All soft and black it's time to grow - Ryatah/any

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

He likes spring.

(If he can like things.)

He likes spring because it exposes winter’s carnage. 
And he does like carnage. 

He likes spring because it fills his slow river with new water and it gushes forth, spilling itself drunkenly onto the dust. They’ll bring life, him and the river, where life does not belong. It is a labor that demands patience and industriousness – he is happy to subsume himself to it, once again.

(He likes spring, because it relieves him, somewhat, of the heavy, distant, old sub-memories that keep him weary;
Those cold, northern drifts of snow and that bitter wind that flush his skin (smooth, shamefully hairless, as only a boy’s could be) to a bright, painful pink; many-coloured lean-tos set like a jolly, saccharine painting, on a barren strip of Norway. An outpost on a ice-bear island.

The sensation of falling; the eerie glow, like polluted old headlights, green and unblinking.)

Spring. 
It chases these things away, hides them under the gush of icy water; under the mud that forms in thick wallows beneath his cleft toes, leaving strange footprints, like an overgrown stag, in his wake; buried under old bones and preserved skin, like stips of cloth, hanging off ribcages. 
It thaws, taking the damp-cold from his thigh and hip and it lets bloom, from scorched earth, all manner of fanged and dead-skinned seedlings.

(She brings him little things, Sinew – flesh and blood – and he promises not to afear them.
One cannot imagine how tempting it is, but she takes it for them. And for him.)

He does not enter the forest tentatively, though it sends a shrill cold up his spine and the perfume she wears is too rich and too decadent. He knows these are ghosts that haunt, wailing and querulous; he knows it is the absence of nothing – earthy, sumptuous everything – that stings his nostrils, now, after so long. He once loved (if he can love things) the smells of this place. His home. His throne, forsaken for one made of dust and stone. 

He never loved the ghosts, but they were his to bear, regardless. Not all of them had abandoned this place and taken up Pangean quarters, the ones that had stayed are overeager to slip their claws back into him him upon return.

Still, he feels the woods breathe in towards him, like an ex lover that can never move on and strikes out at him out of resentment and shame – but of course, he is arrogant and crowned and when he stops, running his heavy, crude ram’s horns down the smooth, white skin of a birch tree, he fancies this place a spring palace of sorts; 
a hunting lodge. 
A part of his dominion.

the gift-giver

@[Colby] @[Ryatah] - if you so fancy

[Wyrm]

when the stars threw down their spears and water'd heaven with their tears:

My goodness … out of all of the places that he should come across the creature, it had to be the Forest. It had to be. How could it not? For so long now he’s been searching; “Golden, one wing … with horns.” Peering always with restless eyes at the others when they dwell beneath, trading words and phrases not meant for him but he snatches them all in his own secret way. It has been so long (generations, really) that he’d begun to doubt the creature’s existence, wondered if it had been some thing his aunt had procured out of fear and shock from his granddam’s passing. Wyrm had begun to let it go.

But, my goodness, there it is. “There he is.” the changer thinks, unable to stop the haphazard grin that now twists his mouth upwards near the edges. A grim smile, one he’s not worn in ages. It takes nothing to stop him from scrambling down his perch, winding eerily in spirals around the trunk as the horned stallion ambles past, ingresses further into a place Wyrm has called home now for some time. He shifts faster than he’s ever done before, bright jade skin flashing now and again while the patterned sun glances across his hide.

“You.” He calls out, eager steps leading him to where the other has gone. He must - must see the face of this being. It has been so very, very long, after all. “It is you, isn’t it?” He breathes, feeling the rush of some sensation he cannot name, some sense of closure as the pieces fall together by fate’s design. “How did you do it?” Wyrm presses, narrow head shaking gently side to side with the question, two-toned eyes never straying from the creature’s stance.

“How did you kill her?” He wants to know, trembling with a bemused sort of energy. “Show me.” The shifter pleads, choosing then to root himself to the earth. He would not, could not go until he knew.

did he smile his work to see? did he who made the Lamb make thee?

[sinew]

sinew.

Sinew has never truly been afraid.

Only in her dreams, and even Pollock cannot venture there to taste the essence of her fear.

So the carcass did not bother her - not that day in the forest not too terribly long ago.

She had been in the earliest stages of her pregnancy then, and now she is overdue and far too thick in the girth for her tastes. Something in that thickness could suggest twins or a large colt, but she - like all mothers, knows otherwise and she thinks back to that carcass and that day and the bones that gave her name for the foal in her belly.

It is not that she trails after him;

Their paths happen to cross, and always here - in the Forest, his once and forever domain.

(It is more his kingdom than that of Pangea, for all that no kings hold a thorny throne here.)

Hers’ is a swollen ambling gait that belies her pregnant state; a most ungracious waddle as the unkind bark of the trees brushes against her fat sides. She knows that he has come here to hunt, for these are his hunting grounds and all in it are his prey - except her, she bids his hand of fear but never falls beneath it, not truly.

(When you are a filly barely weaned off your mother’s teat and you end up inside out of Time with a thing o golden eyes, scales and smoke, in a lake at dusk where a black mare bathes like a shadowy treasure ferreted away, you come to fear nothing but your own dark dreams.)

The fat little mare pauses; she sniffs the air, can scent his dusty Pangean smell on the crispness of the breezes that go swooping and whooshing by her. The wind is wild in that wood, wild like her brood is and less so because they are more creepy than anything and she feels an answering writhe in her womb, a kick that stabs at her guts and ribs and makes her seize up in a sudden sharp pause. “Damn whelp!” she barks to herself, more gruff than angered.

It is the voice up ahead that makes her pause longer, there is something familiar about it from a long-ago conversation in passing, from that day of carcass and strange woodland cat-but-not. Her black eyes land on a patch of recognizable green as her head swings about, not realizing that they had been so close all this time - him, her, and him. Beyond the deceptively smooth emerald of his skin is the familiar palomino of Pollock. Intrigued, she ambles closer, not disguising her approach in the least as she crashes through the deadfall to join them.  

The green stallion’s questions catch her attention as she plants her fat self beside Pollock, ever mindful of that one beautiful broken wing that drags horribly in the dust. A glance at it and she can see that it is caught full of branch and burr, ignored as usual and a sly grin pulls at her lips as her eyes return back to the green one and his odd slit-pupiled stare. “So eager,” she remarks casually, as he blunders on about how Pollock has done this or that - killed someone, she supposes, because that is something that Pollock does - kills or terrifies, or terrifies them to death, whatever suits him for the moment.

(Sinew has never heard his stories, but she’d like to now.)

the only promises that ever make sense