Snow. It sticks to what she can claim of a mane, soothes the raw skin that opens along the edges of her scars, her flesh an endless field of volcanic ash demarcated with the fault of her sores. The edges of her ears are crinkled, shrunken inwards, filtering the wind past them though it would not have mattered anyway. There was nothing to hear. The wind and her heartbeat, the wind and her heartbeat, the wind and her heartbeat. Her hooves drag regular, straight lines through the snow as she climbs. She is freezing. Eventually the pure, glittering colorness of her surroundings is marred by what she leaves behind, blood dripping over chest from a sore for the snow to drink.
She imagines it in half-section, a drop suspended in water, curling jellyfish-like, tributaries a mockery of her veins.
She doesn't look up until she's reached the top of the mountain. They fascinated her. Quiet. Unreachable. Ancient. 'I'll just take a look,' she said to herself. And yet there she was, frozen and smiling. Beqanna opened up beneath her, kingdoms and herds alive ant-like and milling at her feet. Their daily dramas, the lives she watched play out in front of her every day - miniaturized. And in the center of it all the Meadow - her Meadow.
She was five, and yet she'd never left that Meadow. It was home, the tiny copse of trees surrounding the only safe place she'd ever known. From that place she'd watched others come and go, dreamed of a life like that. Like what? Anything, really. She wouldn't class herself as lonely - it was impossible to miss what you'd never had.
And yet now she was in the Field.
If it were physically possible she might have been nauseous. It wasn't so far removed from where she'd lived her whole life, but to her it might have been whole worlds away. It even smelled different.
It was night, long after the sun had retreated beneath the horizon, long after its bloom had disappeared from its red-purple glory against the very same mountain she'd been daydreaming of to keep herself calm. She couldn't be out during the day, but that suited her current anxiety - there were fewer horses around.
Anhedonia
i've grown familiar with villains that live in my head
they beg me to write them so they'll never die when i'm dead