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 Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 7:19 pm
 The mare on the mountain was not having one of her better days. Not that she ever really had what by most standards would qualify as a good day, but there were varying degrees of bad for her. This was not one of her more lucid days of sanity or the semblance of it. On the other hand, neither was it one of her worse days - violent and angry. Instead, she was simply wandering in a dazed, mindless stupor, barely noticing the bits and pieces of death that flitted about in the periphery of her vision. Or perhaps she was drowning in it, and it was flashes of life that she was ignoring. She was of no mind to care either way. On she plodded up the slope.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 7:46 pm
 Runa liked the mountains. They were isolated even during the day--and at night they were fantastically empty. That, and something about the need to exert herself to move up them was refreshing. She didn't know why, and frankly, she didn't care. It made her happy, which was why she was trudging up the mountain like a clockwork soldier. She kept her gaze towards the ground, making sure she wouldn't make a wrong step and fall. That was the last thing the undead mare needed.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 7:59 pm
Going as slow as Atropos was, it was no wonder that steady hoof-beats soon sounded behind her, but it was as though she could not even hear them. Normally, she would have long since sensed and avoided a coming Azrein with its brilliant thread of life and the sudden end where that thread was cut off blazing in her mind. However, in her insensitate state, her conscious mind did not even register that another Azrein was near.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 8:05 pm
Runa's vision was so low and obscured by her long mane that she didn't realize she was advancing on another Azrien until she began passing her. She didn't say a word; she just kept walking with her gaze fixed on the ground in front of her. Her mind instinctively waited for the gasp of surprise when the other Azrien saw her; that was usually the reaction. After all, an undead draft horse was anything but normal.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 8:20 pm
Lost in her own mental world, she did not even really notice the other mare when she was withing sight. Instead, she thought her merely another imagining, or perhaps just another part of the scape that her mind had painted. There were often strange things there, even things that did not fit within her usual life-and-death sight. Admittedly, there was something about this newest imagining that seemed stranger than usual, but she was not curious enough to investigate. It did no good to encourage her delusions, some distant part of her knew this.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 8:25 pm
There was no gasp. No sound of a startled reaction. She paused and lifted her head to look up at the other Azrien. She stared at the white mare who sported rotting flesh and a skull for a head. "Ah," she commented to herself as she resumed her motion. "That explains everything." Runa couldn't find it in her to be even mildly surprised at the other mare's appearance; she'd run out of surprised expressions when she finally calmed down after discovering her reanimation.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 8:34 pm
Atropos paused. Most delusions did not talk. They wailed, moaned, screamed, or sighed, but they did not make calm observations and continue on their way. Slowly, she lifted her head and fixed her empty sockets on the odd delusion. She sensed...nothing. No life, no death, nothing at all. Just a gaping void where something should be.
"...empty," she observed in a dreamy, detached sort of way.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 8:41 pm
"Empty?" Runa's pale eye fixed on the eye sockets again. "... Are you talking about me?" That was a new descriptive. Monster was a common one, as were blood-curdling screams--even just a quiet gasp would suffice the terrified Azrien's need to comment on her freakish, undead existence. But empty? She'd never heard that before.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 8:49 pm
"Empty," she said again, then seemed to lose interest, gazing vaguely around as though trying to figure out what she had been doing. Then, her neck drooped a bit and she started back up the mountain.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 8:55 pm
This mare was calling her empty. "Gee, thanks," Runa said dryly. "That comment is going to do wonders for my low self-esteem. Do I sound empty to you?" Her rhetorical question out, she began grumbling to herself as she walked besides the skull-faced mare. "Can't even get treated like a living thing anymore. No respect these days, none at all... Should've just stayed dead."
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 9:05 pm
Realizing that the delusion...being...emptiness was speaking to her once more, Attie roused enough to focus on her again, giving an oddly good impression of a slow blink for someone without any eyes. "No life. No death. Empty," she explained, wavering a bit between awareness and the odd other-world that her mind was entrenched in.
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Posted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 9:53 pm
"Oh, for Pete's sake," Runa grumbled. She turned her attention to the strange, dazed mare. "I'm not empty, I'm full," she argued. "There's life and death in me. It might not look like it, but there are. There's so much life and death in me, I don't know what to do with it all." Then she went back to her grumbling. "Honestly, never heard of an undead Azrien before... That's such a bad term too. 'Undead'... I didn't undo my death, I came back to life after I died. Reliving Azrien. That sounds much less morbid..."
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Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2012 7:32 pm
"Reanimated," she argued without even really knowing why she was bothering. "You are neither alive nor dying." Ever so slowly, Attie was coming back to herself. Or at least, some part of her mind was, and it was doing its best to drag the rest of her with it. Still, it may be a few minutes more before she became a conversationalist with a personality.
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Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2012 7:49 pm
"Reanimated still uses 're'--meaning that I'm animated for a second time. The first being my original life, this time being my undead life. That's why they call creatures like me 'the living dead,' isn't it?" Runa didn't know why she was arguing with the mare. Maybe it was because, no matter how much the skull-face irritated her with that dazed tone of hers, it was someone to talk to. Since everyone always ran away, it wasn't easy to talk to anyone, let alone argue with them.
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Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2012 5:36 pm
Such a degree of reasoning called for more mental faculties than Attie was currently in possession of, so she dragged her mind a little closer to the surface. "But this second time there is no light in you, and there is no end."
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