elif
The path slopes downward.
Elif is not afraid - so she tells herself, even as her heart seems to echo louder in the semi-darkness - but even so she pulls a little wind in behind her, a breath of cold, clean air against her cheek like a ghost’s caress. Anyway, it is not a far path; she is only submerged in shadow for a few breaths (she does not care for the feeling, does not like being underground and separated from the sky - like being swallowed up by a snake) before the light is on her hooves, and then her slender forelegs, and then the slopes of her shoulders and her fine-boned face.
It takes her a moment, then, to see him. She must blink back the sunlight, however limited it is in this place, and at first when her eyes make out his shape he is nothing but black.
He was killed by a black pegasus. You need know nothing further.
At once she tenses like a mongoose before a cobra, like a hawk about to stoop. Her thoughts are not thoughts but flashes of gold, sparks of flame that ricochet off the blackness of him, that circle around the carved-out space they are in and wing back to her, no less urgent or angry.
But before she can act, can move her leaden, burning tongue, he lifts a wing and his true color is revealed. Her eyes adjust and he is not black at all, but a brown richer than any soil of the desert, and bronze, and molten gold. When she blows out a breath the wind sighs with her, relieved.
She might have smiled, then, had he not said what he did.
Her gaze had been straying, making sense of the place she’d just walked into, but it flickers back to him at his words, and her chin lifts, defiant. “I’m not.” Only a girl’s voice, but a girl with bloody knuckles, with tangled hair, with her jaw set. A girl who hates to be told what she is.
He should frighten her - because of where she found him if not for the simple fact of him - but he doesn’t, not reclining like a fat housecat. He looks at her the way all the noble men do and she has no patience for it. “I’m looking for someone.” A man in black.
With borrowed nonchalance she shakes her head, and hardly a wisp of her severely-short mane moves. The scarlet collar is a familiar texture around her throat, a comfortable embrace. With a thought to the prayers sewn there - bravery, honesty - she steps further out into the arena, and nearer to the stranger.
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