An ending.
Acton did not care much for endings. Even his performances (when he had given them) had always closed with the crowd chanting more, more, more, and with the promise of yet more mysteries to come. He had never cared much for finality; treacherous, crooked Crow he was, he loved doubling back, loopholes, stories that wove in and out and around again.
So he did not care for what she said, or the way she said it - a thing too heavy, too dense to echo as it should have.
He blew out a breath, then, and might have said something further, were it not for the stranger. She was a welcome interruption, and Acton watched her draw near, her expression dazed with the strangeness the way he imagined his own must surely be. Once she reached them he was surprised at how tall she was, how strongly made; it seemed at odd with her soft dreamer’s face.
Acton was learning not to underestimate dreamers.
It’s more of what I’m not finding, to be honest, she answered, and his lips quirked up before he could stop them. “Like water?” he said, and huffed a breath that was not quite a laugh. His spark-bright eyes slipped between the mare and the unicorn, and uneasiness twisted in him again like seaweed in a low tide.
“It shouldn’t happen at all,” he answered the stranger, but the two mares seemed to be having some silent conversation, their eyes all silver and sea-green, and Acton wasn’t sure whether they’d even heard.
He was not sorry at Isra’s suggestion they return; yet again, slick as a shining fish, the day had changed for the buckskin. He did not care for the dry sighing of sea-grass, the low hum of flies that should never be this far from shore.
Still, he told himself it was nothing but the strangeness of it that made him hold his tongue as they turned back to the city, that made him twist his ears at the clear ringing of the queen’s command.
With only a last glance at the bright slash where the true-sea waited on the horizon, Acton made to follow the unicorn and the star-mare, just behind them and before the horses who joined them. He tried not to wonder what would happen if the water chose this moment to return.
you're italic, I'm in bold
@Isra @Kassandra
