Craft;

[craft]

I was in the darkness, so darkness I became;

She did not know what she expected to happen next, but she did not expect a nightmare. Her nightmare, made corporeal, as his skin goes black and both eyes blaze orange. Their bodies aren’t the same, but it’s enough, and she cries out, unable to stop herself, a memory of orange eyes rolling on the sand.
How does he know? - the question thuds in her brain, pounding like a headache. Because to her, she calls what happened a dream. She does not call it death, still refuses to entertain the notion, stubborn in her insistence. Of course, she has no explanation as to what happened instead, why she remembers the world fading into blackness and then reappearing in the meadow decades later.
He inches closer, this grotesque mimicry of her son, and she flattens her ears as her heart pounds, her baser instincts calling to her to run. But she doesn’t – stubborn, she stands, confused and furious at this stallion who plays at knowing her.
“Why should I tell you?” she hisses, and though no smoke comes from her lungs, the words have their own scorching ferocity to them, “what makes you think you deserve to know?

He changes back, then, and asks another question. Another attempt to provoke her, she’s sure.
“I didn’t die,” she says, sure in this, buoyed by a false and foolish confidence that she could not have been felled, that the sound of ribs breaking was just a dream. Too stubborn, too proud.
“Who are you?” she asks then, as if she, too, is owed answers.

Craft