Herbalists' Cache lamb to the slaughter

I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death –
 
The serpent speaks from the dark; jowls whetted and gluttonous as it sharpens its teeth upon the perversion of its sadistic ruminations, fangs caressing the cusp of its lip for it pines of the suppleness of flesh.  His words are like a razor blade wicking against the lobe of her ear, it bites as much as it offers a honeyed, inebriating tenor of pleasure – a lotharios sweet, comforting kiss which lulls the senses just before the knife slices against the tenuous throat.  There was something palpably off about him; the way his marbled, mountainous form harbored glints of moonlight upon the cavernous, virile muscle strung across his bodice, to the viperish twinkle that pooled upon his viridian lenses like poison.  For once in her life – the entirety of her mostly comfortable, tended existence, which instilled such a perilous value of invincibility – her heart murmured a disquieted, unnerved song.  She has paused, somehow enraptured into stillness by the very venomous tongue which sought to summon her – she is still because she is experiencing a very raw, new emotion.  She is still because she is fearful.

“You do not rule me,” she hisses – though she is scared, it is not yet enough to stifle the fires of her pride – her vanity – that emboldens her.  The inferno of rage which greedily feasts upon her displeasure at being ordered by this flea-ravaged vagrant of a man.  Her gaze burns under her brows – sharp, deadly – the skin of her muzzle knitting into deep crevasses as her eyebrows pull downward with a caustic display of fury.  Despite such emblazoned, unflinching vibrato, however, the cruel irony was that she could not muster a thread of strength to will her limbs into movement.  She is nearly alike him, stone – though her form is not steeled in such the confident, predacious manner as his.  On the outside, she may have appeared to have been an unphased, stoic monument of rebuttal: but beneath, her soul trembled.  The silence of the beatific forest seemed deafening; even the unmoving, lush verdure, untouched by acrid winds, shuddered in her eardrums.  Her pulse raced, blood hastening through her veins with such urgency it began to form a cacophonous ensemble of hoofbeats.  Her breath, already labored, spilled into the chilled air like smoke.  There was no escape.  No prince would arrive in time to save this despairing damsel.

–  and Hades was following with him.