10-10-2019, 03:01 PM
The forest is still. Even the fog around her has settled, the ripples of her movement long disappeared into the trees along with the echoes of her children’s laughter. The thick mist reaches nearly to the mare’s striped knees, and for a moment she is reminded of standing in the warm springs of her homeland. The image is shimmers away as the fog is disturbed by someone’s arrival, and Lepis shakes the ombré strands of her mane mostly away from her blue-grey eyes to see who it is.
For some time, she does not visibly react. Lepis remains motionless, a statue of pale gold, dark sapphire, and white marble. Then she frowns, her cobwebbed forehead wrinkling and her navy mouth drawing into a thin line.
”I thought you were dead.” She says in a voice as flat as her expression.
She remembers each minute since their last meeting; there are no hazy spots in her memory, no place where Wolfbane might have been beside her that she’s just forgotten. They’d said their last goodbye on a hazy fall morning, hoarfrost turning the redwoods around them to glittering figures. He was off the the Brilliant Pampas and she was going to see about sending diplomats to the other lands. They’d spent the night in their green bower, and she’d been reluctant to wake up and face the frosty morning.
He hadn’t come back that night, but Lilliana had. They’d met with Noah, and then Wolfbane had gone his own way back. That wasn’t so unusual, not since his change, and not until he’d been gone for a fortnight did she truly grow worried. The Comtesse hid that from her children, of course, but soon found she had to hide their absence from each other - first Eyas, and then Pteron just before winter - and then the rest of the redwood dwellers as well. Secret keeping is not unfamiliar for the dun pegasus, but not from her own family.
”I don’t know if you saw the little red boy playing with Celina,” she says, still flat, still expressionless. ”But that was your son, Elio.”
@[Wolfbane]
For some time, she does not visibly react. Lepis remains motionless, a statue of pale gold, dark sapphire, and white marble. Then she frowns, her cobwebbed forehead wrinkling and her navy mouth drawing into a thin line.
”I thought you were dead.” She says in a voice as flat as her expression.
She remembers each minute since their last meeting; there are no hazy spots in her memory, no place where Wolfbane might have been beside her that she’s just forgotten. They’d said their last goodbye on a hazy fall morning, hoarfrost turning the redwoods around them to glittering figures. He was off the the Brilliant Pampas and she was going to see about sending diplomats to the other lands. They’d spent the night in their green bower, and she’d been reluctant to wake up and face the frosty morning.
He hadn’t come back that night, but Lilliana had. They’d met with Noah, and then Wolfbane had gone his own way back. That wasn’t so unusual, not since his change, and not until he’d been gone for a fortnight did she truly grow worried. The Comtesse hid that from her children, of course, but soon found she had to hide their absence from each other - first Eyas, and then Pteron just before winter - and then the rest of the redwood dwellers as well. Secret keeping is not unfamiliar for the dun pegasus, but not from her own family.
”I don’t know if you saw the little red boy playing with Celina,” she says, still flat, still expressionless. ”But that was your son, Elio.”
@[Wolfbane]
