The mist clung to her coat like the breath of something long dead and dreaming.
She emerged into the clearing with hooves that made no sound, as if the earth itself recoiled from her touch. Before her, the waterfall bellowed with unnatural fury, not a cascade but a gaping wound in the world, a churning maw that swallowed light and sanity alike. The water effervesced in rhythms too precise to be random. Too ancient to be understood.
She made no sound. She had no voice to give.
And yet something in the hush around her seemed listening.
The trees bowed away from her path, old bark warped and weeping sap. They were barren. The stones lining the water bore markings not carved by mortal hands or hooves - spirals and sigils written in water, symbols that felt like they had always been there, waiting. Moss weaved itself in coils that mirrored the fog erupting from her nostrils, hot against the cold. The scent of wet stone and decay clung to the air, thick with the memory of rituals no living thing should recall.
A raven, dark like her, shrieked high above - harsh, warbling, wrong - and the sharpness of its call noise fractured the silence like a mirror under frost.
Shivering, she did not look up. She simply walked forward, her hooves meeting the edge of the pool where rime had begun to take hold. The roaring of the waterfall did not grow louder.
It deepened.
Somewhere beneath the thunder of it all, something answered.
🌑 strange 🌑
devil's backbone.