03-14-2017, 07:03 PM
AN INNER WHINE LIKE A MAD MACHINE
He sees the shadows her wings cast cross the strange, crooked walls. They dance and flicker; they test the moorings of his imagination. The blight has all but extinguished that light, too. (She could be a dragon—she could be a rabid star. She could be someone set aflame by father for treachery. For all Famine knows, he is mighty and cruel enough to make it so. But he thinks none of these fanciful things, only that what comes snaps at his survival instinct like a rattler.) In his chest, feeble as it is, his heart begins to quicken its slack pace. He grunts, tries and fails to force a chipped hoof to grab purchase of the giving, fine dust that has blown into this hole.
Of all his siblings (half and full), he is the sorriest—at least, for now.
Famine groans, it echoes like tongued death across the sandstone, settling deeper. As he has always been, he is prepared for what is to come. He is prepared for it to be a reaper or harbinger—he expects it will come to engulf him; he conceives of no other reason for the brutal torch this haunt seems to bear.
Fear comes to him in many ways;
He fears death, sometimes—he feels it so close.
He fears his father.
Fear is not his weapon, and so he submits to it; he lets it die on his brain, turn to grave rot, and there it withers in the languidness of his addled mind.
When she shows herself, he narrows his eyes for a moment against the glare of her wings. He pays no mind to the sparks that fling from their conflagration—those that land on the sand around him perish; those that fall on his skin hiss and burrow, stinging for brief, keen seconds. He utters not a word as she looks down on him—he knows what she must see, can only imagine what she thinks.
He curses himself for letting her follow him—
It is a relief, however, when she lays down with him, bellies in the sand like two serpents. He finds it hard to raise his head, harder still to scramble up from the vulnerable position he has flattened himself into. It is a kinder thing to let him rest. He exhales, sand billowing away from his nostrils. “I’m dying,” he mutters back, half-muffled and sober. He pulls his chin up from the ground just enough to look at her, grains sticking to the spittle on his lips, sliding all gritty over his tongue.
“Who are you?” he lets his nose fall again, planted in the barren sediment.