;Leokadia
A white hare sat beside a crimson barberry bush, a downy ball that made a pretty picture in front of the red berries that clung to the shrub's naked branches. Leokadia watched it from the shadows beneath a juniper tree all tension and curiosity. Her stance was wide, pink hooves sunk into the loam and snow. She'd extended her neck and her crystal blue eyes glimmered beneath the edge of the scrubby juniper's scaly blue-green fronds. The expression was one of clinical interest, not the innocent gaping of a child. Having been born in the midst of winter she'd seen very little fauna, the occasional bird or deer did not escape her notice but today's proximity to the long eared mammal before her was exceptionally interesting. She observed it's watery eyes, black and nervous in it's little white head and it's trembling nose that searched with anxious twitches for scary smells.
The creature's small loveliness made her feel a tightness in her jaw. Lo flared her nostrils and she clenched her teeth as she raised a hoof to step forward. The hare twitched as it sensed movement and that anxious prey-animal motion unfurled an inexplicable desire in the filly's chest, an urgency for motion in her limbs. She embraced that flow of energy and burst from her cover in an instant. A hind limb slid in the snow but she did not fumble and shot forward toward the little animal. She wanted it. She wanted to touch it, to embrace it, to dash it into redness in the fresh snow.
Today she would not quench that unnamed desire. Her quarry escaped in a flash of brightness and when Lo arrived at the barberry bush a few moments too late she dropped her head to breathe in the frightened fur-bearer's scent and pawed up the gentle indent where the hare had sat until there was only mud and bright red berries beneath her feet.
she's an arsonist in her pastime
and i've been burned for the last time