01-07-2016, 08:16 AM
She thinks she could stop time and stay a foal forever; Sinew chooses not to though, even if the idea holds a great amount of appeal for mischief-making.
She is Scalped’s daughter and she is fearless, the budding immortality in her veins does not help this at all. It gives her a sense of strange entitlement and despite the inherent knowledge that harm can still come to her, she is not afraid of any of them - she remembers that there are worse things than their magics and their means. She has dreamt of bellies slit open and steaming, their entrails a warm nest and their livers a lifesaving meal; she has dreamt of throats gaping open like shocked lips, bled not of words but of their life’s source for nothing other than ritual use; and she has dreamt of the horrors forced upon them not by each other but by the straight-up beasts that know how to tame them (Sinew’s mind and memories are older than her mother’s, and there is a strange boar-tusked horse in them that haunts her). The tiny overo should be afraid, but somehow, she isn’t.
Sinew stares as his head slithers down to her level and she meets him eye to eye; they go from gold to black, swallowed up by the space in between the stars, cold and dead, and she should be afraid but she isn’t. Her bravery is foolish but admirable, but his forked tongue snaking between his lips and his smoking breath do not scare her - they fascinate her! His ploy to frighten her only makes her laugh, pleased at his response more than anything else and she was about to ask him to do it again, remembering how the shadows crept across the earth towards them, the land going dark like his eyes did and she wants to see that again, but they are not alone any more.
Something - no, someone - else crept out of the dark towards them.
Her nose or her cheek ends up against his knee; he is a force to be reckoned with, caught between them and she thinks for a moment that she could leave all this - not because of fear, but because it is too strange until the lightning cracks across the back of the sky and blinds her eyes. Time sloughs off of them like old dead skin; they have years to lose and she has only days before they are elsewhere, in a time beyond time that any of them has known or may ever know. The trip is dizzying and she feels like the world cannot stop spinning out of control; she experiences an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach, hollowed out and strangely sick and even here, her legs are as wobbly as they had been the first time she tried to stand only days’ ago.
There is a mare in a lake, black and beautiful; a mountain rises behind her into a sky purpled and pink rather than blue, like dusk maybe, but Sinew honestly doesn’t know. Just like she doesn’t know how they have come to be here and her foal-face pulls up into a frown as the threads of time and magic and their manipulation teases at her old-new mind. She cannot help the instinctual snort that leaves her, the apparent distrust of this - she’s not pierced by such beauty as the stallions might be, though she watches her first companion more closely than the odd fellow that has cast them both into this, unwilling stones that skip across the lake of his being, forgotten and she turns to her first companion - the one of smoking breath and gold-gone eyes and asks of him, “Who is she?” when she should be asking who he is and what has he done to us?
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