Desreal: the log saw something that night -- Herne.

As she waited, not entirely counting on a reply, her milk teeth grasped an evergreen sprig. She tasted evergreen sap on her tongue, a wintry taste that she found unpalatable and annoying at such a tender age as to prefer the flow of milk yet to that of oat and leaf. To empty her mouth of the evergreen taste, she scooped up a tiny mouthful of loam and chewed the soil until an ear flicked his way at his words. She laughed, “Does a dream of a shadow of a thought bleed? Can it reek of sweat and travel too?” she queried, seizing delightfully upon this talk of cynic and child.

She tasted the air, tasted his scent as animals do, and came to flank him in the green-dark of the glade. “You should cool your heels in the river, it might do you some good and cleanse that blood off your fur.” she suggests quietly, nose low to the ground as she sniffs and roots about, uncovering stones and ants that roll and scurry from her. Uncaring of custom - she likened herself to little more than a savage, a tree-raised thing that knew nothing of a horse’s decorum, the instinct her quieted and unafraid of him -, she shouldered against him and nipped at the shadowed crook of his knee.

Michabou rolled her eyes up at him and smiled; “If you are and I must be, then I am a mound of moss, a rolling stone, a monster made of mud!” at the last, her voice piped high and clear as a bird’s, mimicking the rapturous cry of raptor at the pinnacle of the hunt as prey is seized in wicked curving talon. Her child’s face clouded in thought and the nuances of her voice became husky and low as she said in all seriousness, “If you are the dream of a shadow of a thought, then I am the consequence of a night best forgot.”