Two tall, gray horses stand face to face on an empty beach. It is a dull gray morning, the wind is moderate but its chill quite biting. Low fog rolls off the water and drifts over the beach, occasionally passing through the horses. They don't seem to notice it anyway. In a flash, they are engaged in a violent, high velocity spar that involves weapons and dirty tricks.
Emersyn initiates, fearless, merciless, and she kicks her sword up out of the sand where it has been hidden and lunges for him at once. If not for his saber he would be pierced through the heart, a loud and sudden clash of opposing metals spook the jaeger birds back out to sea as her partner blocks himself. He thrusts her off, snaps at her face, trips her up, then tries to topple her entirely. Yet the two horses shuffle sure-footed and steady, like dancers as they moved around each other’s forces. The stand off seems to last forever, but once it starts it ends fast, and it ends violently.
For awhile they stand together while they catch their breaths and bleed, then laugh about it. Emersyn helps her sparring partner to his feet and steadies him. A part of his wing has been torn open and she has claimed a hideous rip in his ear. He has bloodied her knees and battered her legs, and to some extent, even provoked her to kill him. Thankfully, she did not.
It is a long way home. You take care of that wing -- and you are lucky I didn’t break it. Her voice is chillingly cold. Though she intends to be friendly it is flavorless and bland, he cringes at her and has an ugly look, a slightly unsettled one. Freak, his expression reads. She can tell he’s more afraid of her than he was when they were younger. She can tell that he cannot wait to leave her here and return home. Home, a place she can never return to. She is abandoned almost immediately, he gives her his sage advice and leaves like a coin operated gypsy out of time.
You are distracted, get some help. He says.
Blood-slicked and disassociated from the spar (despite the glorious win), she feels anxiety and despair filling in all the hollow spaces in her head. Emersyn limps towards the water with tender, battered legs and gingerly steps in. The salt stings and makes her stiffen at the joints. To distract herself, she tries to recollect on what she needs to do later tonight - of the plans she has within Viride. Of the man she thinks she might kill.
A sort of madness sets in on Emersyn’s tired, overworked mind. It thinks with the type of spiraling that vultures do when they follow a sick calf they plan to feast on later. It obsessives over a need to clean up a mess that has been made. And It initiates the kind of mood that causes a sort of wilderness to inhabit one’s mind, when all one can see is the color red. Red like blood. Emersyn falls to her knees seeing without seeing, her city burning and running red with blood.
The tide rises up and up, and if it rises higher and higher, and faster and faster, the soldier does not notice it. When the wave rolls onto the shore, her hair is black, when it reels itself back into the sea, it is white. In the Lull between ebb and flow of water and waves, looms of black and white float in directionless loops. Blood colors the swirls of seafoam around her pink. Her eyes are ice chips that do not reflect the blue of the sea - or perhaps that is the incoming storm’s reflection in her eyes.
@Lucinda A rare and introspective Emersyn for you.
