Sunrise.
He hasn’t slept again;
He dreams of blue-green flashes. Of the curdled, dry-throated cackle of an old wingbag. He sees fur flying, bones collapsing into piles of once-was. Gone. He dreams of this again and again and again; and again, he hasn’t slept.
He stirs to the dawn chorus—bluebirds, wrens, robins—chirruping and trilling into the clean, thin air, still cool from the night. They swoop in wild aerials above, alighting from branch to branch as he watches them with unfocused, sore, red eyes.
The forest rolls with thin, filmy sheets of fog; glittering under the tight clutches of trees is an even thinner crust of overnight frost, crunching below his hooves.
Bleary-eyed and disquiet, he pushes off from the larch he has leaned is tired body against all night and sluggishly passes into the bloom of hazy light, in and out of the dappling sun, streaming through green-grey needles.
But still, it clings to him. The light. The cackle. The bones. And in his anchored, fitful mind, he hears neither of the rustles in the deep woods. Not yours; and not the one that shifts, stranger and less familiar—less equine—in the gloom.
He hasn’t slept again;
He dreams of blue-green flashes. Of the curdled, dry-throated cackle of an old wingbag. He sees fur flying, bones collapsing into piles of once-was. Gone. He dreams of this again and again and again; and again, he hasn’t slept.
He stirs to the dawn chorus—bluebirds, wrens, robins—chirruping and trilling into the clean, thin air, still cool from the night. They swoop in wild aerials above, alighting from branch to branch as he watches them with unfocused, sore, red eyes.
The forest rolls with thin, filmy sheets of fog; glittering under the tight clutches of trees is an even thinner crust of overnight frost, crunching below his hooves.
Bleary-eyed and disquiet, he pushes off from the larch he has leaned is tired body against all night and sluggishly passes into the bloom of hazy light, in and out of the dappling sun, streaming through green-grey needles.
But still, it clings to him. The light. The cackle. The bones. And in his anchored, fitful mind, he hears neither of the rustles in the deep woods. Not yours; and not the one that shifts, stranger and less familiar—less equine—in the gloom.
@Illu
