fury and blades

Eira... For a moment the frail blue waif stood there paralysed with fear—sight of the ferocious, faceless monster, provoking the adaptive response, ears, eyes and nostrils lifted, all senses on high alert. He loomed yet in shadow, barely discernible (whether by her confused brain or bewildered stare), save for the luminous, waltzing glow of the other mare’s active firelight and Eira’s flailing thoughts stumbled as they tried to find logic. A sound, syllables resonating urgently around the walls of the cold, fetid-smelling tomb, yanked Eira suddenly back to reality, and she recoiled to the armour-clad soldier’s flank with bumbling, bent strides. Pressing in, should the larger accept, jutting bones, concealed beneath the rug of never-shedding fur, nestled against the unforgiving surface of the strange, tin adornments. “What is it?” her thoughts queried feebly, frightened, though the other would not hear. The Magnus Metus, the harrowing voice of the Rift seemed to answer—or perhaps it was the threatening murmur of the monster’s hungering belly or the passage of the wind meeting hapless death in the dark contours of his room—bleeding through her resolve until she was trembling so violently that she worried her joints might split apart. Her braver companion stepped forth with horned skull snaking low, black and teal flames suddenly devouring the feathers set upon her crown. Eira mirrored the motion of those long, sinewy, dark legs beside her; though her own action was cursed and hindered, and she looked considerably less elegant. Like a foal beside it’s dam, she flanked carefully and consciously, all to aware of her own bitter vulnerability—but the quest too, that she’d been commanded to complete. "I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter."

- Pablo Neruda, Winter Garden
@Kiada