Meadow

He emerged from the sea on a dark, eerily quiet morning, the snow drifting down in shadowy, silent swathes nipping at his damp-darkened hide where it touched him, and of life beyond this slush-cold beach he couldn’t guess- the muffling thickness of the snow made the only sounds the echoing creaks and cracks of distant branches giving way beneath its weight. He stood a moment past the thick, sluggish surf, steaming and heaving dragons breath clouds from his black mouth as he pondered where to go from here. From the tide of the slow-churning sea he’d witnessed dark shapes stirring in the distant gloom of the land, but what they were, he couldn’t say in this alien place. An unknown quantity; a risk, as like to be hounds as horses, whose snapping jaws sought to see his redness run redder with spilt blood- or to be horses, he thought ponderously, who bore hounds’ teeth behind their mirror masks.

Of course, he could return to the sea- and likely never leave it again, for his thin-tempered flesh wasn’t made for that icy black water, his lean limbs weary from it, and so he shook crystals of ice from the vicious red of his mane and began to stretch his numb legs inland.

They were beginning to regain feeling by the time he stepped into a different sea- a lagoon of ice-capped grass snarling out of the snow that cracked and stung like broken glass against his ruby shins, stretching off into a yawning open space, caged by winter fog; a dead beast’s massive, bloodless mouth, and he tread its needle-grass fangs and limp-snow tongue lightly as a stag, a violent spot of vital red in this colourless place, void of life.

But he knew better.

He’d seen them, those hazy figures; speckled shades in the mist, drifting in disjointed shapes his salt-stung black eyes could not make sense of. Perhaps they were yet here, watching his bright body from the thickness of the fog. Perhaps they’d fled at his arrival. Perhaps he was below their notice, and they had drifted off without a thought to him. Maybe it was only the eerie mysticism of the struggling sunlight beginning to creep thick golden fingers through that cold night mist ahead of him, but he found himself intrigued enough to call out with his carnyx lullaby of a voice.

“I’ve seen you,” and a muffled echo purred back at him from the fog, as if mocking him. He continued, lower, lulling, luring, his long red neck uncoiling to peer into the haze, “Won’t you come speak with me..?”