@Kassandra
D
ead.
The words fall on her like stone, burying her beneath their rubble until her shoulders sag and her world-weary red eyes fill with questions that must go unanswered. Gods walk among the mortals, and the secrets that they keep, they hold tight to their breasts. Caligo cannot tell them? Two ears turn back slightly and the cascade effect gives the purple mare a particularly skeptical air. She wonders how a sovereign can be killed and the demi-goddess would not see how it happened. Cannot? Or will not?
Perhaps she is faithless.
Perhaps she is too bitter to accept the word of strangers, even that of a goddess - or especially that of a goddess - but she casts around her to find anyone else with that same suspicion boiling up out of their hearts. There are none, at least none wearing it obviously, instead awe and devotion and all the things that Rivane has long since forgotten in her many travels fill the courtyard. She shifts her weight uncomfortably, tail licking smoothly through the air until there is left around her a wide berth free of those others milling forward to greet Caligo, to meet those that rise to the challenge of replacing a sovereign reported mysteriously dead. Rivane shakes her head furiously. No.
No to accepting that the Queen has been killed and nobody will ask how or why.
No to accepting that the threat to it is gone when it has not even been spoken.
No to claiming a right to that empty place left behind.
A familiar scowl is twisting her lips. The world around her moves on, almost as if Morrighan's death were a sidenote, and though Rivane did not know the mare that had ruled them, she finds it strange, disconcerting. The walls she builds keep Caligo's hooks from her heart, she does not feel that pull the others do. It feeds into her Otherness, a black pit of loneliness stretching before her like the empty plain of the sea, makes her turn away, her thoughts full of the feeling of running; of escape.
no, wait, a high-pitched voice rings out excitedly in her head. There are small claws pressing against her skin and Beech's small weight in the curve of her back. His whiskers are twitching madly, feeling the air that moves around them. i can feel Kassandra coming!
He's right, of course. That striped neck twists the direction the little rat is leaning, and there, with Oculos struggling to follow through the throngs, is Kassandra, forcing her way desperately between the crush of Denoctians. Rivane pauses, her jaw set stubbornly to one side, the desire to flee luring her with its siren song, but Kassandra is her friend. In fact, aside from Beech and Barley and Breadnut, Kassandra is her only friend, so she turns back, following fluidly through the path of irritation and confusion left in the silver-haired mare's wake, follows until she finds herself at Caligo's head, her shoulder pressing firmly against Kassandra's haunch, wordless.
I am with you
