life’s but a walking shadow
It’s an easy smile that rides the stranger’s lips, a friendly carelessness that colors his voice, and for a moment Indra almost envies the way in which he seems to be of this place, filling it with his presence even as he suggests the stay is temporary. Belonging is a thing she has never seen much use for and seldom thought to miss, but watching this stallion, his effortless way of holding himself, she wishes that she, too, could be relaxed and luminous and unconcerned.
But that would be a fool’s assessment, to blink before Lysander’s light and miss the darkness at his heels. Indra is many things, but not foolish, most of the time, and she has long since learned how to look, how to listen. She knows nothing of Lysander’s past, here or elsewhere, but she feels the edge to the silence that follows his words, like static in the air before a storm. She glances at him sharply, reassessing.
“No,” she says, and the word might be a response to either of his not-quite-questions. Her gaze drifts to the sea churning far below, the white foam glazed red in the sunset, and after a moment she adds, “There are things about this place that seem—familiar to me.” She watches the breakers in their rise and fall against against the rocky shore, the troughs of shine and shadow, and she wonders if it is simply the nature of all oceans, to call to memory and soul.
Then a smile touches the corners of her own mouth, small and wry, and she shakes her mane, revealing the pale leather strip woven close along her nape, studded with tiny pearls—and three thin, curved teeth. “I do not carry the sea in my veins,” she says quietly, “but once, long ago, I knew creatures who did. They are beautiful, and they sing the most beautiful songs, and they bring ruin to those who do not know them for what they are.”
Her gaze returns to the stallion, and she allows herself a moment to admire the fine picture they must make, standing opposite one another, burnished by the sun. There is a curious symmetry to them, gleaming like a pair of coins: one silver, the other copper-gold, and made all the more striking by the green of his eyes, the red of her hair, his antlers spreading before the needle point of her horn.
“But you seem to know what it is you’re looking for,” she says, more mildly. “Have you encountered many dangers in this place?”
i n d r a
@Lysander
