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Suddenly little defective colt is not alone. There's a rumble in the earth and he feels it with the same ferocity that he feels his fear, but he understands neither. He has not been raised to know fear, despite the fact that many of the situations he has been placed in in his short life would warrant such an emotion. So when the earth shakes beneath him and he experiences that jolt of pure terror that he has never before known, the colt breaks the silence with a terrified whinny; a desperate cry for the mother that rests miles away, likely contentedly sleeping off the spoils of her children's last kill. It is instinctive and uncontrollable, similar to the shaking that overtakes his young and knobby knees, and the confusion that envelopes his consciousness. The creature that towers above him is unknown and unnatural, and he does not know enough to connect its existence with that of a god. His body quivers and his form appears small before the god's. In the echo of the massive creature's voice, his silence is overwhelmingly and blatantly abhorrent in comparison. The god asks about his bridle, indicating what he means with a touch that causes him to shiver and fall back, and offers to the young colt yet another of his desires, but he lacks a full understanding of the spoken word. Yet thus he learns his first name for his bridle. He knows something. The voices say he doesn't know anything, and he knows that he does not know much, but he will cling dear to what he knows. He has learned pain with his first fall, learned brother with his first introduction to his siblings, learned companion, learned come, learned stay. Drink, blood, father, strong, great. The words, beginning to lose definition, seem to meld together as the voices whisper them all at once. He catches snippets of the god's speech: Sad colt... age... wanting... companion! He looks up with fading fear at the smile that greets him- the first smile he has ever seen, as he hears the word he has been waiting for. He tries to focus, tries to understand, but the first few words are a mystery. He is beginning to make sense of wanting- of that desire, of that need to fill the emptiness. He faintly grasps time in its basest of forms. What happened to the rest of the world as he walked from home to this place, and how there would have been more of it had he walked a farther distance. The passage of change in the surrounding, from night to day as the world slips around him. But he does not know what it is to speak. He has lived in silence, and now, faced with the request to do what no one has ever before asked him to do, no one before has ever attempted to teach him to do, he feels, yet still without knowing it, a sense of defeat. He has not heard the words he knows best, the words he learned first. He finds that "come, stay, drink, bathe, blood, here, lie, and father" are all absent from the god's conversational, not commanding tone. He tosses his head back, the bridle whipping across his back, glowing a bright green, seemingly in reaction to the presence of the earth god, as if its owner once felt a connection to such a being and its charges. He parts his lips as if to speak, unknowing that this is just what the god required of him, but is unable to form the words. A quiet whinny escapes and he shuffles backwards, shaking his head in confusion. There is a look of sheer lack of connection. A look of wanting to please, of being raised to want nothing more than this, but being unable to. The voices whisper once more their mantra that he is worthless in terms that he may understand. He begins to believe them. |
