10-22-2017, 10:46 AM
The djinn was gone.
There one day and gone the next, an intangible presence that she couldn’t quite remember anymore. Even the most recent memories seemed blurred by the haze of decades gone. The girl can’t quite comprehend it, but such is the way of the old beqanna magic.
Starlin has tall and lean on the grey shores of Nerine, a bold pale figure among the mostly mottled crew of the Iron Queen. She towers over her mother these days, but the two share the same large expressive eyes, the same sculpted desert face. Mother’s are sea green, and Starlin’s are a deep blueish grey – the shade of the sea before a storm, her father’s eyes. No longer able to take on her more agile shape, Starlin has taken to running as a horse. The exercise pushes her loss from her mind, far enough that she has time to process without becoming overwhelmed.
The young mare has just finished such a run, and she takes stock of where in the Forest she’d wound up. Her survey of the surrounding land stops when she sees movement. Black and white, like the residents of Nerine, close. Starlin raises her head and calls out in familiar greeting, realizing a moment too late that the stallion is a stranger. Her face flushes, and she briefly considers turning tail and running home. But she is already breathless, and nothing good has ever come from running from things.
“Sorry,” she calls to the unfamiliar stallion, the short distance and fall-silence of the woods around them making it easy to hear the apology in her words. “I thought you were someone I knew.”
There one day and gone the next, an intangible presence that she couldn’t quite remember anymore. Even the most recent memories seemed blurred by the haze of decades gone. The girl can’t quite comprehend it, but such is the way of the old beqanna magic.
Starlin has tall and lean on the grey shores of Nerine, a bold pale figure among the mostly mottled crew of the Iron Queen. She towers over her mother these days, but the two share the same large expressive eyes, the same sculpted desert face. Mother’s are sea green, and Starlin’s are a deep blueish grey – the shade of the sea before a storm, her father’s eyes. No longer able to take on her more agile shape, Starlin has taken to running as a horse. The exercise pushes her loss from her mind, far enough that she has time to process without becoming overwhelmed.
The young mare has just finished such a run, and she takes stock of where in the Forest she’d wound up. Her survey of the surrounding land stops when she sees movement. Black and white, like the residents of Nerine, close. Starlin raises her head and calls out in familiar greeting, realizing a moment too late that the stallion is a stranger. Her face flushes, and she briefly considers turning tail and running home. But she is already breathless, and nothing good has ever come from running from things.
“Sorry,” she calls to the unfamiliar stallion, the short distance and fall-silence of the woods around them making it easy to hear the apology in her words. “I thought you were someone I knew.”