Vicious. Formed from iron and magma, beneath the pressure of the earth, coal was shaped and stripped by the many beings that lingered. As if in a dream, the ghosts of megalodons and brontosaurus passed on by; their frames slightly transparent on the breeze. From small corner of the world, some unacknowledged and unguarded portal, a demon was let loose upon the earth. Or perhaps not demon, but something incarnal and not quite true.
From the blackwoods came the monochrome mare. Black and white slid from between two trees, a shadow touched by snow, until it came to rest upon the grass at the edge of the commons. Two blue eyes; like the innards of a glacier, analysed the field with some hot viciousness stored in her heart.
What was the reason for this viciousness? What was the thing that filled her mouth with the taste of blood and her nostrils with the scent of charring muscle. Her eyes; sharp as blades, seemed to have been formed like this.
She had had parents once, or so the legend went.
She had had a mother once, or so the rumours go.
Salka was the mare’s name, but it was not the only one that she had sported. She had had a role in a far-off land, and there had been referred to by My Lady, La Belle Dame sans Merci, and many others. Far more had been spoken in her absence than in her company.
But Salka was the name her mother had given her, that blue-black hide thriving and pulsing with the last throes of pregnancy. Blood flowing from her dam’s nostril, dripping onto the white snow on which the birth had taken place. Spring refused, steadfast, to creep forward that year, and old mother Dagmar was far away from the herd, buried into a snow heap to hide from the predators that starved so. How easy it would be for them to rid the world of Salka in those first few hours, pink-white fetlocks staining the snow with a path that led straight to a meal.
Dagmar had known that death would take one of them anyway, as the old story goes. As the form of a black mare encroached between the trees; Dagmar had let her life slip away with her daughter’s name as the last thing on her lips.
Now, that same filly was a mare who had no mother at all. Great hands had formed and molded her beyond the reach that any nature could provide, and cruelty was justified by no backstory. Things seemed always to be slightly dead in her presence, her proximity making the air freeze and leech of oxygen. Her eyes fixated in a moment, cut one into pieces. Now, she stood on the green of the Commons in a foreign land, searching for Something and Nothing. The figure blended closely into trees even so; her white coat marked with black streaks like boulders and trees across her facade.
She stepped forward, her head held high as she considered what the future beheld her.