09-03-2016, 05:08 AM
The curl of his ram-horns loop in and out of her dreams;
Goat-horses dance on their feet, invisible then visible.
She dreams less and less of eyes bright and shiny, like gold coins, in a dragon’s hoard.
(By now, those eyes are probably plucked clean out of his skull by the birds on the beach. His bones are nests for kelp and tides.)
It starts as a tiny shake of leaves in the old boughs of the old trees;
The grandfather redwoods begin to talk in a creaking language of bark and breeze.
She lifts her head from grazing to listen to the things that are said in the sway of the trees, and then --
Oblivion.
Sinew has been here before, back in a familiar blackness that pushes her past the cold dead light of the stars. She can feel her immortality being sucked from her bones by a too-hungry mouth of anger and sharp teeth - it hurts, worse than even the time Tarnished bit a chunk from the left side of her neck and ate the tip of her left ear off. That shortened ear turns now, listening for a thread of sound that might be familiar in this black place but there is only the silence of loss as it echoes around her, rebounding back off the sides of something great and awful that cannot be seen - but she feels it! Mountainous and tall, she feels it but she does not rush up its steep rocky side to reclaim the very thing that is temporarily lost to her. Instead, she has but a thought spared to her daughter and her mammoth-pet, the latter that is sucked up in that same black space that Sinew dwells in but is unrecognizable - too horse, too far alien for her to seek out, and she moves on, because the last thing she remembers is ram-horns and palomino skin.
She opens her black eyes; there are still trees - not the redwoods, but some kind of trees in every possible tree-species. Firs, with their needling fingers, brush at her cheeks and hair as she goes by them; they beg her to stay - linger, in their dark green midst, but she cannot. Sinew is driven to find him, goat-god-horse-thing but his smell is absent. She is not terrified, even then, she has never been more brave than fearful and she is like a thing possessed in her hunt - she will find him, he is the last remnant from Before. Even changed, recognition dawns the moment his palomino skin gleams dusty but in reach of her black eyes.
He had not the breadth of those beautiful wings before!
Can she then claim her immortality?
(Yes, go to the Mountain, something whispers to her.)
She ignores it - for now;
His heavy breathing is a cadence for her ears that she steps along in time to; she finds herself facing him, staring in that too-knowing manner that Sinew has always had. “Pollock,” is all that she can manage to bring herself to say, because he is just a stallion and that, is almost disappointing - almost, because Sinew still knows him, respects him, and merely says - “What now?”
Goat-horses dance on their feet, invisible then visible.
She dreams less and less of eyes bright and shiny, like gold coins, in a dragon’s hoard.
(By now, those eyes are probably plucked clean out of his skull by the birds on the beach. His bones are nests for kelp and tides.)
It starts as a tiny shake of leaves in the old boughs of the old trees;
The grandfather redwoods begin to talk in a creaking language of bark and breeze.
She lifts her head from grazing to listen to the things that are said in the sway of the trees, and then --
Oblivion.
Sinew has been here before, back in a familiar blackness that pushes her past the cold dead light of the stars. She can feel her immortality being sucked from her bones by a too-hungry mouth of anger and sharp teeth - it hurts, worse than even the time Tarnished bit a chunk from the left side of her neck and ate the tip of her left ear off. That shortened ear turns now, listening for a thread of sound that might be familiar in this black place but there is only the silence of loss as it echoes around her, rebounding back off the sides of something great and awful that cannot be seen - but she feels it! Mountainous and tall, she feels it but she does not rush up its steep rocky side to reclaim the very thing that is temporarily lost to her. Instead, she has but a thought spared to her daughter and her mammoth-pet, the latter that is sucked up in that same black space that Sinew dwells in but is unrecognizable - too horse, too far alien for her to seek out, and she moves on, because the last thing she remembers is ram-horns and palomino skin.
She opens her black eyes; there are still trees - not the redwoods, but some kind of trees in every possible tree-species. Firs, with their needling fingers, brush at her cheeks and hair as she goes by them; they beg her to stay - linger, in their dark green midst, but she cannot. Sinew is driven to find him, goat-god-horse-thing but his smell is absent. She is not terrified, even then, she has never been more brave than fearful and she is like a thing possessed in her hunt - she will find him, he is the last remnant from Before. Even changed, recognition dawns the moment his palomino skin gleams dusty but in reach of her black eyes.
He had not the breadth of those beautiful wings before!
Can she then claim her immortality?
(Yes, go to the Mountain, something whispers to her.)
She ignores it - for now;
His heavy breathing is a cadence for her ears that she steps along in time to; she finds herself facing him, staring in that too-knowing manner that Sinew has always had. “Pollock,” is all that she can manage to bring herself to say, because he is just a stallion and that, is almost disappointing - almost, because Sinew still knows him, respects him, and merely says - “What now?”