to feel that we exist, even though in pain
♠︎ ♕ ♠︎
What a mystery she is, this girl of few words who offers her help but no information of herself. Her silence allows August to fill in the gaps for her - who she is, where she came from, why she’s bothering to help a stranger track a stranger. But the palomino’s imagination is proving as fickle as the rest of him, lately, always changing the story. She wears that collar of diamond and ruby because she is high-born, or because she is a thief. She is helping him because she is a spy, or entranced by the determination in his eye and the careful pattern of dapples on his golden skin. She will threaten him at the end of this - she has a secret of her own.
Of course he has no idea how close this last guess is. He lets the whole game go, anyway, just watching her decide with the evening light stretching her shadow longer behind her, making her seem to glow like a star. When he feels her tremble he presses more firmly against her, and then withdraws.
“Good choice,” he says, if only to break the quiet. His expression doesn’t change as she steps ahead of him; it is smooth as a windless lake. When he follows, it isn’t Warset he watches but the huddled structures around them, homes with the shutters closed and interiors dark. It isn’t hard to wonder how many of them are empty, or have lost members to starvation or stone, victims of the rule of the previous king. It isn’t hard to wonder how many of them might feel skeptical of the current rule. August wonders what keeps them in the desert with nothing between their teeth but the grit of sand.
It is cooler in the dark. August keeps close to the pegasus as they leave half-moons in the dust, and when he catches her eye it gleams like a cat’s. “Where do you come from, Warset?” he asks, just to keep the silence at bay.
@warset | <3
