05-07-2020, 09:56 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-10-2020, 08:41 PM by Neverwhere.)
Hey all you cool cats and kittens
How many days has it been?
The mare wakes in a snowdrift, wet and shivering, and somewhere beneath the haze of the fever, she's surprised that she's woken at all. Her head lifts weakly as she blinks rheumatic eyes, as she curls her neck to laboriously rub those eyes against a damp knee. It barely helps, but some of the haze is wiped away. Her brain feels too heavy for her head and it is slow to interpret what she is seeing.
What she is seeing is not Nerine.
"What..." her voice is a croak in her inflamed throat and it dies away into a whisper that even she can barely hear. Minutes pass, during which she almost doesn't even breathe, her eyelids droop and she begins to fall asleep there in the snow but the feeling of falling sends her into a panic and instead of slipping into sleep, she is leaping to her feet. Like a foal, she stumbles and staggers, her hooves numb from the winter's cold.
Every inch of her is screaming, her coat turned black with dried blood while fresh oozes from the grid he gouged across her. The feeling of scrabbling claws brings a shudder that blends in easily with the feverish shivering. She needs to get out of the wind but barely trusts her unfeeling legs, stands with an awkward, wide stance like a sawhorse, breathing fast and shallow as though that will stop the searing pain that blooms across her skin. Her head hangs low as she sways as flurries drift down upon her, trying to think, trying to remember how she has gotten here, and where here is.
The memories come like wisps of smoke and she cannot grasp them. He left her to die and the shock and adrenaline abandoned her soon after. She had fallen into the mud and the blood and waited out the last of the storm there, alone. She feels her readiness to die, sees him in that flash of lightning as if he is running at her now, but then he is gone, there is nothing but snow and grey rock and trees. She remembers things had not gone as she expected. The memory slips and the mare bares her teeth - the blood there isn't all her own.
Would it have gone differently if she'd held her tongue?
No.
Probably not.
She'd needled him and with that memory comes the flashing of strange, piscine, teeth, long and thin. She does not notice that there is still one broken off and piercing the skin of her shoulder. It's the least of her concerns.
The Forest!
Her head flies up too fast with the recollection and it sends her skittering backwards, but she catches herself this time, barely, haunches aching and trembling. She had hit the River's mouth and traced its western bank until collapsing with exhaustion and fever but remembers no part of the journey. The melted snow has soaked her entire right side, through her thick northern coat, all the way to that torn, angry, skin. The wind howls and she freezes, and she limps, from her snowdrift bed to the wind break of the Forest, trailing the toe of her left foreleg in the dirt .
Neverwhere wonders if this is the place she came with... with... Oh, with someone. It feels like ages, and her memory is like a sieve, her head full of fog thick as Taiga's. Groaning, she leans against a rough-barked tree, pressing burning flesh against it, staining the tree's skin red, and lets her eyes shut against the glare of grey light. There's a faint memory of wolf song in her ears, a distant, long-ago thing. It would be a strange irony if wolves found her, now, but never mind.
That bitch, Neverwhere
