11-22-2020, 11:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 11-22-2020, 11:03 PM by Sintra.)
She had woken up again at the river as if she had never gone to the mountain at all, and she had leaped to her small feet with a startled gasp, terrified it was starting again, that it would end with her mother tearing the skin from her body again and the stumbling gallop through the forest.
"Sintra?"
Her mother's voice seemed so normal, calling out clear at the sound of her daughter rousing in the dark. The child had shuddered at the sound of it.
"It was just a nightmare Sintra."
The words rekindled the panic that wrung her young heart. Without waiting, the girl bolted, unseeing, heedless of direction or the deep river, intent only on escaping her monster that is not her mother, and the forest at their backs. No lullaby follows her, only the sound of her splashing and sputtering and choking when the river swallows her, too swollen with frigid snowmelt for the filly to cross. She was swept away, too deafened by the river's roaring to notice the desperate cries of her mother's attempts to save her.
The blackness followed soon after, a strange, thick, fuzzy blackness that had no business being in the middle of the cold river.
When morning comes at last, peeling away the night, the sun finds her lying still as death near the water's edge. The vultures have found her, too. They wheel and pitch in the sky above, unsure of what their eyes tell them. Only one of their bunch has braved the low-cropped grass where the meadow runs towards the river, only one struts closer to the carcass gleaming in the early dawn and turns its featherless head this way and that. The scent says the meat is still fresh (still living, in fact, but he is not very picky about that as long as the animal is down and immobile, it is enough for him,) but his eyes give a stranger story, bones already picked clean. No, not quite, because when he looks closer, he can see the faint colors that shift across the skin of her belly.
It is confusing, yes, but he and his brothers are hungry. Someone must take the first try. Wings wide, he hops to the dark head still full of normal flesh, where the foal's faint breath makes her nostrils tremble, and the nightmares of the nearly-dead set her eyes to rolling beneath the black curtain of her eyelids. His beak is not strong enough to tear through the tough skin over her abdomen, but it is precise enough to pierce through her lowered lid and tear out the spinning violet eye.
A scream splits the silence of the spring morning.
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@[Jassal] this is not where i meant this post to go...
and in my twilight, i will die a colossus.
WILT Spring is, of course, his favorite season of the entire year. He is infinitely fascinated by the strange children who are born unto them all. There are never any quite like him, much to his dismay, but he likes the little newborns just the same. This is how he comes to find himself wandering the riverside on his spindly legs. Wilt has seen strange and unusual babies already, and he just knows there is something exciting around this curve of the river ahead.
He pauses when he sees the vultures coming to land near something very small in the mud. The flytraps all crane their stems to see better. They don’t have eyes, naturally, but they mimic his tilting head as he tries to see her better. Then the bird takes a bite and the air is filled with the screech of pain from the girl’s throat. Wilt skitters closer and roots rise up from the river mud to anchor the birds by their talons. Their wings send feathers flying in their frantic efforts to free themselves but he pays them little mind.
That is, until one snaps its beak at the vine encircling his slender ankle.
A sneer of disgust overcomes his lips, revealing the pointed black teeth in his jaws. Those awful teeth part and a thick black tongue snakes from his mouth to coil tightly around the bird’s neck. Slowly, at the rate glaciers are formed, he pulls the thrashing thing to his mouth. The other birds croak and continue their flailing anew when his teeth close around the vulture’s head. With a twist of his neck, the bird’s head comes free, and the blood pools across his tongue.
He crunches it for a while between his fangs before the roots begin ripping the buzzards to pieces. Wilts ink-black eyes settle on the girl and he coos softly as he lowers his head.
“They’re gone now,” he explains gently, and the roots begin stuffing little pink bits of them into the pitcher plants and flytraps of his thick mane. One curls to his mouth and he gratefully accepts the bite. “Herbs will help the pain.”
But he does not force the medicinal plants on her. He waits, patient and grinning with blood drooling down his dark chin.
@[Sintra]
Sintra’s screaming reaches fever pitch. The world goes from the black of sleep to much too bright, white, and red, and one side of it lurches forward strangely before a sickening snap turns out the lights entirely. The other eye flies open, rolling, and the girl scrambles in the dirt, her small hooves thudding against something she cannot see, hidden in the darkness to her left. It’s bewildering, terrifying, and her breath comes in fast, shuddering chuffs while she tries to pull her wayward feet beneath her.
Whatever is next to her grunts and hisses. Feathers brush her flank and the girl squeals and kicks out at it a second time, finally rocking up onto numb hooves in time for a bit of the blindness to separate itself and stop her dead. She twists her neck awkwardly to find him in her sight and winces as her brow, creased with concentration, pulls at the torn skin of her empty eye socket. The creature looks so like the Guardian on the Mountain that it makes her stomach turn.
Why would he come after her?
The child shivers and tries to step back, but her long traitorous legs tangle together and she falls in a pile against the wet, feathered lump that remains of her mauler. She shrieks again and tries to throw herself backward, fore-hooves striking furiously at the root-shredded carcass, bile burning the back of her throat.
“ I don’t like this game anymore!”
Her black cheeks are darkened further with tears and blood that dash against the translucent skin of her breast where her heart beats rapid-fire and visible between the bones. She has not noticed this change yet – this transparency had always lurked beneath the black down of her baby coat, a coat ripped away somehow in the dream of the after-life and leaving her strange. The Guardian offers her herbs for her pain but she barely hears him over the rush of her pulse in her small ears, barely notices the blood dripping from his mouth with her working eye shut tight against the light of day, against the sight of roots tearing birds apart and feeding them to her gothic savior, and the other, swollen, bleeding, sightless.
“I want my Mom,” she whispers softly, forlornly, into her blood-spattered chest.
Sintra It was so clear to me, that it was almost invisible
@[wilt]
and in my twilight, i will die a colossus.
WILT He watches her scramble and flail with pain. Wilt is not entirely familiar with agony, so he does not understand the way she screams and wails. The wet black of his eyes blinks slowly as he observes with a detached, vulgar curiosity until her gaze finds his. She falls backward and he laughs, as though this is all some clever game for his amusement and not her near-death experience.
His stilt-legs carry him closer as she declares that she does not enjoy this game. He doesn’t mind. Wilt merely lowers his head to observe the pitter-patter of her hummingbird heart against her small ribs. How strange! Does it beat on its own? Would it keep on trying to pump blood if he ripped it from her chest and held it in his teeth? A soft hum builds in his throat as he dwells on the thought a moment longer, until she speaks again. Her voice is so soft he almost doesn’t hear her above the river and the bones of vultures snapping from their sockets.
Her mother?
The vines reach a morsel of meat to his mouth and he takes it with snapping teeth.
“Why? What has she done for you?” he asks with a rather unamused frown of black teeth now. He is not of the impression that mothers are worth much of anything, save for his darling sister. Starsin alone is a worthy parent.
“She didn’t protect you. She didn’t save you,” he explains, moving forward so his blood-smeared mouth is inches from her good eye. “I saved you. I made them all pay.”
And Wilt tries to hide his anger at her ungratefulness. She hadn’t even begun to breathe a single word of gratitude, but he is patient. He can be kind, even. And if the girl does not realize how fortunate she is, he could eat her too. Just like Sochi. Just like the vultures.
@[Sintra]
She keeps trying to see with the eye that's gone dark, keeps trying to squint through ink and blackness and doesn't quite understand the permanent link between the pain and the blindness or that the scent of the blood staining the air with its metallic smell is coming, in part, from her. That it started with her.
She thinks, perhaps, this is still part of the dream, that the black creature before her with the little mouths hiding in his mane is just another monster from the dream, but the pain of her torn skin pings and pings like an alarm that won't shut off, and, slowly, Sintra begins to understand. It's a horrifying realization. She had barely felt being skinned in the dream - at least, it had seemed painful then, but now it is fuzzy like trying to see trees through falling snow. Shredded muscle and tendon and skin remind her that this time, everything is real. The child turns to look at the bloodied corpses as the looming specter speaks.
What has she done for you? I saved you. His words drift over her and she's suffocating, drowning, half the world blank, even as she slowly turns into a rainbow in the growing light of day, a soap bubble with color flickering across its fragile surface.
"But... She's my mom." Her voice is a strident plea between hushed sobs that she tries to swallow again and again, while the remaining violet eye - turned glassy with tears - searches for his strange shape again. Confusion swims in those pools, and she bares her new teeth at him in a rictus of pain. She is a foolish little thing, but even she cannot quite miss the barely-tempered menace in his voice, though filtering it through the haze is an enormous task.
I made them all pay.
All this wreckage. For her.
If she was here, her mother would not have been capable of this, even if her rage and her love for her daughter made her wish that she could. But she isn't here, because Sintra had a nightmare that sent her stumbling into the river, and now she's lost and maimed and at the mercy of a worse sort of predator, something less cowardly than a vulture that would have flown off with his prize as soon as she'd screamed out and tried to climb to her feet. The girl's neck extends, her head so low that her jaw nearly grazes the damp, sandy, soil.
"I-- I'm sorry." she whispers, shivering, "Thank you."
Sintra This is the table equivalent of pajamas
@[wilt]
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