life's but a walking shadow
The world was white, and cruel, and cold.
Indra could not say how long she had been wandering the frozen wastes, her breath steaming in the air before her, her flanks matted with ice. Time slipped and swam around her, swallowing days and weeks and months, stretching minutes into years. Still the pale ghost of the sun never seemed to do more than brush the underside of the horizon, a distant gray brightening that scarcely flared before it faded again to night.
Dimly, the unicorn understood that she could not have been here that long, or she’d be dead.
Or maybe the magic, the malice, of this place would not let her die.
She did not know what she had done to anger the rift—if it was anger at all, and not simply the way of things, savage and unrelenting. When the night rose with a hundred impossible colors, shimmering like silk across the tundra sky, she might have thought it was a dream, or death, if she had not been too weary to think at all.
So she walked on, head bowed against the wind, the dark glint of her horn like a setting star as it pierced the veil.
*
On the other side, it is evening, the air damp and warm against her skin, the breeze heavy with brine. Instead of snow underhoof there is weathered rock, solid and reassuring, and the ghostly greens and violets of the aurora have given way to a spectacular red and gold sunset.
Indra sneezes and blinks into the light, pivoting slowly as she stares out over field and cliff and sea. She has grown too accustomed to the whims of the rift to be surprised by much of anything, anymore, and so she does little more than flick an ear toward the cawing of a gull overhead, and start off along the ragged edge of the bluff.
But the coastline seems almost to waver in her vision, blurred by the contours of a landscape she can not quite fully remember and yet cannot shake from her thoughts. There is something familiar about this place, unnervingly so, and that more than the change of scenery causes the hair to prickle along her spine.
She cuts her way north and east, if for no other reason than that the cliffs do so as well. The sun inches lower, and her shadow unspools at her side, and her mane glistens deep and red.
It is less will than instinct, really, that has her leveling her horn at the sound of hoofbeats up the path, for she has seen destruction enough to know that to hesitate is to be lost. But it is only the silhouette of another horse, and the unicorn checks herself, lifting the iron tip to a more genteel height (if only just).
She should say something, she thinks, in an effort to be friendly, but she can no longer recall the last time she had to bother with social pleasantries, and the words lodge in her throat, thick with disuse. For a long moment she merely eyes the stranger, the face half-glowing in the harsh light of the west, its mirror lost to shadow.
"Hello," she says finally, coolly. "This is... a nice place. Do you live here?"
i n d r a
@anyone! sorry it's long and awkward eeeep hehe
