[AW] the heart of the sun

[Shrike]

like a fresh cut flower promises sure to wither up Shrike has lost count of the number of days since the attack on the city because they have all been the same: dog-hot, bone-weary, bloodstained. It is not the first of those kinds of days that she has seen, and it is not the first time she has walked in a place wearing the strange kind of anonymity that comes from bleeding for it while still a stranger. More than the bloodshed, more than the fact of the uprising, it is the architecture of the place that she finds strange. Until she woke in this desert (woke with the memory of hot, wet blood in a weeping smile across her own throat) she had never seen a wall. She had arrived only the morning before the attack (uprising, she has heard, but she does not know enough of the sides to consider it truth), and had taken uneasy shelter within the shade of the city. That night, when the first sounds of it reached her (and oh, no matter how strange the world, the sounds were always the same) she intended only to stay hidden. They were not her people, and her magic was gone: there was no bear sleeping uneasy in her bones, no whisper from the rock of this place, no promise that it would move for her. When a painted, mad-eyed desert beast came shrieking like a demon into her alcove her choice was made for her. If nothing else there was this: Shrike’s muscles remembered how to fight. And now it was done. She walked like a ghost with the rest of the city’s dazed survivors, offering little, listening much. She knew there was little to separate her from their suspicion: she, too, had just risen from the desert, unknown, the memory of death in her smile, in her eyes. So she expects the expression, canny and assessing, that meets her over the chipped stone of the fountain’s border. She does not let her gaze linger long on the figure, only enough to mark her healing wounds and her strange collar (it is not the first of those she has seen in her time here, but she has not seen many). Nor does the paint offer a greeting; all resources were precious in the desert, even speech. Shrike only nods tightly and drops her head to drink. Not too much, only enough to beat down the dry dust of her throat. Even a belly full of water is a weakness in a place like this. When she does lift her head, muzzle still dripping, it is to settle her frank gaze on the other mare’s. She might have been content to still say nothing at all, but there is a part of her, faint as a memory, that craves companionship. A word simply spoken, not something growled or spit or screamed. “What happens if these run dry?” @Teiran here have a terrible phone post written from an airplane! SHRIKE