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07-17-2016, 10:52 AM
Unfamiliar syllables press together discordantly in his ears, broken by spaces here and there to suggest coherent words, but none that he can understand. He looks up again, confused, but the girl is staring up at the moon now, smiling, joking. His anger rekindles in response. “Do you think I exaggerate?” He chides, ears folding back against his poll. “You will suffer, as I suffer. You will know hopelessness.” The words threaten, assure, a final warning to her disbelief. Maybe he’s putting too much weight on what he expects the outcome of her experience to be, these are not her pains and losses to feel upon waking after all, but he can’t help wanting her to suffer, to see someone else acknowledge the cruelty, the unfairness, the justification behind his bitterness.
Rolling onto his right side, he grunts one more rough reproach before forcibly closing his eyes, brows still furrowed in agitation. “You’re the one that will have to trust – that it will end, for you at least.” And then he quiets, focuses on the regularity of his breathing, the rhythm of his heart that still beats for all its emptiness.
It’s difficult at first, his thoughts unwilling to slow on command and his senses overly aware of the filly’s proximity and attention. He doesn’t know how much time is passing or at what pace, but eventually his brows begin to smooth from their scowling and his ears fall slack. He drops out of awareness, oblivious to time or space or even his own existence within them, and for a moment he is at peace. Then from the nothing he suddenly is again, in a world of white and agonizing cold.
-
On one side a few battered trees stand bent but solid against the howling wind, snow piled high against their trunks, on the other is nothing but white – endless and blinding, no visible horizon or feature to stand out and give scale to its enormity – only white above and white below and flecks of white flying across his vision between the two in biting, stinging squalls of ice like airborne shards of glass.
He shrinks away from the pain, pressing himself against the snow-banked trees, trying to hide in what little windbreak they provide, but even here the cold is inescapable. It slips beneath his skin and muscle, lodging in the spaces between bone and cartilage, cracking, splintering. His legs are numb, blood drawing back into the core of his body for survival, but somehow he still stands, knowing to lie down is to lie down forever. Ice weighs painfully from the hair on his chin and neck and elsewhere too, though he no longer feels it. The worst is the ice on his whiskers and eye lashes, clumping the bristles together and pulling painfully at the sensitive skin of his face, providing just enough sensation to deny him numbness.
Silent bodies stand nearby, hunched against their own misfortune, half buried by the snow heaped upon their backs and too weak to shake or brush it off. Eyes barely open, mere slits against the raging storm, he sees their varied coats in blurs of color, this one a steel grey, that one gold, some full size, others in miniature, young foals clinging miserably to the lifeless sides of their mothers. A pang of grief reminds the stallion that his heart still beats, sluggishly pumping thin streams of blood from one vital organ to another. His mares, his sons and daughters, but glaringly few in number. These are all he has left and even now he sees the life draining from their sunken eyes, their wash rack ribs.
The wind kicks up an octave, whistling and screeching through his ears, but he knows the high pitched yipping isn’t all wind. As impossible as the winter seems and as wretchedly poor as his kind have fared, the wolves have staunchly held out, padding their bodies with meat and marrow from his friends and family, his subjects, all those souls who laid their trust in him, some taken cleanly off the dead, some taken in shrieking, bleeding gulps from the unfortunate living. He’d cry if he could, but his withering body jealously hoards what little reserves still lie in it, tucked away beneath shrunken skin and wasting muscle. It would only add to his suffering anyway, freezing before it leaves the corners of his eyes, another dagger of ice to wound him, but the howling continues and so he looks to his broken family, forming goodbyes in his anguished, silent way.
Then a new train of thought intrudes on his prayer and his eyes open wide, knowing already what his logic-worshiping mind decides, the ‘him’ of memory and the ‘him’ of reality vying for control in this altered consciousness. He reels inside himself, violently protesting the recollection, and the dreamscape fades, slurs, jumps to another time in the same setting. He stands alert now, still cold, still blanketed in ice, still standing beside his mares, but now they stand alone, miniatures gone, and all their eyes and ears point in the same direction, wails of fear and pain drifting back to them in stuttering, cut off cries.
-
The stallion's body tenses in his sleep, sweat dampening his neck and forming a ring around the base of his ears. His eyes jerk behind their closed lids, the stress of his dream state bleeding through to reality, pushing his pulse to a quicker and quicker beat.
-
Their guileless faces swim in his dream vision, listening fearful and broken to his command, to his forsaking. They're to slip away in the night, walk as far as they can and lay down when they can't, let the cold take them before the wolves do, but they're only children - his children! - and the wolves are keen. It’s no silent, peaceful death that comes to take them.
He turns away, a sob tearing through his swollen throat and the image blurs again, only flashes of lucidity coming from the void - angry voices, paltry blows, indiscernible curses and his pleading response - But he'd saved them! He'd given them a chance to live! To hopefully heal and birth new children instead of dying in an effort to nurse these young who are doomed to die without them – and then he’s alone, no hunched figures, no trees, no howling, just snow in every direction and a zigzag trench leading out of the distance and to his staggering hooves - alone - a rolodex of names and faces crossed out in blood streaming past his tearful eyes, a scrawled apology overlapping the letters - I'm sorrysorrysorry...
-
He jerks awake as if struck, gasping for air, disoriented. His heart drums wildly in panic, skin visibly quivering, but thedream nightmare is more familiar than he cares to admit and his self soothing is well rehearsed. Eyes still wide in reaction, he turns his head to seek out the filly, wondering how much she's seen, how much she's felt.
OOC // Sorry for endless text. @Aelin
Rolling onto his right side, he grunts one more rough reproach before forcibly closing his eyes, brows still furrowed in agitation. “You’re the one that will have to trust – that it will end, for you at least.” And then he quiets, focuses on the regularity of his breathing, the rhythm of his heart that still beats for all its emptiness.
It’s difficult at first, his thoughts unwilling to slow on command and his senses overly aware of the filly’s proximity and attention. He doesn’t know how much time is passing or at what pace, but eventually his brows begin to smooth from their scowling and his ears fall slack. He drops out of awareness, oblivious to time or space or even his own existence within them, and for a moment he is at peace. Then from the nothing he suddenly is again, in a world of white and agonizing cold.
-
On one side a few battered trees stand bent but solid against the howling wind, snow piled high against their trunks, on the other is nothing but white – endless and blinding, no visible horizon or feature to stand out and give scale to its enormity – only white above and white below and flecks of white flying across his vision between the two in biting, stinging squalls of ice like airborne shards of glass.
He shrinks away from the pain, pressing himself against the snow-banked trees, trying to hide in what little windbreak they provide, but even here the cold is inescapable. It slips beneath his skin and muscle, lodging in the spaces between bone and cartilage, cracking, splintering. His legs are numb, blood drawing back into the core of his body for survival, but somehow he still stands, knowing to lie down is to lie down forever. Ice weighs painfully from the hair on his chin and neck and elsewhere too, though he no longer feels it. The worst is the ice on his whiskers and eye lashes, clumping the bristles together and pulling painfully at the sensitive skin of his face, providing just enough sensation to deny him numbness.
Silent bodies stand nearby, hunched against their own misfortune, half buried by the snow heaped upon their backs and too weak to shake or brush it off. Eyes barely open, mere slits against the raging storm, he sees their varied coats in blurs of color, this one a steel grey, that one gold, some full size, others in miniature, young foals clinging miserably to the lifeless sides of their mothers. A pang of grief reminds the stallion that his heart still beats, sluggishly pumping thin streams of blood from one vital organ to another. His mares, his sons and daughters, but glaringly few in number. These are all he has left and even now he sees the life draining from their sunken eyes, their wash rack ribs.
The wind kicks up an octave, whistling and screeching through his ears, but he knows the high pitched yipping isn’t all wind. As impossible as the winter seems and as wretchedly poor as his kind have fared, the wolves have staunchly held out, padding their bodies with meat and marrow from his friends and family, his subjects, all those souls who laid their trust in him, some taken cleanly off the dead, some taken in shrieking, bleeding gulps from the unfortunate living. He’d cry if he could, but his withering body jealously hoards what little reserves still lie in it, tucked away beneath shrunken skin and wasting muscle. It would only add to his suffering anyway, freezing before it leaves the corners of his eyes, another dagger of ice to wound him, but the howling continues and so he looks to his broken family, forming goodbyes in his anguished, silent way.
Then a new train of thought intrudes on his prayer and his eyes open wide, knowing already what his logic-worshiping mind decides, the ‘him’ of memory and the ‘him’ of reality vying for control in this altered consciousness. He reels inside himself, violently protesting the recollection, and the dreamscape fades, slurs, jumps to another time in the same setting. He stands alert now, still cold, still blanketed in ice, still standing beside his mares, but now they stand alone, miniatures gone, and all their eyes and ears point in the same direction, wails of fear and pain drifting back to them in stuttering, cut off cries.
-
The stallion's body tenses in his sleep, sweat dampening his neck and forming a ring around the base of his ears. His eyes jerk behind their closed lids, the stress of his dream state bleeding through to reality, pushing his pulse to a quicker and quicker beat.
-
Their guileless faces swim in his dream vision, listening fearful and broken to his command, to his forsaking. They're to slip away in the night, walk as far as they can and lay down when they can't, let the cold take them before the wolves do, but they're only children - his children! - and the wolves are keen. It’s no silent, peaceful death that comes to take them.
He turns away, a sob tearing through his swollen throat and the image blurs again, only flashes of lucidity coming from the void - angry voices, paltry blows, indiscernible curses and his pleading response - But he'd saved them! He'd given them a chance to live! To hopefully heal and birth new children instead of dying in an effort to nurse these young who are doomed to die without them – and then he’s alone, no hunched figures, no trees, no howling, just snow in every direction and a zigzag trench leading out of the distance and to his staggering hooves - alone - a rolodex of names and faces crossed out in blood streaming past his tearful eyes, a scrawled apology overlapping the letters - I'm sorrysorrysorry...
-
He jerks awake as if struck, gasping for air, disoriented. His heart drums wildly in panic, skin visibly quivering, but the
OOC // Sorry for endless text. @Aelin
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