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Private  - man on the silver mountain

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Kassandra
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#1

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]

kassandra,










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Teiran
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#2

"What have we got here?"

Teiran's voice didn't carry the inflection of curiosity one might have expected, but she was not curious, shocked or surprised. There was no time for such things because if she couldn't get this equine on their feet the only thing they would get is dead. Quickly.

The rose-hued warrior had been doing her usual patrols, the sprawling expanse of the desert ever the same looking and yet always different. Gilded, blinding, sweltering, but the dunes shifted constantly beneath one's feet and the touch of the wind. How many others, like this equine here, had gotten lost? How many were not lucky enough to be found. Teiran had lived in Solterra all her life, and survival of the desert, survival of all things, was as ingrained in her as the feeling of sand gritting against her skin.

"Hello. Come on, get up," she said. Her tone was not exactly gently prodding, given the condition of the black coated stranger. It was more clinical, more business-like. If this situation was as serious as it looked then there was no time for niceties in Teiran's book. Then again, she didn't really employ niceties in everyday conversation anyway.

As her sage green eyes moved over the other, it was difficult to say if she knew them. She certainly did not recognize the dog laying dismally across their face. Very few living in Solterra had such a dark coloring to their skin as the heat it drew was no less than stifling at best. And as she waited for some sign of life, Teiran considered the best plan of action to take. Clearely the priority was to get them both out of the sun, and to get the newcomer's body temperature down.

As she stood there, eyes burning holes like the sun burns the sands, Teiran couldn't help but to think about the disruption of her schedule which she lived, breathed and worked by. Saving lives had not been on the agenda today.

"Speaking."


@Kassandra









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