[AW] the heart of the sun

[Shrike]

like a fresh cut flower promises sure to wither up Shrike has long fought for places that were not her home. Home had long ceased being a physical place, a patch of land to return to again and again; home was Calliope her shield-sister, home was justice, home was righteousness. She was still looking for those things here, but she does not feel as far away as she first had. There was something terribly grounding about the taste of blood in your mouth. The medicine hat wrinkled her nose at the other mare’s response, casting a final glance at the stranger’s reflection in the tepid water before meeting the real thing. “The people would never abandon this city?” Another horse might have carried derision in their tone, but Shrike’s was flatly curious. She has met many peoples, many tribes, in her worlds and years of wandering, but none of them had built cities of stone like a false canyon hollowed by caves. She wondered if it had been built by magic, but the thought only makes her ache for the loss of her own. “I am,” she answered, almost amused, but at the following question she turned her gaze away from those piercing teal eyes. As she had many times in the past days, she ran her eyes over the structures both ruined and whole, over the few horses who battled the sun, the heat, the bone-dry wind that left grit in your teeth. It was not a question she had the full answer to, and her pale lips pulled down at the corner. “I had little choice in the matter,” she said, something wry in her voice. “I woke not far outside the city. I am no stranger to deserts, but I dared not walk this one not knowing how far it went.” Shrike was not meant to die between dunes, her bones sun-bleached and swallowed by sands. Even by the time she learned of other courts in Novus (a patchwork map in her mind), there was little she could do. It was full summer in a foreign landscape to which she had no guide, and so Shrike was stranded here in this ruined city. Home, she thought again, and pictured a black unicorn with white markings tracing lightning down her side. Shrike sighed and shifted her weight, once more assessing the younger mare. She reminded the paint of one of the rangy, fierce coyotes in the desert of her youth: small but tenacious, a gleaming intensity in her gaze. She was not sorry she’d wound up fighting for her side. “Would you recommend I stay?” she asked, and her smile then was the closest she’d come to laughing in a long time. @Teiran SHRIKE