Winter; it was such an infernal, useless thing. Beneath Ree’s dark hooves the earth cracks, the delicate morning frost broken by her unhurried steps. Particles of ice cling like hopeless mariners to her fetlocks. They too fall from place, crushed back into the ground and earth as the mare continues in a straight line, unwavering, perhaps even determined. Her breath curls up into the air, a sliver of silver smoke that whispers as it rises against the frigid cold. She can almost hear it, the sound it makes – a muffled wail of a tortured soul – and for a moment she comes to a stop at the top of the rise she had been climbing. She shuffles her hooves restlessly at the edge of the trees, gold-brown eyes flashing, petite ears careened forward intently. She exhales again, slowly this time. She listens. She waits.

Nothing.

The bay mare huffs. It is a windy, guttural snort clearly portraying the agitation that shows in the way she stands. Seemingly stationary, yet ready to move at any given instance, feet shifting, eyes looking- never still. Perhaps the nice talks she had with herself about losing her mind had been more close to the truth than her conscious had wanted to admit. Too much time on her own had made Ree far too reflective of the things that went through her head, some things the kind best not reflected on. She much preferred the simplicity of not having to care or be bothered. She hated this new feeling of uncertainty, of no longer knowing herself entirely. She hated change.

Yet here she was in the very midst of change, running from things she still couldn’t understand. Perhaps because she refused to try. Her past is a mottle of unhappy shadows that dance and laugh tauntingly at the back of her mind, tempting her to dwell on them like little, cursed demons summoned purely to cause her misery. The temptation manifests itself in a battle of thoughts and haunted memories inside the inner workings of her mind. As she stares out from the trees, down at this new, unfamiliar place, the war rages on. The unwanted feelings and recollections are as useful to her as this treacherous, petulant season of ice. Yet for as resolute and decisive as Ree could be, she still teeters on the precarious edge between her own sanity and the enticement of losing herself to the beckoning darkness completely.

Long, wild, black locks of hair fall in disarray across her face and along the length of her slender neck when she throws her head, a nervous tick, trying to clear her view. She studies the scenery intently now, an attempt to sway her attention away from the less desirable things that still murmur demandingly from the headspace where she has pushed them. The sun breaks through the clouds, bright, white sunlight that reflects off an equally white world, making the picture it paints almost unbearable in its winter fed pallor. She has stood still too long, ice has again settled on her feathered ankles, frost clinging to the tendrils of her tail that brush the ground behind her. She is a mirror image of the wilderness she has stumbled upon, an unpredictable, shadowy coil of muscles and skin and racing thoughts and wandering eyes.

Eyes that, for the briefest of seconds, appear to settle with a look of unimaginable panic.

And in those brief seconds, Ree’s resolve crumbles, a broken porcelain sculpture of elegance and poise shattered by a blow to its weakest juncture. And those thoughts she fought so hard to ignore begin their slow, poisonous, creeping ascent.

"The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep. "

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