burning cities and napalm skies; anyone

[Starlin]

Springtime on the coast is in full bloom.

African lilly, allium, poppies, and bleeding hearts; they transform the grey coast with their bright splashes of color. This is Starlin's favorite season in Nerine.

While the coastal realm is beautiful year round, this is the season that they had come to Nerine, and so it retains a nostalgic place in her heart. No longer the little filly that had arrived at her mother's side, Starlin has become a woman grown. 

Inheriting her mother's slender build and her father's height, hard work and exercise have put impressive muscle beneath her sleek grullo hide. While she is still untested in true battle, she has shallow scars from her practice battles, spars against whatever foes her mother could dream up. 


There have been less of those lately.

Without Nayl - without Isobell - her mother has spent less time on the shores of Nerine. Where she goes, Starlin has never asked (but always wonders). Sometimes, the wayward thought that she might never come back tiptoes into her mind, but the dark-haired mare always banishes it with a shake of her head.

She does so now, the sea-stiff curtain of her dark hair brushing against her neck. Starlin opens her blue grey eyes to look down the cliffside at the sea. Should she go for a swim? Or race up and down the cliffs until she is too exhausted to move?

[Volcan]

volcan

Burn slow, burning up the back wall
Long roads, where the city meets the sky
Most days, most days stay the sole same
Please stay, for this fear will not die

She is bored.

Every day it’s the same. Sea breeze. Crashing waves. Bobbing flower heads. Waving marram grass. Nerine was...peaceful, at least.

They should probably change that.

The smokey mare swings from being nervous of their judgement (of the true amazons) to wanting to make them all proud, wanting them to be impressed by her, the lost daughter of a lost khaleesi, born in a lost kingdom… Was it in her blood? Or was her blood entirely sand, now? Did she have what it takes to be a new-amazonian, a Nerinean?

It seemed that Nerine liked horses that could sit around, walk around, eat grass all day… So she was exceeding at it, naturally.

She should probaby change that.

”Hello, Starlin.” says Volcan with a smile. ”Thanks for letting me know about Nerine. I suppose technically I’m your recruit.” It hadn’t been her first choice, admittedly, perhaps it should’ve been.

”Were you recruited here, or born here?”

[Starlin]

The sound of hooves pulls Starlin from her thoughts, and she turns to see a familiar roan mare. She’s seen Volcan’s from a distance a few times, but the grullo mare had not yet made the time to greet the newcomer. It seems Volcan has taken it upon herself to do so, which Starlin is grateful for. She tends to put off social interaction whenever possible. Not out of dislike of her companions, of course; she simple prefers her solitude.

“Hi Volcan," she replies, dipping her head in a polite nod of greeting. The silvery mare thanks her for telling her about Nerine that long-ago day in the Field, and a quick smile flashes across her dark mouth. “I can’t blame you for trying out Ischia first; I hear the island is like paradise on earth - if you like parrots, that is."

The inquiry into her origins is unexpected but not unwelcome.

“Neither, actually." She says, “I came with my mother as a child; she’d grown tired and wanted to come back to Nerine." Not to Nerine, really, Starlin knows, but to those who lived here and called it home. “I’ve never thought of leaving though, so I suppose I might as well have been born here; I have few memories of my time in Sylva."

“And you?" She asks, surprised at her own curiosity. “Is this your first foray into the Amazonian way of life?"