[open] with whispered lies

[Raelle]

She should be dead. She should have never escaped the prison he had fashioned for her.  She should still be there,  strewn through the fingers of uprooted trees with the rest of the dead that lied in the wake of a crazed man. Raelle should have been one of them.  

She had started to converse with the corpse he had left her for company after days past and she was still trapped beneath the fallen trees. The smell of death had started to bring scavengers of every kind. But, her prison was also her savior from hungry teeth. Unfortunately, her friend had not been so lucky.  She stared and the wolves and foxes watched her as they fed from the belly of the dead gray. Raelle did not know the name, but the face still bore the fear and surprise from seconds before the life was ripped from them, even as eyes began to shrivel and sink into the skull. The crows plucked them out like grapes on the second day. 

By the time night fell on the third day,  there was naught but bone and hair and the residual stench of death left of her friend. The scavengers were sated, even merry with full bellies on too thin frames. 

Weak as she was, Raelle managed to worm her way from the fallen tree roots that had held her captive. With the weight of the dead now resting in the bellies of beasts,  Raelle was able to lift the old fallen tree just enough to struggle, inch by inch, towards freedom. But every inch came with blood. Raelle clenched her jaw so tightly that her teeth cracked at the surface. By the time she was birthed through the gates of her prison, her right side was lined with jagged cuts and her left eye encrusted with dirt. 

Then the mist came, more terrifying than the beasts that had taken her dead friend into their jaws. The air was suffocating, heavy and full of decay. Raelle ran. She ran blindly, foolishly through fallen trees. At least, she felt as though she was running, after having spent days trapped beneath the trees. Her pace was more a dragging walk, though the effort was evident enough in the way her muscles strained, the flare of her nostrils, and the whites of her eyes. It doesn’t take long before the mist swallows her up. 

She remembers her friend’s eyeless face somehow staring at her through the missed. “Come.” it had said in the voice of many. Raelle had followed the hollowed figure into darkness. 

Then, suddenly, she is here amidst the trees of the forest, though the damage of the madman is erased. There are no bodies, no uprooted trees. Hopeful, Raelle looks to the deep cuts along her barrel. Though they no longer bleed, pink scars still line her painted body. Her expression furrows in confusion. 

“Do dreams leave scars?” she thinks aloud.

[woodrow]

His tail should be curled around his nose;

He wakes up, his nose is cold and his tail is strangled by knots and brambles.

Woodrow is surprised to discover that he is a horse again!

He had bedded down for the night in a comfortable thicket of dry grass as a coyote and morning found him shivering cold, alone, and of another species entirely - the one he originated as, from birth to now.

The bay dun roan had climbed to his feet, almost shaky and newborn, as he looked around. Why did it all seem so different now? He had hunted the miec and the voles, and now his stomach clamored for grass in fits of hunger that left him stupid and weak. Woodrow did not hate himself as a horse, but he preferred the scavenging nature of his other self and his four hardscrabbling paws. He has spent so little time as a horse that he has forgotten how to be; he tries to sniff scat, scent the air, and paw at the dirt but his hooves and weak horse-nostrils are nothing like his coyote self.

What he does smell is a mare nearby and that is no extraordinary thing, because there was always a horse nearby. It has just always been easier to grin up at them around a lolling tongue and half-parted jaws that showed the neat rows of his sharp teeth. Now, he is just a stallion and this shape feels cumbersome and bulky. He can smell days’ old blood on her and as he nears her, he can see the pink puckerings of scars along her side. Stranger still is the confused expression on her face, as if she doesn’t know how they came to be there, or she here. To be honest, he has no idea either.

“Maybe,” he mutters casually to her.

“Anything is possible nowadays.” He is clearly taken by this notion, because something surely must explain how he has lost his other more familiar shape.

(he can hear it yipping to the moon for release from underneath his skin)