let me give you a Lullaby::.

[cowgirl4lyfe]

OOC - ookay:)

[Velnias]

Je a n Gr e y

Holy gods, my head hurt. It throbbed and ached, pulsating against my temples and making me shake my skull back and forth as I walked. It was all this water, I supposed. It wasn't the Cursed lands themselves, though it used to be, but not anymore. Now that the barrier had been broken I could venture into them and look around. Of course, if you knew me, you'd also then know I wasn't here just for investigative purposes. I was here to get some information for myself, and to keep moving. The way my head was always talking, always awake, always thinking, I never got too much sleep. I couldn't stay in any one place very long.

With an air of graciousness I masked my head's throbbing as well as I could. After all, pain in the body was only a nerve, signaling the brain and passing on information. It wasn't real, wasn't measurable. I was usually very good about controlling my mind, and so I set to work at it. There was a moment during which I was almost blinded as the pain increased tremendously, and I realized I'd struck the wrong chord in my nerves. But closing my eyes softly, I put faith in my hooves to guide me, and guide me they did. I searched around in the files of my mind, maneuvering until I found the source of the pain. As quickly as that, I brushed it off and slowly, the pulsating faded away until it was barely a dull vibration.

Much better, that wasn't hard, was it? And now I could focus. I opened my eyes, taking in my earthly surroundings that were so different from the colors in the Outside worlds. I wasn't used to so many shades of sick browns, greens and grays. At once, I knew I did not like it. I'd realized the day that the barrier had been opened. On that day, the hues and vibrant shades of color I was so used to seeing turned paler and had less contrast between them. I remembered distinctly how, even in the Abode, I'd been milling in the valley and when I looked up at the sky, I saw the faintest of periwinkle blues. I watched the thin swathes of sky that could be seen behind the low-hanging clouds, and when the sky grew dark and starry at nightfall, I slept under a birch tree standing alone out in the fields. But what had jarred me awake that morning was a sickening feeling; I'd felt as if, only for a moment, the world had tilted sideways and plenty of life had fallen out of it. I was sick all that day, and when I neared the southernly border I felt why.

Since then, I'd grown used to it or the pressures trapped in this place had since spread out, lessening the effect. Now it was just the stagnant water, brackish and metallic and filled with gods knew what. But when I walked I still walked with the same poise, held my head high, though I felt very wrong in a place like this. But I was strong. I had powers not many could say they'd heard of or experienced. I didn't need any sort of protection, not from stallions, not from anybody. My friend used to tell me all I needed protection from was from myself, but I hadn't understood what he meant then, and still wasn't sure I did now. What I did know was that he was wise and a good companion to have. He'd also told me I was too beautiful to be as strong as I was. I had the most ravishing dappled cost, he said, silky year-round, and the longest dark legs and finest silken copper locks, wavy as they would always rest on my crested neck and spreading out behind my muscled croup like waves of water. I was athletic, had trained myself to outsmart whoever tried to outsmart me, but I was so much deeper than that.

I wished I hadn't seen my friend die. I wished I hadn't seen the light leave his eyes, staring at me with their coldness. The thought pricked my eyes with tears, but then I realized it was in fact, the stench that was making my eyes water. Jerking myself out of the reviere, I drew in a deep breath and filled up my lungs with the rancid odor, nearly coughing it up. And that wasn't all. There were faint voices, too, and instantly I clamped my lips closed. The wind was blowing in my favor, so I easily caught their scent, but they wouldn't have caught mine yet at all. One of them smelled very, very suspicious. Not metallic, like the waters fumigated with corpses and their rot, but like the smell of a truly ill, decaying horse. Hell, they all smelled like they were decaying as they stood. It was the way of the curses they bore.

Though I listened from my distance, there wasn't much to learn other than the odd-smelling mare's name. Obviously, she spoke with the confident lilt in her voicce tat suggested she was confident, and in her words I sensed trickery. I understood why it was they were here, but I was thnking to myself about how much more sense it would make for them to be elsewhere. Across the border, or deeper in the Cursed lands where just anyoe wouldn't come across them. Surely, they knew they'd been freed? The must be utterly desensetized to the world if they hadn't, but still, they were equines with thoughts and actions. And tempers, likely. With my nostrils flared and wary of danger smells, I approched from behind my hidden alcove and walked the closing distance between me and where the others were. It was then that I saw the source of the smell. An enormous lake, its water black and putrid, and bubbling with heat yet at the same time a frostbitten mist rose from its surface. I felt the tune of some kind of ominous music playing in my ears, to myself. I reminded myself that the escape route, if necessary, was right behind me. I reminded myself that I wasn't, in fact, afraid of the sights at all, because fear would make me useless, and I had worse things to think about. So I met the scene with cool eyes, stopped and softly paused my hooves firm in the earth about five paces from the mare, and discovered that she was silver-grey dappled, and her eyes were cold and hard, like mine. I was struck with a pang of guilt, but brushed the feeling away. I didn't have time to think about his death right now; not the fact that I couldn't save him, because I had tried, but even I couldn't stop my own power then.

WORDS 1,237
MUSE very good.
NOTES all for you and Lullaby!

[cowgirl4lyfe]

bump?

[Velnias]

done!! finally!!!

[cowgirl4lyfe]

Leukemia Lullaby

Everyone had gone. At last, Lullaby had her solitude. Hunger pained her stomach, the growls nearly echoed in her ears and made the hair on the nape of her neck rise stiff. She had lost the chance feed and now she was paying for it. The stallion had left in a hurry, uninterested in them all. The other mares, they scooted as soon as dusk hit. An unruly sigh escaped her silver rimmed snout. She picked up her feet and drug them along sinking mud, carving the letters out with her tip of her petite hooves that spelled R-E-G-R-E-T. She finished the word and left it to encrust itself in the ground. In the minutes to come, she would sit there and watch it dry, drool almost hanging from her lip. She studied the what she had inscribed and her brows narrowed to a point. Again the ashy mare began to scribble elaborate markings in the muck, so much that soon her hooves reached a permanent brick-red color from the bloody clay that she dug into. Coming to the end of her muse, she rested her hoof - putting the cap back on the pen - and reexamined her work. The lyrics were poetic and fast-paced. They strung each other together in her head with old memories from deep in her past. So the poem went; but dare she not read it aloud for fear of returning to those even darker places and emotions...

Regret of the pain I put them through. Regret from the disdain I gave to you. Regret from the poison I leak, that I cannot feel or see, regret that the victim could not be me.

It was a short, simple and satisfying verse, enough expression to ease her mind until the does came out to play. Then she could do a bit of hunting. Deer was always the tastiest and warmest meat. They were faster around here, in the Cursed Lands, they had to be if they wanted to survive past five days old, so the chase was part of the fun. After generously dousing her poem with liquid from the lake, she further obscured the letters with a good stomping to separate all legible pieces from each other. Her mind cleared, she set off to the trails. Turquoise sage and gray needle thorn brush lined the path she took. With her slick onyx whipcord tucked in, she padded down the road, sniffing all around the floor until she hooked her nose to that succulent scent which was a grown female whitetail. Her heart jumped from her chest and the veins under the skin of her breast grew hot. It wasn't long before she spotted the creature. She, the doe, bounded over vast amounts of land with her length yet thin hocks. Her toes splashed black dust into the air and their tracks steadily dotted the trail. When close enough, Lullaby pounced forward to tag her prey. She came down on the doe's back end, hearing a break in the creature's hip bone, she grinned and began to decrease speed but to her luck the doe kept going at a jagged gait. She tried to place her legs on the ground but they just kept falling out from beneath her. No cries of pain left her mouth. She didn't look back. She didn't slow. Not that Lullaby wanted one to come, but wasn't there a buck or a herd of other whitetail near to help her? What was she doing way out here all alone anyway? For a moment, Lullaby feared the worst; that this doe was sickly and she broke from, or was cast out of her own herd because of her condition. No, she thought, She's healthy. I can smell it.

"You've got to be shitting me," The mare gasped and summoned up her strength to finish off the hunt. Ahead was nothing but a maze of trees that Lullaby was not about to let her dinner wander off in. Just a few more seconds and the cancer she transferred to the doe's body would manifest. They reached the forest boundary and as she predicted the doe gave a few violent jerks then slowed, and finally collapsed. Lullaby approached halfheartedly. Her smoldering red globes cooled to a warm blue, tinged chocolate brown in the center. Her boa outstretched and inhaled the doe's pleasant aroma of ground bark and fresh moss, mixed with a unique coat scent. She salivated like a dog and prier to her gripping the thing between her pearly whites, she spooked when it started to squirm again. It was a pathetic scene. She could hear its crumbled hip bones mixing up like a god damn milkshake in there. The eye of the doe blinked back tears, her face was masked in dust. "I'm so sor-." she started to say but before she finished she let her hooves smash between the doe's ears; the deed was done. Carefully, she lifted the creature to her mouth and proceeded to drag it back to camp besides the lake to feast. The spot where Lullaby's mouth met the doe's hair had already turned black with cancerous cells but it stopped as soon as blood coagulated. Collapsing the body like a fold-able chair near the shore, she tore into it's still quivering, raw flesh.

Her eyes had narrowed to heavy slits. The trace-like state overwhelmed her system once more. She peeled back tendon and fat to reach the rib cage of her meal and uncover the heart. She never really favored the to eat it, but staring at the mass of meat that once pumped a creature to life for who knows how many years, without stopping, somehow fascinated her. She nosed it, gave it a lick, then rolled it out of the caress and right up to the toes of someone else...

"Well hello, how can I help you?" She was startled to an extent, any other horse would have been able to see the stranger mare clear as day when she waltzed right up, but Lullaby had been so caught up in her meal, she had hardly noticed anything else but the fact that her hunger pains were now distinguished. But she was also angered slightly, and her twisted harks went straight back. Her eyes, flashed electric blue and shown brightly, and her stare was uncanny. The opposing mare wasn't really doing anything but standing there, so Lullaby decided to give her a chance to speak before she backed her far away. It was rude to disturb someone while they were eating, was it not? So, she didn't stop, but chewed slow to hear her new company speak. She had no reason to poison anyone now that she had been fed, she she looked up every so often from her carcass to eye the mare excitedly. The mare was tall and not terribly built, she was pale skinned as well, and definitely not a mutt breed. Lullaby smoothed her tongue over her bloodied lips and gestured to smell the mare, but carefully, so as not to touch and cause an unintended diseased feeling to occur in the new fae from Lullaby's ghastly power.

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Words: 1,190 ish. Give or take a few.
Muse: Very good.
Notes: Sweet, thanks for replying:)