So still, now. So quiet. The chill of the air had settled onto her flesh and it bit her to the quick, even through her heated hide; the violence of her action was reflected, now, by the violence of her inaction. The pain of it, the sweet pain of it; sharp and fierce, reminding her how alive she was, how far from death.
But the sweat, the froth against her lips—it too, tasted of salt, and Boudika now wondered if she were drowning, simply in a different way. Why had she not been lost at sea? The question arose, unbidden, as her breath fogged the winter air and her heart began to slow. She would have forced it aside, had she the time; but Boudika was no longer alone.
The prairie was too vast, too open, for her to be truly startled. Nevertheless, there was something about the approach of the other mare that frustrated Boudika first, and unnerved her the second. Boudika was no stranger to the supernatural; it had lived just outside her window, for as long as she had known, in the water horses as they sang to her in songs that promised beauty, and ended in death.
That was her first thought, when she turned her head in a gesture almost avian—assertive, quick, no-nonsense, and distinctly predatory. A slight narrowing of her crimson eyes. The unicorn was beautiful in a ghastly sort of way, like the imitation of beauty; a painting that existed as a work of art, but could never capture the vivaciousness of life. Boudika stood in stark contrast with still-heaving flanks and sweat-flecked skin. Her whole body steamed with heat and it rose into the air in the manifestation of small clouds.
The question seemed odd to Boudika; but everything about this land seemed odd. Her ears perked, and she shifted so as to face her new “companion”—and that word came unbidden, and unwelcome—directly. ”I stopped running, because—“ and she cut off, a shadow shifting across her face. Why had she stopped running? She had wanted to go forever, beyond the mountains, beyond the sea. She wanted to go—home? And the thought, in her mind, came as violently as retching. Boudika shoved it away, enraged.
Her tumultuous emotions did not show outside, however. What remained was a soldier’s perfect composure. ”I stopped running because I wasn’t going anywhere. I had to come back somewhere. And so I came back to my Court.” One fact, after the other, delivered with a military crispness. A stark professionalism that disguised the stream of I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I was running to the desert sea I was running to scream at the sky and damn the gods who cursed me I was running to run I was running until I couldn’t take it I was going I was running from the scent of an ocean I cannot reach, the scents of a stallion that has hexed me, the scents of a girl I am not and a life that is not mine and a lie, a lie, a lie, a lie— and then, the tap, tap, tap of the unicorn’s blade.
Boudika did not like this feeling, of being unhinged. She did not like it whatsoever. And so she forced herself to settle—she forced her breath to still and her heart to stop thundering. She forced herself to cut her nerves, to steel her focus, to look again at this strange mare. ”I don’t recognise you.” A statement, without a question. Boudika’s eyes settled unwaveringly upon the unicorn once more—they had been fluttering, distracted, with her thoughts—and evaluated what she saw.
Again, Boudika was struck by the other. The supernatural. It came to her abruptly; the arrangement of parts, although perfectly proportional and belonging, seemed somehow different, somehow disarrayed. Yet Boudika did not know why; nor did she think on it long enough to believe that was truly what she saw. The sharp tail, the spiralled horn, it all reminded her, incredulously, of the water-horses. The shape-changers. The way looking at them, they were slick as oil, so likely to slip from one’s grasp in feathers, fur, claws, teeth, scales, flippers, skin. They could not keep a shape any more than the ocean could stay dry and so, that it what Boudika thought, as she wearily appraised the stranger.
A creature that could not keep a shape, with a strange and somehow offensive question, although the question itself could not be considered offensive. Merely the things it evoked. The things it made Boudika, herself, question.
@Thana
