She wakes, slowly, reluctantly, from the sleep of death, breath shuddering and hot in her ghostly breast. Hera pours life into her with that wordless, deafening, warning. Do not cross the gods. Yes, Sintra has always known better than that. Pomegranate seeds and pith fall from her mouth when she opens her clenched and aching jaws, but the vivid red flavor doesn't leave her tongue. A final reminder of Hera's displeasure. Of those final moments biting down on the tree's fruit as the lion closed its jaws around her neck and the world grew hazy-dark.
Oh, she had played the dutiful warrior steed (Boy, he'd called her!), and she had, though accidentally, killed the crab whose stars now twinkle brightly across her cheek and nose, she could not kill the lion, however, trapped there in that pit as much as she and doomed to die a hundred times at his mistress's pleasure. Would not, and so she is justifiably punished even as her life is returned.
Perhaps that itself is the real punishment.
Sintra finds her shaky feet and remembers with a sinking feeling how they had so quickly failed her when the spear broke her chest open, but when she presses her dark lips to the place death had bloomed like some terrible flower, there is no golden scar there, nor to her shoulder or the soft places of her belly that Carcinus had torn wide and fed upon as she watched, dying too slowly in his grip. The only scars that she bears - though she cannot see them - are the ones at her throat where the lion held her; a breathless, bleeding sacrifice. The young mare huffs softly, unsure of what she is meant to do next. She is so weary of monsters and vengeful gods, but they fill into all the empty spaces in her life that she goes nowhere but finds them. It's a thought that makes her steps hesitant, makes her pause between the nodding leaves of the Colocasia around her, illuminating them with the soft glow of her pale bones.
There's a hush in the night-time jungle that feels too familiar, and Sintra wonders mournfully if Hera's curses have followed her even here, to this land that has boasted peace for so long. She's only just arrived, can she have broken the place so soon?
Oh, she had played the dutiful warrior steed (Boy, he'd called her!), and she had, though accidentally, killed the crab whose stars now twinkle brightly across her cheek and nose, she could not kill the lion, however, trapped there in that pit as much as she and doomed to die a hundred times at his mistress's pleasure. Would not, and so she is justifiably punished even as her life is returned.
Perhaps that itself is the real punishment.
Sintra finds her shaky feet and remembers with a sinking feeling how they had so quickly failed her when the spear broke her chest open, but when she presses her dark lips to the place death had bloomed like some terrible flower, there is no golden scar there, nor to her shoulder or the soft places of her belly that Carcinus had torn wide and fed upon as she watched, dying too slowly in his grip. The only scars that she bears - though she cannot see them - are the ones at her throat where the lion held her; a breathless, bleeding sacrifice. The young mare huffs softly, unsure of what she is meant to do next. She is so weary of monsters and vengeful gods, but they fill into all the empty spaces in her life that she goes nowhere but finds them. It's a thought that makes her steps hesitant, makes her pause between the nodding leaves of the Colocasia around her, illuminating them with the soft glow of her pale bones.
There's a hush in the night-time jungle that feels too familiar, and Sintra wonders mournfully if Hera's curses have followed her even here, to this land that has boasted peace for so long. She's only just arrived, can she have broken the place so soon?
@Gale have a third thread with me