04-23-2016, 03:25 AM
Loam can feel the jangling of Hickory’s nerves like an alarm that keeps going off; it is a rhythm unnatural and not altogether unfamiliar to the sable mare but she wants to press her lips to the pulse and siphon off snippets of the irregularity of it. She has never felt anything more than a quickening of her own pulse in a fit of madness like the time she manipulated a stallion into killing a mare, enslaving him to her for the sheer and simple knowledge of what he had done, or when such sweet buckskin flesh made her weak in the knees but like water, always slipped her grasp of it beyond the moment and the memory. For the briefest of moments, she wonders where that mare that she used to be had gone… who is this meek and mellow thing left in its place?
The grass grows underfoot, quite noticeably and unnaturally, and Loam bends her head down to it to feel it tickle her maw as it pushes up through the soil. She knows Hickory has done this thing, manipulated the earth and pulled the grass up tall from it and that is a very curious thing, almost a tricksy thing that Loam thinks is quite beautiful and useful though it is hardly a manipulative thought that flies through her head - merely an observation, a reckoning that Hickory was far more changed than originally implied but she had already guessed that.
“Hardly,” she counters distantly, unaware of much of a difference beyond the basic facts of age and experience, little of which have shaped her. Loss mayhap, she could argue even that really given that she had such the barest touch of what might have been love that it is more a dream now than real moments that happened in this selfsame forest that towers above them, making them small shadows standing at the feet of something both great and terrible and so much bigger than themselves, that she cannot say she really knows it as love and thus, as the loss of it. Can you lose what you never really had to begin with? Her heart wants to thump in odd staccatos of yes and then no, but Loam never listens much to her heart - it is a slick, gross, throbbing muscle.
But she is curious… Hickory thinks she has changed and really, she is only softened by the other mare’s presence, not quite made motherly but something about the bay makes the black more mild, less heartless, and something else that Loam sometimes can put a name to but often doesn’t.
“How,” she asks.
The grass grows underfoot, quite noticeably and unnaturally, and Loam bends her head down to it to feel it tickle her maw as it pushes up through the soil. She knows Hickory has done this thing, manipulated the earth and pulled the grass up tall from it and that is a very curious thing, almost a tricksy thing that Loam thinks is quite beautiful and useful though it is hardly a manipulative thought that flies through her head - merely an observation, a reckoning that Hickory was far more changed than originally implied but she had already guessed that.
“Hardly,” she counters distantly, unaware of much of a difference beyond the basic facts of age and experience, little of which have shaped her. Loss mayhap, she could argue even that really given that she had such the barest touch of what might have been love that it is more a dream now than real moments that happened in this selfsame forest that towers above them, making them small shadows standing at the feet of something both great and terrible and so much bigger than themselves, that she cannot say she really knows it as love and thus, as the loss of it. Can you lose what you never really had to begin with? Her heart wants to thump in odd staccatos of yes and then no, but Loam never listens much to her heart - it is a slick, gross, throbbing muscle.
But she is curious… Hickory thinks she has changed and really, she is only softened by the other mare’s presence, not quite made motherly but something about the bay makes the black more mild, less heartless, and something else that Loam sometimes can put a name to but often doesn’t.
“How,” she asks.