Solace
. . .
He returns her banter with easy-going familiarity, and Solace feels whatever was left of her usual self-protection slipping away. In Hyaline she was surrounded by the same faces every day, and while she loved these faces (she would protect them with her life if it was necessary) finding a charming stranger in the starlight gave her a unique thrill. She had a home, a beautiful home, but she had come here to get away, hadn't she? Doubts flick across her mind, but they are fleeting and do not dim the sparkle in her blue eyes.
Remember last time you fell for a stranger in the woods? Her inner voice scolds. Three years of questions and a bloodthirsty dragon on your back was what that got you.
But there is youthfulness to this stallion that is easy to trust, and the way he seems to lose himself in her eyes is like a drug. She had never used her femininity in this way before, and the sensual curiosity makes her reckless.
It's then, as she is about to move forward once again, that she recognizes a scent from her childhood. It clings to him, close to the skin where the intimate, hard to shake scents clung. She knows it, and the mystery of that scent is distracting.
Her mother had brought that fragrance home once. She slipped away one autumn night, leaving Solace and Svedka sleeping alone under Tephra's coconut palms. Solace hadn't slept that night, at six months old when she was left the guardian of her twin without a parting word, and she had been sure her mother was never coming back. Tangerine had returned, in the pre-dawn hours, with a wound on her neck and the scent of sex and stardust on her skin.
But Solace had never again found that scent, the ionized scent of the heavens, until now.
"Where are you from?" She asks in a more straightforward tone than before. She looks him over in the way she often evaluates strangers, trying to guess where she may know him from. "I feel like I know that scent... but I can't quite place it."
@[Astrophel] So Her mom (tangerine) had a one night stand with Carnage (it was a Starnage month) when she was a kid. In the thread he came down from the stars and all that- so that's what she is referring to.