in your ribs, I see more than bones; something lost I had long ago
Aldous is a boy caught in the season before adulthood.
He is awkward in his body, all long limbs and short hair. He is lengthening but has not quite lost the softness of youth, his face still rounded in places where someday it will be all hard angles and planes. He is a thing born from affection, but not quite love—or, if it is, a poisoned version of it. He is the best and the worst of his parents, carved from their ambition and their curiosity and their greed.
He is cruel and he is curious.
Afraid and ready to cut his teeth on this world.
He watches from the bank as the thing that is not a filly and not yet a mare walks across the ice and then crashes through it. He lifts his head up higher and peers out, his dark blue eyes blinking closed as equine and opening as draconic, the vision sharpening. She is built odd, alien in nature, her body too thin and severe to be alive and yet clearly animated. His heart skips with something like fear, something like wonder, but he does not move from his perching spot. Instead his short tail flicks and he cocks a leg.
Should he save her, he wonders, but he does not move.
The fire dances around his face and he tilts it to the side.
Should he at least try, he thinks, but still, he remains still.
It is only when she surfaces and begins to drink that he moves at all, peeling away from the frozen ground to come closer to where the water would meet it were the ice not holding it back.
“What are you?” he calls, uncouth in his forwardness.
aldous
@miseria