Caneo;

Sky -

Cracked open wide, eggshell blue and thin as a baby's legs. It beckons from its throne above him. Because nothing else calls (but north, a cold wind winding in his mind and gnawing on his limbs) Caneo climbs. And he knows he'll never reach that blue vault spreading high above him, but soon enough the air bites in his lungs. And soon enough, the wind is its own voice, soft and clear, and he has never seen this place before: the grasses at the top of the world.

Atop the path he stops, himself a statue glowing silver in the sunlight, like a beast carved of moonlight or pure metal. Against the sky his skeleton is rendered impossibly thin, precariously long, almost too strange to be alive. Then he sighs, and something of the spell is broken, and he continues on, his cloven hooves sharp in the new grass. Upon his brow the serpent is unwinding, bored and vacuous. She slips down the nape of his neck and pools across his spine, blue and grey and very small against the faint, faint hollows of his ribs. The Dragon's Throat takes care of him, but he will always be a frightful thing, rendered in the bleak vision of a far-away god, a god of hunger and nothing more.

Caneo is hungry now.

It might be more right say: the snake is hungry. He no longer differentiates well between his feelings and hers; they're collapsing, intertwined, sometimes the same being and sometimes not. So he could pretend he's scouting or something for his herd but really he's just bored and wanting for meat, for some kind of little fast thing his new soul can sink her teeth into. She writhes in restless waves across his bony haunches, her tongue seeking and seeking, her black eyes bright as chips of obsidian. She makes him little more than a vessel for now, a set of legs to move her farther, faster -

And it's at a little pool they stop, something probably caused by rains. Caneo's long neck bends back and the serpent catches his horn again, curls tightly round its base as he moves her from his back to a spot near the ground. And the ground is alive with little noises, croaking and singing, small beasts trying to live. The curl of blue scales unravels once she scents grass and she slips along the edges of the tiny pond like a shadow, herself hunting shadows, until she's near enough one of the frogs and then - (fast).

He watches all this from a distance, afraid of scaring the frogs away. Now she has one in her mouth, though, and he shifts just a little nearer, protectively. His blood is up, cold and quick; something predatory shifts his heart and his eyes skate over the grasses before they move back to the snake, calculating. Restless. He sort of wants to hunt, but it's a foreign feeling to the unicorn. He sort of wants to run, too, but he's trapped. His tail twists in frustration.

all the children painted diagrams of god upon their hands