someday i am going
to walk out of here free
to walk out of here free
S
he is not particularly surprised that this is the place Bexley chose to settle. Where else for a lion-hearted bitch?
On each side tower walls of horizontally striated red and gold; Angharad thinks she sees the imprints of bones once or twice, fossilized in between layers of old stone; she catches sight of a small, flat-toothed skull bleached white by eons of sun; overhead the sun simmers even against the cold bite of an autumn breeze and an opalescent shield of clouds, and oh, if Angharad only knew what waited to be found in the capitol.
But she is only a girl, and a stranger at that, so terribly outcast she has not even quite heard of Solterra’s turmoil. She hears only the nagging voice in the back of her head: find her, find her.
Cervine and dark and showered in pale red dust from the bottom of the earth, Angharad winds her way through the corridors of Elatus with an uneducated sense of purpose. She does not know any better way to spend her time than searching every corner of the world for her cowardly niece. So this is what she does - scours every square inch with those Briar-blue eyes, ignoring the dull ache pitted against her leg, and tries to imagine she is being something useful.
From above, or from far away, it would be easy to think Angharad belongs here. The fawn of her skin melts in easily with the sand. The gold strung around her horns and ankle is so common it might have been forged in a Solterran shop. The dark, sweet stripes that strike her body are that of a well-camouflaged desert predator.
But then you see how the bones in the canyon shudder and creak as she walks past them, and how stubby, underwatered plants spring back to life, and think that if she were from here, there would already be stories about it.
@thana | "speaks" | notes: text
