~~~

The landscape drifts by dreamily and really, it was but a single landscape, a seemingly endless reel with each slice spectacularly beautiful and yet ultimately left behind in the fog of memory. The nasty, oily beast that sat upon the throne of her heart kept whispering silkily to her. Don't stop. It was not a voice, per say, rather an unpleasant prick in the back of her consciousness she could translate with her own lexicon of anxiousness- another thing in and of itself harboring a characteristic of life for the way it loomed over her psyche, its prickly roots reaching out like a vast nightmare throughout her core. The guts, the stomach, the lungs. It had power over her in the most insidious and unseen of ways, from the very private insides of her, her being. The only thing that ties me to this world.

She felt like an extension of her will, rather than the master.

It was not always with her. A time in her early youth was different, when all her mind ever fretted about were unwanted naptimes and how much she would get to play that day. Of course, the occasional monster lurked beyond in the teeming forests skirting the basin of their home like mammoth monoliths, but between her mother's legs and with father in sight, there was nothing that could touch her. Until she got sick, until they all got sick, until she realized the adults were afraid and this made her afraid, until she fell asleep for many days only to awaken to a field empty of foals, her cousin beside her, still dreaming, his breathing labored but steady- until she felt guilt and sadness and anger and confusion at an age far too young to be experiencing such a furious storm, until she tried to fly much too soon and glided and fell somewhere she would never again remember, until she could not wake much for a very long time. 

Then it was, as if it always were, having been hidden away. She only had to crack the egg, breathing precious life to a monster in the most tragically ironic of possessions. She told her deeply religious dam, the chieftess of a clan that worshiped their ancient dead, but all she got was a warning that she was ferrying the soul of an ancestor. At the time, still rebellious and young and eagerly forging her own identity, she had rolled her eyes and huffed like a petulant, disbelieving teenager. Still, she had always been secretly enraptured by the myths and stories, listening to them with a keen ear while hiding behind someone else lest the Speaker catch her gaze. Enamored, they enchanted her with their heroic deeds and majesty, making her feel an alien sense of pride that she came from such greatness, even as her clan was no larger than fifteen members- in one tale, there had been hundreds of them, emperors and kings and great warriors and poets and healers and seers renowned around the world, thousands of years ago. They clung to their history to a point that it did not matter if it was true or not anymore. It was their religion.

She ate up those stories like the hungry, needy child she was. She had heard every one their Speaker knew, living hundreds of lives in the time it took the tell the tale, traveling around the world in pilgrimages and through the eyes of the glorious. She knew about hope, eternal love, and sacrifice. About strength and morals, gods and demons. She knew all these things, and yet had not lived to truly know them intimately the way only experience can provide. She felt no connection to these lofty ideals. She tolerated her impediment, occasionally loathing it in bursts of depression and ineptitude; she had not overcome it the way her fore-bearers had overcome their obstacles. She had escaped death twice, but neither time felt victorious.

She wasn't them. She would never be them.

...It's nothing. It's just in my head.

Pausing for a break, she takes in her surroundings; the cliff-wall she had been following now stands two stories high, several meters to her right, its paleness stark in the bright spring day. The rest of the view was nothing but sparsely dotted trees, their foliage a rich emerald green, with the ground lushly carpeted in long grass that tickled her legs- she had been avoiding the worn paths, preferring to take higher ground. Ferns cluster around the base of the trees for their shade, while flowers and weeds sundry burst in full righteous bloom all about. Behind snow-white clouds, tattered and spread across the heavenly dome like moth-eaten flags, the sky is the most brilliant and bejeweled shade of blue. And she, a little black pegasus, poised and silhouetted against the soft-grey limestone wall that rises high above her. Compact but lithe, whatever god had wrought her had done so expertly in the name of speed and agility- even her wings were cleanly in line with her size and shape, with their hauntingly romantic flare and defined edges like that of a raven.

With a wince, she realizes her left one is roaring at her, some lava-breathing dragon spewing onto her nerves, making the appendage feel swollen and heavier. Although the hotbed of pain nests tightly in the base joint, it radiates out, both toward her body and its own wrist. Normally a dull ache fairly easy to ignore, her limb -even motionless- throbs in staccato beats of agony. The sun is high above, slipping into noon like one does a familiar old jacket, but her vision becomes filled with infinitely dark and elongated shadows crawling out from the underbrush. With an icy blade of panic peeling the skin from her spine, she realizes too that no birds sing sweetly anymore and the world has gone to a breathless standstill pregnant with an unknowable horror.

Something is wrong.
No doubt about that...

And then it hits her, stunning her momentarily with such an epiphany. The pain, the hallucinations. Withdrawal from the sweet comfort of Cobra's Tongue, that tiny red flower in the shape of its namesake with seeds that liberated her from the rushing of thoughts so loud and choking like being dragged into the violent embrace of a rip current. She had neither seen or, subsequently, eaten the delicate plant in what felt like a distant lifetime ago. Eventually, she'd break into a tremor and cold sweat, but many times attempting to break the habit had left her with a grim knowledge of how the process worked. She knew she was hooked. It would take another day or so before she'd succumb to visible symptoms. Still, the fact it had disappeared from her travels gnawed at her with barbed teeth with a sense of impending emergency, a scuttling sensation within her skull that sharpened her senses, graciously allowing her to recognize the tricks being played on her by her very own damn mind. She wasn't so beyond hope with her own nature, even as the endless struggle against it was fit for the very fields of immortal battle.

With a toss of her vaguely dished head, thick sinuous hair gleams in the sunlight, yet forever somber as it fans out like the flight of crows before drifting to shiver back into place draped down the side of her strong, elegant neck. She begins walking again, more slowly to account for the crying, forever-broken wound on her back, but it is only a matter of a few shaky steps before she is brought to the earth as if her marionette strings were suddenly snipped, the air sucked out of her lungs from the hard and unexpected impact to her side, suffocating her shriek to a muffled hiss as blinding stars burst behind her eyes. The pain is wild, rapacious, rabid, immobilizing her like a curse, pinning her down with invisible tacks through her wretched wing now beneath her own weight.