The street urchins of Solterra are hardy and mischievous. They are the sort of children that grow up wild and fearless, scrambling up canyon walls like little mountain goats in the morning and pilfering trinkets from the markets in the evening. Alone they are a nuisance. Working together, they are truly something to be feared. Their greatest strength, aside from numbers, is that they know the city even better than Eik and his endlessly wandering legs, for every street child must be capable of disappearing when trouble comes knocking.
Today they ought to be inside keeping warm, which means, of course, they are not.
He cannot blame them. Watching the children test the snow, Eik is reminded of the first time he had seen the Mors. Never in his life had he seen a desert- sand as far as the eye could see, and then some. He dug at it with his hooves like a dog who wants to bury a bone, although at the time he had nothing to give up to the sands.
(The giving would come later, later, in blood and hope and soul-- but that story has not yet written itself)
He turns silently from the slowly growing crowd and begins to continue on his way when-- splat!-- an errant snowball misses its (very much adult) buckskin target and hits the emissary in the butt. Eik turns his head and blinks in dumb surprise when another flies past his face, nearly smacking him in the nose.
"Hey," he growls angrily. It is difficult to keep a straight face as the pinto child freezes with a guilty expression, wide eyes looking for a place to run and hide. Eik stares him down with ears pinned to his skull, buying time as he subtly and hastily shapes a lumpy ball of snow at his feet. "Your aim is horrible." His snowball breaks into clumps mid-flight and has the unintentional effect of showering not just the pied colt but his friends next to him.
Well shit. The rapidly growing gang of children sets their sights on the grey, who scrambles behind a wall for cover as he hastily packs more snowballs. They have set off some sort of war of child versus adult, and the adults are terribly outnumbered. The colorful buckskin is taking shot after shot, and a small pack of kids have broken off to flank Eik. "C'mon, help us out," he encourages (in his own, gentle way) the grown ups around them. "I'm rubbish at this," he mutters to himself as another of his projectiles falls to pieces mid-flight. His aim is golden, but his snowballs are pathetic.
I have let myself go where the dust
E I K
Has the color of nothing
art by Footybandit
@Acton and any!
Time makes fools of us all
