The stick looks something like a sword, long and straight and somewhat flat, one end wide and the other jagged and pointed. She can see where it broke away from the tree, and she brushes the splinters away lovingly when she picks it up and shakes away the frost. 

The wood is still somewhat damp, heavy in her grasp as she raises it over her head. It makes a whistling sound as she swings it, around and around, before letting it crash down upon a rotting log. The stump splinters, moss and mushrooms caving in around the hole her attack leaves. Decay and laughter fill the air, and Maret spins away, stabbing her sword at an invisible enemy.

Through the woods she races, feinting and parrying and lunging and dodging. Her wooden weapon is a whirl of movement all around her, slashing and stabbing and knocking aside every bush and vine that dares stand in her way. And in her mind she is untouchable, unstoppable, even as her heart stutters and she trips and skins one knee. Because as soon as she falls she’s back up again, twirling through the trees, running alongside the river -

She skids to a stop, breathless, when she comes across the antlered girl. Her coat is dark, almost as dark as the shadows in the woods, but it’s blue instead of green. Maret watches her as she watches the river, and it’s not until she pockets the stone from the shores that she steps boldly forward. 

“Are you stealing that?”

Her voice is lilting, too sweet to be as accusatory as it is. There’s a glimmer in the girl’s half-blue eyes, as she lifts her stick-sword up and points it at the mare. The tip of it hovers in the air, traveling in a miniature circle like it’s tracing the moon that graces the the girl’s brow. 

Her lips quirk into an almost-smile.

“Delumine doesn’t take kindly to thieves, you know.” Does she notice the way her voice wavers, like the trembling of the earth before an earthquake? Her heart flutters inside of her chest, skipping one, two, three beats before settling back into rhythm. The girl hardly notices, brandishing her makeshift weapon. 



"Speaking."
@vaeri

If she notices the way her voice trembles or her heart stutters, it doesn’t show. Even when her heart is leaping into her throat like it can’t bear to be trapped within her ribs any longer she is swallowing it back down, like she doesn’t know what it’s like to be any less fierce than a she-wolf fighting for the right to live.

Her fathers were always telling her to slow down; the doctors had told her she needed to take more breaks than the other children when playing.

But Maret was more stubborn than she allowed them to believe. And she would not slow down, not when all the forest was begging to be explored, not when monsters danced in the shadows and girls from a foreign city found a part of Delumine they thought worth noticing.

"Home," she echoes her, and lets the tip of her stick-sword drop an inch. "And where is home, for you?" There was a glint in her mismatched eyes, and one word alone was enough to distract her yet again.

She was always getting distracted. And maybe that was why her heart shuddered so painfully then, like it was trying to remind her to be something other than lost.

"Hmmm."

She drags the word out slowly, snapping her pretend sword back up until it was angled at the dark skinned throat. Then she begins to circle, slowly, deliberately, around her, a smirk tugging at the corners of her own dark lips. "You don’t seem very sorry for your actions," she deliberated aloud, "nor have you left us any gifts in exchange for the prized rock you’re taking from us."

She completes a full circle, and stops again when she’s facing the girl head on. Her grin widens.

"For that, I think there is only one proper punishment: death."

And she says it with all the authority of the forest, as if she wasn’t just a yearling holding up a tree branch that would likely shatter the instant she tried to use it as anything else.

She lets the word hang in the air like an omen, liking the way it sounds echoing back off the shadows and the soil. And she watches the girl's face closely, gauging her, judging her silently, before her smile turns almost-sweet again, like it had never once crossed her mind to be like any other monster. "Unless, of course, you can change my mind?"



"Speaking."
@vaeri