Anyone;

[garbage]

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; He’d slipped from the jaws of death many times – he should have died, as a foal, when his mother abandoned him. It had been sheer luck that another mare had found him, had loved him. (And what had happened to her? Ah, but he forgets, or he tells himself he forgets. He can only bear the weight of so many sins.) He should have died when he returned to the deserts, tore out his eyes for his mother, for Craft, bleeding on the sand. He was dying, until the magician found him, and crafted him into the image of another, and he, made dumb and passive in the wake of his mother’s death, had obeyed. And he had died, finally – but the jaws of death that had swallowed him had spat him back out, like something gone rotten. “Yes,” he says, “and I can’t decide if I wish I’d stayed dead, or not.” There’d been peace, in the waves. He knew no one’s names, in the waves. (He should have known, when he woke on the beach, in an in-between. It was the first sign he wouldn’t stay dead. The first slap of consciousness.) “I don’t wish to glamourize it, though--” he amends, “it’s not for everyone.” Not for him, apparently. She admits her immunity, then, which is odd – he knows of no one immune, only of the safe lands. He steps closer, as if her immunity was a tangible thing, something that could be spotted on her body, like a mark in lamb’s blood, telling the plague to stay away. “How?” he asks, “you must be lucky.” He’s wrong, of course. He so often is. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain.

@[Shiya]