Dreams were dark, tainted. Shadowy figures wove their hands around me, tried to keep me there, lost within the empty space of my mind. They whispered terrible things. Lied, cheated me into staying there, wide-eyed and silent. They had sewn my mouth with stitches, took my tongue from me, my eyes. I could not talk, I could not see, but I could hear their whispering. Darkness, darkness with the thump, thump of my heart. The told me things, things that made no sense, things that froze me to my core.
I awoke in a foray of limbs, entangled with tree bark and decaying leaves. Somewhere on the outskirts of the Gates, where the enchanted little forests open up and extend to the meadow. Pine cones leave indentations on my neck and swelling barrel. I lay there for a moment, watching the birds above. Inky quills flapping beside them, dark, dark eyes meeting mine. They knew things, they knew the secrets inside of my mind. I whickered up at them but with a loud, obnoxious caw, they flew away; a mess of falling black feathers that fell to my feet. I lowered my muzzle, inhaled the scent of the earth, the cold, late autumn ground was soft in places, deepening mud in others. My teeth picked up the feathers and placed each, carefully in my mane. It was a delicate procedure, one which my hollowed eyes concentrated solely on. Knotted in with the dead leaves and broken twigs, my silvery mane was a mass of dreadlocks, now befitting the deathly chorus of a murder of crows.
I looked up, craned my delicate head. My frame was still out of proportion. A swelling barrel, with something, with something that Wichita had had when I found her. And my bones still jutted out, chocolate skin curving over each china white bone, stark shoulders, a protruding hipbone. And my mass array of scars, thick, raised salmon skin that was still slowly healing. A tad weepy in places as I've been waking up in the strangest of places, with no recollection of getting there. Like today, I awoke to the caw of the birds, and followed them into the field, where they find another perch and sing their dark delightful song, this time to another.
I follow them, every step a delicate process. I stop, I continue, I stop, I continue. It takes me a while to find them once more. Hooves sinking into the wet ground beneath. My cocoa dipped ears twiddle atop my crown, listening. I capture their caws, they sing a strong strong, weave lies with their claws and tell secrets with their beak. I hold their song like tentative butterflies, before wheezing, husky and low, my own version of their song. 'The birds. They hide secrets. They store them under their wings.' I say, my voice hauntingly eerie as I bring up my gaze to reach them, a strange sound falls from my lips, mimicking the caw of a crow, rather than the delicate song of a lark. I turn my hollow, empty eyes to the vast, near empty meadow. A spangling of snow promised in the skies. Their dark clouds rolling over above head. The coldness bites into me, but I let it. As I stand there, just below the tree, gazing up with a delicate eye. 'You know my secrets, don't you?'
Slowly, I see them form beyond the quivering branches. Their naked boughs weaving a tapestry with my past embroidered. Snippets. I remember snippets, but then they bury themselves into my heart, like a cold, sharp steel. Cutting me inside, wounding my already broken soul, tainting my already weakened body.
Reuen
the little ruined girl
resident of the gates |
