handcrafted by confusing love; kult and kersey

[capture]

 

In the shadows beneath the trees, a dark green mare gave birth to the smallest child she had ever seen, with pale blue pupiless eyes fogged and clouded in white. In the shadows beneath the trees, a dark green mare missed the subtle quiver of that tiny ribcage drawing in shallow, ragged breaths. In the shadows beneath the trees, a dark green mare coaxed root and branch and bush and grass like a tomb around the dying child.   And she left.   Hours passed, entire worlds born and destroyed, and still nothing happened. The steel and emerald girl with her bones poking welts through her skin and great valleys drawn in shadow between the ridges of her ribs remained buried barely alive in the tangled tomb of her mother’s making.   But just as the sun had dipped low enough to kiss the horizon, to draw streaks of pink and orange across a pale cornflower blue sky, something changed. It was like a shift in the air, a ripple of magic from the heart of the tangle. It was as though time was racing past, like watching summer in fast-forward as the plants wrapped around the tiny child turned brown and brittle and wilted away. They were as dry as the bones poking up through her skin, and their moisture spread outwards in rivulets like tearstains across the dirt floor of the forest.   All bird bones and spindle legs, the girl rose and stumbled from the tangle of dead plant meant to be a tomb, falling several times before she managed to keep those steel grey legs tremblingly beneath her. There was a noise to her left, a rustle as a bird took flight from a branch in a nearby tree, and those sightless blue eyes followed the trail of sound.   “Mother?” She whispered into the dark, the tiny rivulets of water snaking up her legs and pooling in the hollow places of an impossibly delicate body.     I KNOW THE RULES; THE WEAKER TREE BENDS capture