she was powerful not because she wasn't scared,
but because she went on strongly despite her fear.
The merciless sun hammered down, it's one wicked heart unblinking, and the sky only assisted it with not even a tuft of cloud to moderate the rigid rays. Heat thrashed at her sunburnt flesh and coiled around her flank and limbs like a hot-blooded viper. Each step immersed into the searing powder sent a spiral of dust into the stagnant air - the particles taking on the form of glitter as the sun's rays beat down on them too.
Maerys was used to it though. She'd spent years of her adolescence ripening in Ragnarysa, a desert region, and had long ago mastered suggestions and methods that aided in her survival. She knew well which course she had come from, and though she wasn't precisely convinced what desert this was (or rather, who's), she knew how to backtrack to Delumine which was necessary when navigating the endless rolling knolls of red clay sand.
Vradara had drifted away hours ago and Maerys had not stopped her, letting the creature to fly freely wherever she desired. The dragon could effortlessly take care of herself and Maerys fretted little for the beast whose ancestry and sorcery screamed excellence, particularly in the heat of a desert. Though this left Maerys expressly unprotected, she carried her sturdy ax with her and would not be hesitant to guard herself should a predator approach.
Ahead in the distance, Maerys caught sight of another. She didn't promptly identify him from such a far distance but didn't exclude the possibility as she commenced to move nearer.
When she eventually was able to grow close enough to distinguish his features, it was bittersweet. She wasn't sure who she wanted to find, not entirely, but felt excited to meet another soul with a unique story and experience.
"Good day," she announced, a beaming smile boasted on her delicate face. "I am called Maerys."
and a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, and not a single regret
His lungs had never been the same. No, they had never filled with air like the lungs of his youth, like the lungs of not-so-long-ago. They could not hold the atmosphere like they used to, and it had been long enough that Toro knew they never would. They were no longer his lungs, as he knew them, but new ones, as he would have to know them. For the most part, they were functional. They would never be good enough for him.
We never know what we have until it’s gone.
Air, food, water, even…companionship. Loathe as he was to say it, Anzhelo had become somewhat of a comforting, if not intermittent, and often disconcerting, presence in his life. Isra, too, had left her mark on his heart and he wanted to hate it. He wanted to hate everyone that was ever nice to him. He wanted to strike them down, Anzhelo and Isra and Seraphina, Elif and Caine and Eik. It was not about whether they offered kindness or rivalry. It was that they made him feel anything at all. El Toro sought to dictate when this permission was given and when it was denied. It seemed that he never had a choice; his heart opened and closed the door, and it was never at the right time.
It was in this vast and horrible desert that he meditated now, having been in Solterra long enough to know it, and having learned it partially out of necessity. One could flee to its edges and no guard of Raum’s would pursue. It was simply too dangerous. He was assumed a dead man.
The rebels fed Hajduk, as promised. He was growing, always growing, a lithe and strong lion, white as Toro, blinding in the sunlight and powerful. They spoke most frequently when Toro was spiraling in his own head; it was then that Hajduk intervened with something crude or comforting or distracting. He was good for the white stallion, but like a friend, Toro could hardly admit it.
The mare caught him off guard, as was the way of others and Toro, even in an empty expanse he buried his conscious self under layers of thought and feeling. Hajduk alerted him first, shaking him from the swirling reflection of the past and present. Toro neared her and she spoke. Rather outgoing, and from what he still considered quite a distance. ”Good day. I am called Maerys.”
Toro waited until they were a more conversational length apart. ”Hey. I’m Toro.” She was young, and small. Hajduk rumbled. ”This is Hajduk.” He looked her over a moment. There was beauty there, warrior’s muscles on a childlike frame that rang familiar. ”You a soldier?”
she was powerful not because she wasn't scared,
but because she went on strongly despite her fear.
The ocean, it had always been Maerys' sister of watery depths and excellence. And those watery depths were the soul of this world, the keeper of brethren below the surface. And those waters, powerful and savage and bitter, flowed over mountains and to the depths of trenches just the same, reaching around the globe in a lusty embrace.
But now Solterra was adorned with sand crests over water; the heat of the sun over the ice of the waves.
And the red of it all - the feeling you got when your face heated up and your mouth started to stutter and your eyelashes hurt because your vision was so blurred and tired.
It was that. And more, maybe.
"Toro, Hajduk," she beamed good-naturedly as she regarded the two of them. They were a spectacular pair, profound and ivory as they bathed in the aurelian of the sun.
Toro was more towering than the standard greater than the majority and it was enthralling in a way that Maerys could do nothing but gawk at. He was far from rangy - there was mass on him - with a convex profile, shapely legs, and a compact structure. And when she regarded the purity of his color she felt that the skies had grown clear today because the clouds rested upon his flesh, dyeing the fibers of his body with their porcelain kiss, as if they decided the heavens would be earth-bound today.
Hajduk, he was no different, striding as if his very joints were engineered by a higher power. Maerys was a believer of evolution, but something about the beast made her want to believe it'd been sculpted by the divine.
"Aye -" she nodded "- 'tis the truth that I am a warrior, I am from Delumine." Would it surprise how it surprised the others? Or had he already figured it out and pushed the question to confirm what he already suspected? "What art thou?"
She thought,
she thought,
she thought she knew from one glance
But she had been wrong so many times.
If it was easy for a wolf to dress as a sheep, couldn't it be easy for a sheep to hide as a wolf among wolves?
M A E R Y S
@El Toro literally so sorry maerys was so weird here to write LOL
Toro puffed up as she stared at him and Hajduk. They were a handsome pair, weren’t they? Readily he let his previous meditations drift away, basking in the gaze of a young warrior girl. Too young for him, certainly, but he enjoying the awe in her expression. Yes, his body said, the heavens did come down to earth today.
”Ah,” he said, ”You Deluminians ain’t so bad.” She spoke oddly, archaic, and he wondered what piece of history she’d stepped out of. It wasn’t a very Deluminian way of speaking, he knew, but when so many were from other lands, what did it matter?
”I’m a soldier, from Solterra. This chunk of land, you could say.” He glanced around the arid expanse. ”What’re you doing out here, anyway? You lost?”
![[Image: maerys-pixel.png]](https://i.ibb.co/kM48w8r/maerys-pixel.png){kind=tracking}
