the birdsong might be pretty,
but it's not for you they sing
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but it's not for you they sing
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Not matter the shape of her form, or the skin held tight as a cage around her, there are things that heart has never forgotten. It still dreams, she still dreams, of swimming for the cove like a tidal-wave. It still knows the way to tremble like a field-mouse in the talons of an owl. It still knows how to run, and rush, beat a furious tune that has everything to do with war and with survival.
It still knows fear. Like a mother, a father, an entire family, it knows fear. And because she knows it, so does the slumbering vineyard.
A vine trembles above her head. It whispers in the way of root, and earth, and Red lays her cheek against the vine to settle it. She knows, deep in her belly she knows, that the worry of the vine has nothing to do with the charm she's burying at the base of it. The last time the vineyard rattled like this the rains had started. It had rained, and rained, and rained, and Horace was lost. This time she's not sure what the roots are trying to tell her, she's forgotten how he told her the way to form words out of the earth. Her heart aches to have forgotten than and not the fear.
She's still standing there, cheek pressed to a sleeping grape vine, when the stallion approaches. Her heart, her heart that still knows how to dream, flutters beneath her breast like a caught sparrow. A part of her, the one that's still seal no matter her form, thinks he's the color of a shark. He looks like the shallow sea, like she needs to find her cove and find it quickly.
Fear pours into her, like water filling up a vase.
But the part of her that is all mare, all creature pulled from skin and sea, turns away from the trembling vine. She couldn't understand the words of it anyway. “Hello.” Red shakes her head and dead leaves caught there fall to the ground. Each sounds like a whisper against the snow and for a moment she wonders if the dead leaves are trying to tell her the same words as the vine. Those leaves crunch under her hooves as she moves towards him. Suddenly there are no whispers but the inhale and exhale of their lungs.
Red lifts her eyes up, up, up to see his own. The color of them makes her heart break. And then--
Then she sees the scars mottling his skin like a map. Her next inhales is sharper, colder, a bleat underneath the echo of his whistling. Red tries to tell herself to be brave, be brave, be brave. Be. Brave. She does not lower her eyes from his gaze when she says, “are you lost?”. And with something like fury and pleading she prays that he is.
Because, oh, oh, oh, what if he came for her?
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@Sarkan
