’Let us sing you a song our sweet nesrine’, the mare shifts her head in the opposite direction of the whispering voices, that tease and wrap around her like a vice only she could hear and feel.
’Silver haired and crooked hearted, the little girl strolled on, her head held high and eyes closed for the world dare not see; or was it she who dared not see the world? Step by step she left her lands, the last of her own, with eyes that burned of golden fire’, they had begun to sing with as much innocence as a child, taking on the voice Nesrine knew to be dead and gone; the dead don’t talk, right?
“Shut up, shut up,” Nesrine grits at them, tossing her head into a passing tree that painfully scrapes along her offered cheek with his rough bark but for the moment she could breath, the throbbing easing the taunting haunts that threaten to consume her with every heaving breath from her lungs. She was tired, sleepless nights and endless wandering would do that to a nomad, but it was those darn voices faults; they never shut up. More persistent with her solitude of life.
She staggers away through the forest, her head throbbing from the force of her purposeful collision to wander aimlessly through the brush and away from the hustle and bustle happening beyond her in the large fields. Peace and quiet, that’s what she wanted; no, needed. Poor little witch, a whisper whips past her, one she huffs at because she’d never truly get peace, they were here too, and overly chatty today.
Yet they also guide her subconsciously, for the voices weren’t just in her head but in the earth she walks and steers to keep on level ground that becomes a winding path to somewhere, and in the air as a cooling breeze that whips up to pull and tug her in the direction of the beach where she’d washed ashore a long while ago.
There’s a body.
At first Nesrine thought the voices were playing tricks on her again, or perhaps it was the bloody wound that was beginning to dry atop her face; either way there was something large laying on the usually pristine white sands, and it wasn’t moving. Some would have kept their distance, but not Nesrine, they urged her closer with excited chattering blocking out all other noises while she leaned over the mare barely breathing on the beach, golden brown eyes taking in the open wounds for a brief calculating second.
“Hey,” she nudges the other mare, cautious eyes watching the way she’d come for any sign she’d been followed after, but usually the voices would tell her so. Again Nesrine nudged at the broken body on the sand, who looked the same way Nes did herself when first arriving, bringing forth a more persistent nudge as fear of having another body in her consciousness suddenly weighed heavily on her slender shoulders.
’Your fault, your fault she’s dead’, they sing