Night had come and with it a breathtaking view of the stars. Despite the mists of Uwaritace, Tola moved seemingly without issue, even though she only had one eye in her head, and that eye was almost completely covered by a thick mucousy layer of cataracts. "Hobbles and heroes-" Tola muttered to herself, her voice sounding like a song run backwards through a blender. "Hippos and-" Dramatically Tola stopped, her nose falling towards the ground as if dragged by a magnet. Her one good eye was turned awkwardly to better investigate something in the soul.
"Aye, aye aye. But only one. A wripple of laughter shook Tola's emaciated frame as her twisted neck rose towards the sky. With moonlight filtering down upon her, her body's agedness and general state of malnutrition was painfully obvious, but the mare (if applying a gender toher even made sense at this point), seemed not to notice.
"I will see without salt or brine, thank'ya." She mumbled to the stars, brows narrowing over her one eye and its empty socket-ed counterpart as she began to scan the skies.
01-09-2018, 08:06 AM (This post was last modified: 01-09-2018, 08:11 AM by Rixen.)
R I X E N
I had come to this place only once before, to contribute to the Matron’s tree. On that day I received the gold pendant that I now wore proudly around my neck, and whose magic I had not yet figured out. It was a dark night. Why did I think it was a good idea to venture here alone in the dark again? Who knew. On most nights I bedded down someplace sheltered and did not wander about. The Rift was a dangerous place and I didn’t want to be caught off guard in the dark. I much preferred running into the Rift’s surprises in the daylight, when I could see what I was up against.
At any rate, I was here now and I wasn't about to turn back. As I walked, I admired the night sky. The stars shone brightly down upon the earth, twinkling like diamonds in the sky. The sheer number of the stars multiplied in all directions like a rebellion in the heavens that was slowly attracting more and more support as it progressed. As I stared up at them, I thought about the stars. How did they hang there? What was that larger one to the north? Did they have names? The stars from my foalhood did. Each one had a name and a story behind it. When I was young, we would gather around and listen to the herd elders tell the story of each star and how it came to earn its place in the sky. Perhaps the stars I saw now were the same stars from my past, connecting my past life to this one. It was entirely possible that the Rift wasn't such an entirely different world after all.
My thoughts were interrupted by a strange sound coming from somewhere nearby. It was not the noise of a horse, but hissing murmurs followed by a twisted chortling, a sound as startling to the ear as nails scraping across a chalkboard. Curious to see who - more like what - else was wandering about at such a late hour, I followed my ears to the source of the noise, the pale moonlight guiding my hooves. The trees parted to reveal a clearing, and sure enough I was wrong. Standing at the center was a gray horse who was turned away from me, looking up at the sky. I had most likely found the source of the noise. Scanning the figure, I could faintly make out the shapes of her ribs jutting out of her thin hide. She was well-aged, by the looks of her. But I was not yet close enough to see the exact details of her appearance. The mare was busy babbling to herself now, and I could not make out what she was saying. Approaching slowly as not to startle her, I called out to the stranger. "Who are you?"
"Talk."
they heard me singing and they told me to stop
quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
Tola continued to babble quietly to herself as if Rixen's words had meant nothing to her. He might have been speaking in another language, or not at all, for the reaction he received. Yet had he looked close enough, he would have seen Tola's large moose-like ears flicker to catch his words, the sounds getting trapped in the long and greying hairs that bursted through the soft off-white tulip-like folds.
"Once upon a time at the end-" Tola continued, her boney-back shifting as her hooves slowly began to rotated her ancient frame around. "-and yet not the end-" One eye bulged as it took in Rixen; what she could see through the cloud of cataracts anyways. Spiders, glowing from within, crawled complacently out from her mane, weaving themselves in and through the gnarled branches that sat atop her head like a crown. One spider, fat and slow-moving had made its way to her empty socket, lingering in the darkness there like a cave.
"Do you know who lives here? Who lived here? Who hears here?"
Her tone was still that same melody-stuck-in-a-blender sound as she took a step towards Rixen, her broken body looking as though it might fall apart at any instant should her skin decide to tear. It was so papery-thin it looked like it could do just that at almost any moment.
tola
Madness is like gravity,
all it needs is a little push
01-10-2018, 08:58 AM (This post was last modified: 01-12-2018, 10:57 PM by Rixen.)
R I X E N
The skeletal mare kept right on mumbling to herself, even after I called out to her. Was she ignoring me? Or had she not heard me? Hearing was one of the first things to go with age. As I stood behind her, feeling somewhat awkward, I tried to discern what in fact she was so busy talking about. I thought I could make out a word here or there, but maybe it was simply wishful thinking. Most every sound that came from her mouth was gibberish, strung together to the point where it was impossible to pick out where one sentence began and another ended, much less individual words.
Bit by bit, I inched closer to where the grey woman stood. I had only moved maybe a few steps when she paused her talking and began to turn around. Who knew whether or not the turning of her body frame was because she knew I was standing there, the moonlight illuminating the right side of my body which was otherwise bathed in the darkness.
"Hello?" Was all that I could say when she finally faced my direction. Up close, she did not look anything like I was expecting. Much worse, in fact. In addition to her thinness and unkempt hide, both of which were qualities that one might expect of someone too old and frail to properly eat or clean themself, the stranger had only one eye, which was covered in milky cataracts and bulged out of her skull. Where her other eye should have been, there was a dark and empty socket. Her mane was crawling with large, hairy spiders spinning their silken webs among the matted strands of hair. I watched in dismay as a spider, plump and particularly hairy, crawled oh so slowly from the tangled locks, across the mare’s face, and into the empty eye socket where it settled in all cozy and warm for the night. Upon her head rested a ‘crown’ of sorts, fashioned from a jumble of sharp branches. Though I doubted she cared, I did my best to conceal my disgust at her off-putting appearance. This was the Rift. The place was crawling with all manner of odd and unpleasant looking creatures, just as many as there were beautiful ones. Why should I be surprised?
I winced as her jarring tone broke the silence. It was a sound that was not gentle on the ears in the least. Immediately, she launched into a series of weird questions, to which I replied that I did not know the answer. "I-I don't. I am not from around here. Is it someone important?" Was all I said, curious to know what her answer would be. Or was she referring to herself... Despite her unsettling image, I was not afraid of the old woman. Always one to stick to morals, I refused to allow myself to make any judgments before I'd attempted a conversation with the mare, even if she was not the most pleasant creature to look at. Mind you, that was an understatement.
"Talk."
they heard me singing and they told me to stop
quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
Tola fell silent, and her inscrutable gaze crawled over Rixen like a thousand tiny spiderlegs. She appeared to be concentrating very hard (or perhaps she'd simply fallen asleep and forgotten to close her eye..?) for her breathing came in shallow and ragged spurts as if oxygenating her blood was something she only did when the feeling struck her.
"Everyone is important." Tola hissed suddenly, her voice like a snake on sandpaper as it slithered from her lips. Her entire posture had subtly changed and for a moment she seemed entirely coherent and perhaps intelligent. That might have been a stretch, but whatever had happened it was a marked departure from her previous countenance.
And then just as quickly as it had come this moment of rationality slipped away. Or seemed to anyways.
Tola began to suck on her teeth and for a moment it looked as though she was going to turn away from Rixen entirely, but midway through lifting her decrepit limbs, she seemed to think better of it. "Time is a funny thing, you know." She drawled. "It isn't relative at all, but me - ning - less." She spat out the word in its syllables as if it offended her. She shook her head, dislodging a few spiders whose small glowing bodies raced back into the safety of her matted mane.
"Do you know who the Metus is?" She asked in that bizarrely coherent tone again. "Do you know what lays at the heart of the labyrinth?"
tola
Madness is like gravity,
all it needs is a little push
The mare stopped speaking, her one good eye coming to rest on me. She stood still, except for her eye, which I could see was rotating back and forth along my striped hide as she examined me carefully. She appeared very focused, like a thick cloud fogged her mind she was on the verge of lifting it. I watched as her bony sides heaved in and out with every ragged, rapid breath. I didn’t like being under such close examination. It made every one of my blue-grullo hairs crawl.
Everyone is important. What?! Of course everyone was. What kind of a statement was that? Everything she said seemed to have been pulled from thin air. Only a moment ago she had asked me if I knew who lived here. I didn’t know, but instead of answering my question the mare began on another new topic of discussion. Irritation had started to grow ever so slowly within me, but I tried not to let this show. It was difficult to follow everything she said, or even to try to make sense of any of it. After realizing she might never start talking sense, I simply gave up trying. Some things were meant to confuse me, I supposed. The sooner I accepted this fact, the better off I’d be. I didn’t respond to the statement. I didn't know what to say, and besides, she would probably ignore my words and go on rambling. No need to waste the breath.
I watched as the ancient’s entire stature changed in a matter of seconds, as if she had examined me, drawn some sort of conclusion, and now was changing how she would interact with me. I didn’t know what it was. Perhaps it was that she stood up a little taller, or pulled her shoulders back, or her cataract-covered eye gleamed with a new light. Something changed. I sensed it. The mare looked almost thoughtful? Until now, she had not seemed capable of much in-depth thought. She came off more like one of those old crazies that a herd pitied enough not to outcast, but didn't exactly want sticking around either.
Just when I was growing hopeful that we might have a proper conversation, the glimpse of coherence vanished. The grey mare almost turned to leave, shifting her weight forward and starting to move away from me. She must have gone back on that decision, though, because the motion of her bony limbs came to a halt and she began to speak again, for some reason she chose to talk about time. I would have been very annoyed if she had actually turned and walked away mid conversation. If you could call such interaction a “conversation” that was. Sure, a few words were exchanged, but that was about where the similarities ended. More like the strange woman was conversing with herself and I was sort of just ...here. She hadn't even bothered to introduce herself yet.
Her words were choked with what came across to me as disdain. Though I said nothing, I thought about what she said. Time was indeed a funny thing. Sure, it was how one catalogued events, past, present and future. But time was almost like an illusion, one that horses' brains applied to the universe so that they could survive a linear existence. I was not even sure that I fully understood it. Maybe time did not exist. Maybe it was in fact meaningless. In the Rift, surely such a thing was possible. Most anything was. My mind ached thinking about it.
At the mention of the Metus, my ears swiveled forward, keen to hear more. Perhaps she would elaborate, I thought, the smallest amount of hope rising deep within in my chest. Difficult as it was, I decided to give another attempt at conversing with the mare. She seemed to have snapped out of her madness again, and I wanted to see if she might finally yield an answer. As a result, I talked rather quickly, hoping to catch her in this sane state. It was as if she constantly fluctuated between a state of madness and lucidity, and the key was to catch her at the right time. I shook my head no. "I have heard of it once." I answered, thinking back to the Matron’s mention of the creature when I had been at the lake. "I’ve never seen one, though. Nor have I been to the Green Labyrinth before, though I’ve been told it’s a beautiful place. The Labyrinth crawls with danger too, I’m sure, as does the rest of the Rift. What does lie at the heart?"
"Talk."
they heard me singing and they told me to stop
quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
Uwaritace
