How many days out under the baking sun had they wandered? How many hours lost to the vicious, unrelenting, golden orb in the sky, wasted moments of life dissipating like heatwaves rising from the desert floor? It felt like eons, time immemorial, massive units of space and whatever fuzzy substance made up the timestream, even longer than any god could put a finger on and name. Days bled into weeks bled into fragments, sharp, splintering pieces of whatever remained of her miserable, shattered life.

Once, Kassandra had lived a royal, if sheltered, life, at the top of a secluded tower hewn from solid moonstone; a fitting coffin for a beautiful mare dyed in the pattern of the deep winter’s night. The bars on the windows were silver, which matched the sconces and the hinges and locks on the doors; sapphires the size of pumpkins embedded the ceilings and the floor was covered in the softest pelts from the rarest animals in all the kingdoms of Furae. She had servants which came to her at predetermined times of the day, bringing food, or teaching lessons, or carting away the morning’s waste. They never truly spoke to her, and Kassandra always had the feeling they were a bit frightened of her.

She spent her days and her nights, the crown jewel of the Folly Tower, plagued by boredom, loneliness, and the frequent horrific visions thrust upon her by the gods. Occasionally her uncle, the king, would pay her a visit, requesting a tale of the future, and always leaving disappointed and slightly angrier each time. It seemed that was all Kassandra was good for— never reaching satisfactions, and enraging those who relied on her.

So it was no wonder when, in the end, Uncle Syroc came to her door, driven to madness by her unending failures, and all Kassandra could do was run away while her home and everything she had ever known was decimated behind her.

Gone was the beautiful mare with the pelt graced by stars; gone was the lustrous silverite hair and the eyes with the soft glow of the moon at midnight. Now here was a bedraggled, shaggy mess, of faded pelt and knobby bone and a mane with patches of hair falling to the ground like snow. Gone were the lessons of arithmetic, astronomy, and history; all that remained was the knowledge of foreward motion, of hocks scraped raw and bloody by a constant, onward trudging through abrasive sand. What little consciousness remained had been shattered by a last, final vision, just when she’d thought she was free, just when she thought survival was her biggest concern… an equine fashioned out of living stone, and the one clad in the layers of silken night. More harbingers of doom? Most likely.

Kassandra did not know how much longer she could continue, especially not now that the weight of her curse was placed back upon her trembling shoulders. Her maw was dyed near black with dried blood, the result of her companion, Oculos, hunting jackrabbits and roadrunners and fat desert grouse and delivering her the blood to drink from, the salty liquid sustaining her for some time. He strode alongside her, now, slightly bonier and not quite as fluffy, but definitely in better condition than his partner.

So focused on his worries was Oculus that he didn’t notice that he had traveled many feet ahead by himself. He whirled almost immediately, seeing Kassandra fallen in the dust, body heaving against the taupe-brown dirt as the sand picked up in the late-evening wind drifted against her mass. Oculos was at her side in a second, tongue lapping awkwardly at her face— no easy task for a canine with such a profound snout.

Her breathing was growing shallower. The connection beneath them was growing dimmer. Oculos laid aside the skull of his best friend, his head resting gently across her cheekbone, waiting hopelessly for the spring stars to rise.


words 658
comments here she is, fresh out the ivory tower, waiting for her knight in shining armor~
tags @[Tieran]