08-10-2015, 08:57 PM
what is dead may never die;
but rises again harder and stronger
She closes her eyes, but she is the rock in her stomach – she will not flinch, no matter what pain may come.
She comes to like one does when waking from a nightmare – disoriented and entirely unsure, as though her entire world has been thrown off-kilter. She doesn't understand at first; why is her muzzle slick? Why does she smell so much like the rotted horse who'd stumbled into the Valley so many days-months-years ago? Why are there others here? Why are they screaming? Why have they not fled? A million questions, and no answers—
That is, until she swallows, and she knows the taste of blood in an instant.
That is, until she feels the warm wet soft-hard chunk in her mouth, and knows that it is meat, and knows that her stomach doesn't turn, doesn't retch – and in fact, rumbles an encouragement for her to swallow.
That is, until she sees the body by her feet, the cold dead eyes of Sheira staring up at her, her friend's face and head and throat and everything a mass of gore, almost unrecognizable. She spits out the chunk of flesh in her mouth – an ear, only slightly chewed, rolls out onto the ground. Aletheia quivers with emotional overwhelm; it is all too much for her to process, none of this is what she had bargained for, none of this was what she had expected when she had given her life for her friends. She swallows hard (bile rather than flesh, and her stomach punctuates that knowledge with a sharp pang of hunger). There is no meat, but she can still taste blood.
But they are looking at her now, the two surviving friends, and a handful of the others. But it's not the others she cares about, it's only Conn and Spiar, and she seeks them out with hungry, desperate eyes. She stands on the knife's edge of madness, some kind of desperate wrongness in her body, and if she can only see them, if she can only reach them and draw strength from them, perhaps she can still be saved.
She finds them within the press of horses, but it's the wrong kind of finding. Conn is shielding the little filly Spiar from her with his own body. as though a meat shield was enough to stop her. As though that could ever be enough to stop her.
Their eyes are a mix of fear and pity and guilt, and that is ultimately what breaks her. She simply can't stand it, can't stand to see them reduce her to something less than equine just by the way they look at her. This isn't how it was meant to be. They aren't meant to be standing here. They aren't meant to be watching her. She is meant to be dead, to be reunited with her mother and her father, to be someone else, something else. It's gone all wrong, and it will ruin them all.
The thought is crystal clear, and she doesn't doubt it for a moment: it's their fault, it's all their fault, and they must pay.
She is fast, too fast, and she strikes at Conn in a moment, before he can even react. Spiar is faster though – perhaps it's a holdover from the time the small girl had been alone on the mountain – and she escapes with only scratches as Conn throws himself in front of her, throws himself in front of Aletheia's wrath. This only enrages Aletheia more: that was her job, to fall in battle so that the rest of them could escape. Ruined, ruined, they've ruined it all.
She is a slave to her blind rage as she strikes at Conn again and again. She punishes him with her hooves, bathing her legs in his blood as she crushes his skull. It is clumsy work – hooves aren't made for striking – but she manages it eventually. And through it all, the rest of them do not run. They watch her as though she is mad, but as though it's the kind of madness that you simply cannot help but watch. A trainwreck you can see coming, and cannot avoid. They watch her with a mix of horror and sympathy, and she feels all the more objectified. She does not think of anything but her rage, her anger at the way things had turned out so very, terribly wrong.
She never thinks of regretting. She never thinks of mercy. She never thinks of anything but the burning hot pressure of her anger, and the desperate need to release it by releasing their blood.
It angers her that they don't all run. It angers her that they are trying to fight back, that the strongest are trying to kick her, to bite her, to scare her off from the rest. Why are they even trying to push her back? Don't they know it will never work? Don't they understand that she has become something more than them? That she hates them, and that she will make them pay? She rends and rips and tears and kicks with an unnatural speed, ferocity, and strength. She loses count of how many she kills, and she can barely see through the thick screen of gore that covers her face.
Sometimes she plunges her face into their flesh and rips chunks of skin and muscle. Sometimes she does not.
But they persist in harrying her, and eventually the strength of their strongest is too much for her alone. Perhaps in some deep recess of her mind she understands what she's become, and perhaps in some deep recess she drives herself off. Or perhaps her animal instincts know that even she can be outmatched when the enemy groups as large as they did. All she knows is that she needs to run, to go, to get away.
She runs without thinking, as though she's a creature of pure instinct, and before she can even consider where she's going she finds herself in the Valley. Her former home is a twisted shell of itself. Bodies drape the landscape, and she notes that many of them have been chewed on. She wonders, for a moment, whether she's been here for just a few minutes, or perhaps for longer. Had it been moments, hours, or days since the massacre on the mountain? Had she discovered the bodies eaten, or had she eaten them herself?
She isn't sure. Time doesn't seem to matter to her anymore.
It's ironic, really; she'd once been the time-lost girl, sitting outside the normal stream of time and space, a law unto herself. And now she's back where she was, an abnormality, a creature existing apart from everything else, caught in a different (and far less pleasant) kind of timelessness. Perhaps if she had emotions beyond hunger, she would care.
But there is nothing beyond the hunger, not anymore. She is a body enslaved by the need to eat, every emotion distilled into the moment of her next meal. Everything she does, everywhere she goes, it's all in pursuit of food. And not the kind that grows from the ground, either – no, here in her domain, the trees and the plants are in full flower, an impossible and hollow echo of everything that she'd had once in her dream. A verdant garden, untroubled by pests – because, well, she eats everything that might eat the green. All the squirrels, all the rabbits, all the chipmunks and the mice: anything that moves, anything that has a heartbeat is fair game. And all the rest is as nothing to her.
She doesn't even have enough of her senses left to appreciate the scenery, let alone the irony.
She doesn't remember how she'd curled up with fawns in the land of her dreams. She doesn't remember how all she'd wanted was for them to be her friends. She doesn't remember any of it. All she knows is that there is meat, somewhere, and she is hungry.
She kills is too easily. It has no way to defend itself against a normal horse, let alone whatever it is that she's become. It's a small fawn, too tiny to provide much meat, but it's better than nothing. She dives into it with an automaton's mechanical relish, spraying gore across the pristine meadow as she rips into its throat, blood spraying everywhere, a macabre scene.
She is so thoroughly engaged in ripping into the carcass that she almost doesn't hear it. Ripping apart raw sinew and crunching small bones is, as it turns out, noisy work. But sounds sometimes mean meat, and she can always use more meat, and so she pauses to listen.
A number? She vaguely remembers numbers. They're like furniture in an attic, tucked away under a dropcloth, long unused and out of sight, but the basic form is still there if you look hard enough. Focusing, she dusts off corners of her mind she hasn't touched in…how long had it been since the mountain?
The memories lumber back, her friends like old ghosts. For the first time since she'd looked to Conn and Spiar before striking down Conn, for the first time since she'd seen their eyes, she starts to remember that she had been someone, once, someone more than this. That she had been one of many. And that she had killed most of them.
A number. "Four." she says, her voice a whisper, the word almost unrecognizable because her tongue is so slick with blood and swollen with disuse. Four, because they had been four – four friends, capable of taking on the world. Four, because it sounds like for, because she'd done it all for them.
Four, because as it turned out, it had been all for nothing.
aletheia