Footsteps echo as phantoms upon wet stone, keys jingling lets her know first that someone is there, and second that they are just outside her door. What of the guards, the fighter wonders, looking out from beneath heavy brows to consider what this could possibly signify. When Marisol enters, it is a woman grown who greets her, not the green cadet she remembers, not the child of whom Dalmatia helped to train when she was younger. This is not the girl who was in the world when the darkness came to claim its prize of the silver Pegasus. But the ghost of her past and the face before her are the same, if not older. She, too, is likely older, likely much aged with the salt that crusts her hair and tangles along her neck. Even the braids and buns cannot be well kept when nothing to help groom it is given. At last, Dalmatia arches a brow, but she steps forward all the same.
Slow, movements are so slow and careful, looking more like a limp, like she is in desperate need of a walk, of exercise, of something more than these four walls.
Perhaps it is all a ruse, a means to seem weaker than she is. Perhaps the woman actually feels the weight of her bones, no matter how light, having been heavier since her disappearance in the world above. Now, all she hears is her own hooves as they hit the stone floor. They are soft and quiet, they are the tapping of a mouse's feet, just barely heard alongside their combined breathing.
Before Dalmatia brushes against the girl-no-longer, she stops at last. Only then does the ex-Vicarious raise her head and ruffle her wings. The other brow arches now, mirrors of one another, as she looks into the woman's eyes and remembers how they once were. Things were tense and crumbling, but they were different, times were better. Almost anything would be better than these four walls. It seems enough time passes like this for the world to have died and been reborn, but the fighter is not the first to make a move, to back down nor advance. Patience is a cornerstone of her being, a foundation that grounds her still.
At last, at last, her chin tilts towards the open doorway behind the Queen. No words were ever necessary between the two. In the skies nor on the ground, they had had their own unspoken language before Dalmatia's disappearance from court, from life itself. Even in the years between when Marisol would come to look through the peephole just to be sure that her once-Vicarious was still standing, they could always talk without words. It is a language all their own, one the magpie still has not forgotten.
Beware: I am fearless, and therefore, powerful.
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