[AW] a midsummer night's dream

[Pavetta]

p a v e t t a - - - I am from more universes than you could dream of. There was a time when Pavetta might have been able to dream of such a thing. Years ago when she was a lonely girl in the mountains, dreaming of her mysterious father and of the adventures they might have journeyed on together, the worlds they might have seen, the things he could have taught her. The dreaming had went away, though, faded and withered like dry grass in the heat of summer. Life wasn’t for dreamers, it was for survivors. Pavetta had learned that lesson early on. Pavetta tensed slightly as the black unicorn moved closer and reached out to her cheek, tail lashing like a panther about to pounce. She held her breath as the paint was wiped away, the glitter spiraling to the forest floor like rain. “Why here then, of all universes?” she asked, releasing her breath in a sigh of relief. The paint was gone and her cheeks felt cleansed, as if the masquerade mask had been tossed away for the first time since she had arrived in Novus. What kind of unicorn are you? Pavetta paused, uncertain and reluctant to answer, wondering how the evening took such a strange, bewildering turn. Who am I? She was the girl from the mountaintop, the young bride meeting her husband for the first time, the widowed girl in the swamp with shorn hair and wild, hungry eyes. She recalled when the priestesses abandoned her for four nights in the black forest in a last effort to bring forth her dormant magic in dire life or death circumstances. Alone in the forest at night: a certain death sentence for one without magic to aid them in their fight for survival against the monsters and creatures that stalked in the shadows, hungry for blood. She remembered the tears, crying, pleading, pounding on the fortress door, screaming, let me back in. They did not. Her magic never surfaced, remaining dormant as ever, but she survived. After that the priestesses packed her off down the mountain to marry a lord she had never met. She remembered the dark initiation ritual into her husband’s clan, the feeling of rage and helplessness as the sizzling red-hot silver bar was pierced through her nostrils (a mark of ownership), the stench of blood on her skin; the way she was bathed and hair braided and woven, paraded before the men like a cow at auction. Anger, hate, bitterness at the lack of choice, of freedom in her life—black, boiling emotions that both fueled her survival and frightened her. And she survived that too. Thrived, even. What kind of unicorn are you? “I don’t know...yet,” she said at last. An answer that conveyed uncertainty and self-doubt. But her voice was strangely calm and her gaze steely as she met the black woman’s expecting eyes. “I could be many things. I have been many things." a pearl in pigshit, a diamond on the finger of a rotting corpse, creature in whom nothing, but nothing, remains of an elven woman ---

@Calliope