Яikyn

She hadn’t heard anything.

She accuses me of only hearing them instead. My eyes narrow at her, my tail writhes behind me in reaction to what I take as an insult, a snort spreading black filth across the earth between us.

"Hooves. Sticks breaking," I answer with a rattling breath after a long, glaring pause, a black goo lined ear flicking about to catch the sounds of the wind and the surrounding dead and living woods.

The pretty woman seems to grow afraid – the smell of it radiates off of her, anyway, and I feel my ears lift and my eyes narrow in on her. Does she see the trees coming for us now, too? I shift so that I can view the region behind me, angled in the blind range of my vision, hearing her question as an afterthought among my conscious worries that the trees have grown closer.

And then the ghost appears, the poor, blind ghost; my heart slams against my ribs, I physically jump when the corporal begins to fretfully shout, flying away from us in a sudden panic.

I’m not blind.

An indigo blur, the soldier mare dashes as if to flee, her ankles snared in the process; she hits the ground with a loud thud that is solid in comparison to her womanly shrieks, a cry of fear (or perhaps the air being pushed violently from her lungs on impact) breaking from her lips. I watch her there, on the ground, my eyes madly gleaming, the dark trees reaching, writhing…

Sounds… they’re all I see…

I cackle at the folly of her flight. The cackle dies in the sound of a gurgle, dissipates into a rolling hack, the weight of what the white one says a faint bell of warning over the distraction of the kind mare’s fear.

I don’t know what good running will do, anyway. It’s a disease. She’s in trouble for having stayed to talk to me this long, her compassion a burr which has dipped poisoned tips into her dark azurite flesh.

I wish I knew, says the ghost.

The fallen one rises.

The ghost screams her words again, a twice said answer to a twice asked inquiry.

I find that I’m giggling. I am not entirely sure why.

Maybe it’s that one is afraid, and one is angry, and neither of them do any good for themselves or the sick feeling so.

What do I feel? The question floats like debris on the surface of a puddle across the background noise of the pale woman explaining with many words to the dark woman what has happened to us. My giggling dies.

I glance to the reaching trees – I am afraid of them. But of the women? Of the sickness?

My breath catches, wetly I hack until the black filth dislodges from whatever part of my being it had tried to become one with, splattering in a nasty glob at my hooves; despite feeling like such shit, I don’t think I’m worried about much more than the trees.

Maybe what the shadow hides. Such an evil forest must have truly evil inhabitants.

The ghost had come from there, after all.

"Green Labyrinth," I say, amending the name of the land that I was not sure now how I knew she had named it wrong (I had paid almost no attention to her, after all), "and there is a cure."

I look over at her with a harsh glare, an accusatory one, though it is short lived – I do, after all, have to be mindful as to whether the trees creep closer, their roots inching through the earth towards us.

Don’t condemn the world with your pessimism, lady, not when trees are trying to eat people, and you see with sounds and pretty rainbows – there is enough bullshit in the world already, it doesn’t need your help through dark insinuation.

I cured Volterra’s boils. Someone else would cure this disease, too.

"Have you even tried anything but bitching about it?" I ask, a serious question – my eyebrows even raise, gilded eyes widening in interest as I tilt my head in her direction.

[ OOC: I think something in your code is making my font bold, Prissy. Lol. Should just need <*/b> at the end of your text (without the asterisk) but it could be something more complex. I am not code talented. x3 ]

@Ki'irha

in every heart a hole