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She clutched herself with her wings, her warm body slick from the terrential downpour. She wasn’t right. Filtered through the incessant falling rain, her face looked like a worn and bruised mirage, the skin deeply lined. She’d lost weight and some random tufts of hair from various nicks and tucks. Even her shoulders had the stooped curvature of someone worn. Her pink snout felt irreversibly sunburned, an unfortunate gift from Tallsun's blistering heat. She was too many mysteries. Too much walled-up history. There was a fury in her features, visible even through the rain. A new darkness in her eyes.
The mare jerked sideways and pressed her moist face to a nearby tree, moving her head up and down it's soggy trunk scratching deep, raking the skin, digging hard into the bark. Some vast emptiness seemed to drive her on, a craving for warmth and reassurance. And still, there was the fatigue of defeat weighing heavily on her porcelain features.
Was it lack of hope? Anger? Defeat? Loneliness? The mare seemed lost, but not in a helpless, kidnapped-princess sort of way, but angrily. Tired of not succeeding, tired of doing nothing, tired of simply being. And so maybe then, gradually at first, Aurelia became attuned to a curious new odor in the air. A foul tartness, like spoiled milk. The smell had been there all along, in the rain and the trees, but now it seemed to condense into something solid. Something so tangible it was as if she could open her dainty jaw and clamp down onto it with her aged teeth.
The rain danced between the leaves before smacking the mare, but it didn't feel like rain to the girl. It felt like tar, thick and dark and suffocating. Just like her mind. Lightning began flickering through the sky, accompanied by the loud boom of thunder.
She lived in a puzzle world, where the most ordain objects seemed fiercely alive with their own sorrows and desires. It had always seemed so implausible that the world could be indifferent to its own existence. The mare couldn’t help believing in some fundamental governing principle beneath things. And of course, the Rift solidified this belief. With shifting shadows and cackling trees, everything bent and twisted with life. It would seem unrealistic to expect things to be alive when there is no pulse to feel or guts to spill, but she was certain if she broke a branch of the very tree next to her, it would silently cry out in pain and agony, just as anything with a pulse would.
She was here, in flesh and blood, watching everything grow slick from the rain. The question now wasn't would anyone join her, it was who.
talk talk talk talk
like a deer in the headlights i meet my fate |
Siren's Summit
