;Leokadia
Spring had arrived, first with mud and now slowly with green newness. A cremello filly, a little smudgy as she shed her foal fuzz and winter wear was bounding through the spring damp in the playground. She was brown to her knees and splashed all over her belly, chest, and flanks with mud. An occasional wicked squeal rang out now and then when she made a particularly large splash. She'd never known a world that wasn't frozen ground and snow and the new warmer season filled her body with a bursting energy.
At 5 months old, Leokadia had grown sturdier and more substantial but was still smaller than she ought to have been. There was a reason babes didn't come in winter, and she would spend the next 3 years a little out of step with her peers. Her wings had finally feathered fully and while she still carried them awkwardly, she displayed signs of increasing coordination. She might use them to catch her balance, or flare them when she dashed up a hill...little movements indicating that her brain and her flight limbs had established a solid link.
Lo had come to the playground looking for other foals to play with but had not found anyone when she had first entered the special place that had been set aside for the youngsters. She did seem to arrive in the wrong place at the wrong time quite consistently. Someday that might be a source of dark humor for her but as a child she only thought that the world was a very empty place where no one ever stayed or came back. Another youth would have been sad, but Lo saw the sharp edges of the world and called them home.
Neck arched, the girl flared her wings like a sunning condor and reared to stomp down again in the mud repeatedly. She was all over skipping stripes of dark wet earth. Her face blackened with it, her light eyes glittering like moonstones.
she's an arsonist in her pastime
and i've been burned for the last time