life’s but a walking shadow
The wind worries at the red ends of her braid, tugging flyaways loose to lick like flames along her neck. “In some ways,” she concedes; for indeed, how many times can a beach or cliff, a field or sky truly reinvent itself? “But it is often a false likeness.” And oh, she is thinking of the riftlands, too, though she cannot know this golden stranger’s thoughts are such a crooked mirror to her own. Too often, it would seem, the rift could take a reassuring shape to hide the deadly wrongness of it, and for all she knows this place is no exception.
She does not pause to wonder at his word, worlds, or consider whether it is a common thing, for creatures such as themselves to drift across and between them. The riftlands may as well have been a thousand worlds in one; perhaps this place is no different, though she has not seen or felt the shadow of it yet. Could she have guessed, though, at the myriad realms Lysander had walked, playing god and mortal, beast and man, she might have shivered to realize how very little she herself had seen.
And still the familiarity of this landscape hums to her, trembling along her bones. She has been here before, she knows it, certain as she knows her name.
The only question, then, is what wrongness lies in wait for her this time.
His next words startle a laugh from her, low and wry. “Is it a lesson learned,” she asks him, “if you do not heed it?” She sweeps her muzzle toward her right flank, the bare muscle of her neck arching toward him, and the evening light spills across her withers, revealing a trio of delicate white scars reaching up into the root of her mane. “Sometimes the singing,” she continues, turning back to him, “sometimes the teeth, sometimes no more than the glint of an eye. More than once I allowed myself to be drawn... too close, perhaps.”
Strange, to think she had almost forgotten the sound of hoofbeats in the surf, the wild mane tangled with seaweed, those milky eyes shimmering like pearls. There had been a mare, she remembers—a filly, more like, scarcely older than herself, with a voice like the wind through a river canyon and a smile that cut like glass. It feels like a dream, like a different lifetime.
She does not ask what dangers he has met, though she thinks she can guess by the gleam of his green eye that there is a story there, and one she might like to hear some day. But she blinks, and it is nothing more than a final reflection of the sun, slipping swiftly now below the horizon. “We are all dangerous, in our way,” she allows. “Perhaps most of all to ourselves. Would you walk the same path again, knowing how it might end?”
And then it is night, the ocean sighing beneath a last, dwindling smear of violet to the west. “A shame about the song,” she adds after a moment, speaking softly into the dark. “Who knows—maybe they’ll sing one about you one day. What would you do, do you think, to make your name immortal?”
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@Lysander sorry it's sooooo late! <3
