[open] i hope you'd come to the funeral [anyone]

[Starlin]

STARLIN grit and grace. Raised by a doting mother, Starlin has never felt unloved. There was emptiness, of course, the heavy silence that followed any inquiry about her father and then, later, her twin. One was gone before her birth, and the second stayed too briefly. Mother has never seemed concerned about their disappearances, but then: Mother is never concerned about anything. He notes her piebald markings much as she had caught his earlier. That is what had made him seem familiar; almost all of the residents of Nerine are splashed with white: tobiano, overo, splash. Closer, his pattern is unique and not like any she knows, and she enjoys tracing the lines between dark and light with her gaze. When Malekith answers her question, he does not seem bothered by her rudeness. If anything, he is more gracious than she deserves, which leaves the grullo girl smiling broadly. Never a social butterfly, he explains, and from a time before the Reckoning. It is hard to piece that information together with his appearance; Starlin wonders if he is immortal or simply misplaced by the rift in time and space. She’d like him to be mortal, she decides, if only because he seems otherwise normal. Starlin, the daughter of a genie and a sea monster, is nothing more than the grullo horse she appears to be on the surface. It had not always been so (she can almost see the paws at the end of her leg if she remembers hard enough), but such is the way of fate. The older stallion continues to speak, telling her that she doesn’t have to apologize. Starlin doubts this, but she does glance up hopefully, flattered by his compliment. She is too naïve to separate creepy from complimentary, and she interprets his comment through her youthful lens. “You’re probably not going to find many horses out here,” she tells him truthfully, “It gets pretty cold here in the winter. The winds off the sea are cold. Not as cold as Nerine, but there aren’t caves here for shelter either so…” Starlin has been chattering, not unlike the bird that inspired her name, and when she realizes this she finishes with a “It’s not too cold now though. Was it cold where you were from, before? Were you from the Tundra?”