[P] It's not an adventure story, is it?

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

This world is fierce.
 
The fortress’ parapets had met violent ends. Stone had been blown apart and pieces lay scattered all around. Buildings are charred skeletons of what they once were. Even the grasses are the rough and sharp ends of spears. This land remembers war and it will not forget it.
 
It sees to it that the travellers will remember too.
 
Should there not been a moment of fear? A sliver of unease trickling down her spine at the hostility this land hisses at them? Clouds of dusty air, red and angry, blow through Florentine’s window and back into Novus. She watches the dust swirl as if suddenly worried by the new world. It clumped together, span and was blown from sight by Verenor’s mighty breath.
 
When the gilt girl looks back, Raymond is stood over a small step. Curiosity has her moving to him. Here, Florentine is but a trinket of gold drifting across a barren wasteland of dust and ravaging time. The ground falls away at her hooves. It falls a foot deep and in its bed, grasses grow, long and wild. From a distance, Florentine might have never known the trench lay here.
 
Fear became a sweet taste upon the air as she follows the blood-red stallion’s gaze. Ah, she sees it now, more indents in the grass, just the same as theirs. They are large and patterned; a monster’s step.
 
With a breath and a boldness she should not possess, Florentine slowly descends into the imprint, her muzzle low. The grasses do not smell as grasses should, they are bitter and coarse – as if they remember blood and grief and terror. Angry stems of rough grasses, sharp and resistant, scratch at her face - but when has Florentine ever easily relented?
 
Above the smell of sand and acidic, old grass, there is something different. Oh it is rust and it is musty and it is gone as fast as she first smells it. This world wants it’s secrets kept tight and with a sigh Florentine lifts her head to watch Raymond as he speaks.
 
He is not studying her, nor the print she stands within, but stares down the hillside. Obediently Florentine turns to follow his gaze. The meadow falls away in a rolling descent towards the broken ramparts and there she too sees the deep gouges. It was not war that brought ruin here, but a violent monster, in whose footprint she stands.
 
Her chin lifts, her gaze rising into the clouds of crimson dust. She cannot see a sun, nor a moon, there is nothing but misting red. The girl waits for a shadow to loom from the dark and for a moment feels the absence of a black unicorn.
 
A sudden gust of wind has her turning; A twist of fate bringing a hoof to chink against something old. The flower girl pauses, her eyes lowering to a metal that gleams, unnatural and keen. Oh it is so keen to be found!  Her muzzle brushes it and that smell of rust and dusty-time returns.
 
“Raymond…” The time traveller whispers for, from the dirt, she prizes a delicate, flat-linked band of tarnished silver. A gem falls with it, dirty and old. A crack, deep and ugly, rends the gem in two.
 
Slowly the collar lifts to dangle between the girl and the crimson warrior, before she pushes it to him. There are no words, for what could be said at a moment like this? Wild, seized by ragged hope, Florentine turns from the collar and looks for more.
 
But what else would be found after a thousand years? Again the Rift had left them a clue and it is this: there is more to come, for good and for bad.

@Raymond

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world