[P] Fire in my soul

[Marisol]

i'm not weeping, i'm not complaining
happiness is not for me.

The girl steps back as Marisol lands, and briefly she feels quite guilty for scaring her: it already looks as if she could be knocked over by a strong wind, and being startled like this certainly can’t help. Hooves meeting the storm-torn dirt, Mari folds her wings into her sides as quickly as she can. Instead of stepping forward, as is her instinct, she forces herself to stay where she’s landed at least until they are introduced.

At once, the stranger pulls herself together, squaring her hooves, raising her head; her eyes are dull even in the stormy light that glints off the sea, and her ribs are showing through her sides, little divots of light and shadow. Marisol’s mouth twists. She is a warrior by nature, sure, but not without a heart. With every second she watches, Mari finds herself more and more eager to help.

She wants to step forward. She wants to offer food, water, shelter, everything. But then the girl says she is quite alright, and although Mari alights with incredulity, one brow almost, almost rising as if in disbelief, she says nothing. Offers nothing. If she thinks she is fine, so be it—Marisol hardly has time to help those who need it, much less those who don’t.

Still, there is a dull kind of disappointment in her chest. A pale, steady beat, throbbing in opposite time to her pulse. 

Or maybe it’s pity. Sometimes, she’s heard it said, a predator with a broken foot will chase their dinner for miles just trying to prove they are not really crippled. Maybe this is something like that.

“Call it morbid curiosity,” Marisol says dryly. She does not miss the sharp edge in the girl’s tone, much less the way she structures the question as though it were a challenge. So be it, then—she has been in far too many fights to back down from one now. 

I have yet to meet many people. Ah—there it is. Her suspicions were indeed correct. And perhaps (though Marisol doesn’t like to admit), because of that, the stranger—no, Luvena—deserves a little less defensiveness on the part of her queen. 

The Commander forces her shoulders to relax and sweeps out one wing into something like a bow, brief and instinctive as blinking. “Marisol,” she introduces, and bites back the urge to add queen or commander or both. She'd figure it out soon enough.

“Speaking.”

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