life's but a walking shadow
It’s cool in the mountain foothills, and Indra leans into the wind as she picks her way up the stony path, placing her hooves carefully. Down among the swamps and fields of Terrastella, autumn had still been little more than a nip of chill against the cheek, a brush of frost over the fields at sunrise—but here, beneath the long shadow of Veneror’s peak, winter’s grip is already tightening, stripping the leaves from the trees and scaling the mountain ponds with ice.
The unicorn snorts, her breath steaming white in the air before her. She’d offered to help the aged Ilati shaman by gathering blue flowers from the highlands, but his description had been vague, and the season hardly promising. A glance over the landscape reveals more of the same: brown earth, dense clusters of pines, a few lingering purple streaks of fireweed and campion as a last relic of summer. No blue, as far as she can see; even the sky lurks behind a murky screen of clouds.
But her eye is drawn by something else: a line of horses angling toward the base of Veneror itself, the crowd swelling like a tide against the rocky slopes. Curious, she adjusts her own course, the blue flowers shrinking in her mind as she quickens her pace, and it isn’t long before she intercepts the growing herd. Watching, listening, she falls in among them.
There is a nervous energy to them—eager, purposeful, and a little afraid. By their conversation she gleans they hail from all four of the courts, and she sharpens her attention, knowing there has been strife across the land. There is talk of the gods, and the regimes, and the nature of things to come.
And then they are all spilling into a clearing, and Indra can see up ahead that Florentine and the other court leaders are pushing their way through a narrow break in the wood. The last of the regime members slips through, and the trees close, as if no path had ever been. There is no clap of thunder, no bursting light, no sign from the gods (and Indra, for one, is rather skeptical of any gods)—nothing at all but for the rest of them to wait, uncertain, outside the grove.
Indra turns to her nearest neighbor, a speckled white mare with small, delicate wings spreading behind her ears. “What do you expect is going on in there?” she asks, tipping her horn toward the sealed meeting. She lets a smile creep over her mouth as she thinks of the political nightmare about to unfold, with all of the clashing regimes forced suddenly into one small space. “I can’t imagine it will be long before a fight breaks out.”
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@Araxes @Random Events it's a garbage post sorry but hiiiii :)
