He is commanded - move - out from the touch of brother's flesh and the warmth of breath spreading across his thick neck. Mother's voice now quivers in his bones, above the tug and pull of many bodies, many spaces, many intellects now striving for the youth at their center. Mother's sound compels him, and the black beast shivers with what might be warning - or just fear. The glare of yellow eyes moves for an instant to his twin, and then to Evers, ever practical, ever the clipped voice of reason and intelligence. Go, says the motion of this elder brother. Do your duty. He ought not delay, but hesitation sets inside his bones like concrete. For a heart beat he would die to be invisible - to be as nothing underneath her stare.

     A sigh, to stir his ribs. The tramp of heavy feet runs muffled by leaf litter but the giant moves, a shadow among shadows, somehow revolted by the scent of blood. It gleams almost black below him, near the body of one sad and grey - a father, thrown aside as fathers are. He has no time to think of it; he watches Mother, who curls like a snake just near enough to strike. His teeth move for the warmth of worn leather - the taste of sweat, the tang of red that might be black here in the dark. He lifts up and it drags - a noise like dead feet in the night. He startles, a twitch of heavy muscle just below the quiet black of coarse hide. This thing tastes like the dead, like some black magic bound to rot within his mouth, to make him never clean.

     But the foal.

     His mouth is a mess of straps pulled from dead flesh, loose on a splotched face, cooling around dead eyes. He swings toward the foal without grace, with only the barest semblance of control, and stops to stare down into its strange eyes - reckless, innocent, yearning. He must have been so small once, but he fears to break its tiny legs, to shatter more blood and more bones and deaden yet more eyes. The smell of blood fills him with flight. The pressure set by muted expectation rattles back and forth between his ears. With a grunt, a flip of his head, he jerks for the boy - a rattling of leather and the clank of a metal rings. His teeth release and the bridle falls toward Knox's face - a task half done, and let go too soon. He has terrified himself and so he startles back, his pale eyes lifting to Archibald - no doubt angry - and to Mother - murderous. He ought to run. He knows better than to run. He reaches down to push the boy's face, to fix what he's ruined, to force stitched leather over tiny ears. The boy reeks of his sire's blood and Mother, too. It reeks of afterbirth and he hates the terrible emtpiness of its eyes.