“Of course they’ve eaten it.”

The voice pulls Rose halfway out of her delirium. She is curled tightly into a dense patch of foliage, her body a mess of agony, her mind too far away to notice. She had been stealing flowers here and there throughout her whole pregnancy, trying to forget the stallion that had infected her with this parasite, trying to forget that she was pregnant at all. When the labor finally came, Rose had obliterated the entire meadow of them, hoping for — what? To sleep through the birth? To see and feel so many intensely beautiful things that she simply forgot about her condition, and come out the other end with no memory of it?

Or did she hope to fly so high that the fall was not survivable?

The red mare does not sober at the prospect of getting caught — she is too far gone — but it does cause her anxiety. She experiences an intense childlike fear of getting into trouble, but her legs are tied together in knots, and she feels as though an enormous tropical snake is squeezing around her belly. She doesn’t curl her neck to look at her barrel, because she knows she will see an actual snake there, and she is teetering dangerously between awareness of her hallucinations and the belief that what she is experiencing is reality. The strength of her trip is still growing in intensity, and Rose begins to wonder what punishment awaits her for stealing the flowers.

Her fear condenses and gels into something solid enough to move her twisted and leaden limbs. She watches in the dim moonlight as her legs untie themselves from their knots and stretch very oddly, far too long to be her own real legs. She is lifted slowly, so slowly into a standing position, and she wonders if it’s the snake. Is it pulling her into a tree, to finish her off away from other hungry eyes? It must be, because she feels too light to possess all of her own weight, and she hears the snake moving through the leaves behind her. Soft rustling sounds and wet breathing, and —

Again, her legs move of their own accord, powered by her fear-self which seems so separate from her Rose-self and yet has all of the control of their body. She lurches forward, feeling so empty and light and sluggish that certainly the snake must have taken a bite out of her already. She walks as though through honey, unnaturally slow, quiet, deafened by the sweet golden substance, frustrated at her pace and at the same time fascinated by all of the details of the forest that she has time to examine on her journey.

She walks, honey-slow, all the way to the beach and into the ocean.

—

The filly’s movement quiets as her mother fades over the course of several minutes into the trees. Each stride of the red mare takes so long that it’s a miracle she doesn’t lose her balance between footfalls. The filly, who has never known anything else, takes the trail of dripping, glossy black ink behind the mare as a normal occurrence. She bleats for her mother’s retreating figure, wet and cold and shivering and hungry, but the red mare doesn’t hear.

The filly’s eyes never leave the place where her mother disappeared. The ink is still there, coating the leaves Rose brushed against, filling the crescent moon hoofprints she had impressed into the soft soil. It begins to move, and come alive, and the filly becomes frightened. She struggles to stand and crashes twice back onto her rump before becoming so tangled in her own comically long legs that she can’t even get them under her anymore.

The ink flows toward her, reflecting the moonlit jungle on its glossy and unnaturally still surface. It collects and rises to form the body of a small snake, about a foot in length, with mirror-smooth scales and droplet eyes. The filly begins to shriek, instinctively aware that a snake is something to be feared, but her panic only incapacitates her further, and she can’t do anything but thrash. The snake slides silently toward her, and the filly can see in the reflection of its scales the jungle is not safe, it is not beautiful, there are things here with her, she is not alone —

It reaches her, slithering up her foreleg and shoulder and weaving itself into her mane. The filly wrenches about, trying to get it off of her, trying to get away, but it is no use. She knows it is there, holding tight to her, unshakeable.

Her shrieks dissolve into nonsensical babbling. She does not understand language, but she tries anyway, tries to talk to the creature and reason with it somehow and beg for it to let her go. She knows it is not just a snake, or just a hallucination of a snake; she has never experienced reality unaltered, and has no concept of it to compare. Deep in her heart she knows that this is an extension of something bigger, something so huge that she can never escape it because it extends beneath the earth and every step she takes is felt by it below.

The filly collapses, exhausted, front legs tucked beneath her chest and forehead pressed to the earth. Her tiny voice wavers as she prays with gibberish words, pleading, begging, promising, committing, whatever it takes to placate the entity beneath the ground.