for one wild moment; any

[Scalped]

The boughs hang heavy with ice and snow; there are clumps of ice and burr in her mane, in her tail, and beneath the wintering shag of her pelt, she grows fat with foal. She shivers, but not from the cold, more from the memory of the stallion that covered this fall. He was black as night, black as her boy’s eyes had been, but he was grotesque too - she still feels his rot on her skin, chunks of flesh cling to her own, frozen there by the winter. She remembers him cold, undead as she stood beneath him, trapped by his weight and their instinctual need to mate - there was no love in it, no promise or glory, only the bits of gore that clung to her skin, only the rake-marks down her sides from his strangely taloned-feet and deeper punctures near her withers where his fangs had grasped sharp and deep. Scalped shivers from this, from what monstrosity might quicken in her womb but somewhere, an old coyote clamors to the moon and she is soothed by the lonesome sound it makes. She is old, but undying, and still the scar on her breast hurts with a hurt that age has not sweetened nor lessened. The medicine-hat can feel the ghost-hook of the horn against her flesh, like his sharp teeth and his talons as he mounts her; these are memories that will never leave her, his horse-stink of death, her own death and gasping realization that she lives and lives yet, long years without cease. Her thoughts turn away from that pivotal moment in her life after death, even from that pivotal moment of mating not too long ago before the land became blanketed in snow, when the shadows were long and his intent was longer and more wicked. She thinks of the others that came before this one that grows fat and happy and slumbering in her womb; those get of hers that walk the lands now - two colts and a filly, all grown, all on their own, but she can smell them, smell the traces of her own immortality flushed with the vibrancy of their lives - it should kill her to know that their blood is mortal in their veins, short-lived and she hears that coyote stammer again. Their lives are as long as it howls - she knows this, and knows it is how it must be - her undying, them eventually dead and gone, others will take their place as it has always been. Scalped though, is perhaps lonely herself. She never stays around these foals long, once they’re weaned, she tends to leave them to fend for themselves. Had lingered in fact, too long with the first - a colt of her chestnut coloring but lacking her old medicine-markings. She had liked his sire, that feral stallion with the wolf-marked face and whickerings, but she had stayed too long by his side only to leave and take up with another less feral but of the same stock stallion. She bore him a filly, but that was an indifferent girl who liked to go her own way and went as soon as she could, shortly after her first tastings of grass hit her belly, she was gone like the wind. That left her last colt, with the strange horns, like no buffalo she has ever seen, long and curling in their height, black and sharpened to a point. He had been a strong colt, a big bay that already stood taller than her at a year. They had tarried a time or two, in the meadow, and that was the second longest she had spent with a foal. Now he’s gone off and Scalped is thinking of how in the end, they all leave and she hasn’t found anyone or anything long-lasting like she is. So she does what she does best - roam and stray, and she decides to visit the long windblown sands of the desert without really knowing why but knowing deep down in the marrow of her, that she had a dream once, of sands deep and sliding, of a wind that blew hot on her old unswayed back (she still looked as she did in those first days - a mare in her prime, muscled and thick, rawboned and steady; only difference was the long ugly scar on her red-shielded breast that was made by an old angry buffalo bull when he gored her, bringing her death and the first taste of a long unending life through some magic or other he had in his shaggy humped self as it lay beside her, their blood mingling on the grassy plains, her boy trapped somewhere between them, dead himself) and that’s where she found herself, atop a dune, where the sand sang and slid beneath her hooves, and the wind blew hot and fierce in her pale face beneath the red warcap that circled her brow.

[Kitra]

kitra

vanquish x yael

Kitra had lived the majority of her life amongst the bedrock and sand of the Deserts, beside her siblings and beneath the lofty shadows of her parents. Her adolescence was a pulse of pure happiness, there were no monsters lurking in the memories of her childhood – she had been loved and privileged here with her dragon father and magician mother. The only tragedy to speak of was that of Vanquish’s death and that came at the tail-end of her first maturity cycle, but that had been enough. Enough to send the gold slathered girl reeling away with the Deserts well in her shadow.
 
Kitra had left seeking the same decadence of emotion that had been afforded to her as a child, her body ached and her heart craved the affections of other souls like a sweet tooth. What had once been a bratty greediness had burrowed down deeper inside her, down to dip into a deep well of covetousness. Kitra had found a place where inhibitions were unwelcome and there were many more than pleased to fill her emptiness. Seven years her father’s bones lay at the beach and seven years did she live amongst the shameless – but her only wickedness lay in the freeness of her lust. And although she has never bore a child she had known lusts so slick and sweet her very veins quivered. She wonders if the mare that stood upon the dune, stomach swollen and eyes void, had ever felt the same.
 
The sleek black mare makes her way up the spine of the dune, her delicate features twisting as the scent of death swims in her nostrils. The smell is faint on the mare’s skin but the Deserts’ heat boils it into the air and Kitra’s ears are flicked back against her skull as she comes within a shadow’s length, “you smell like shit,” the princess says, “what’s your name?”
 

[Scalped]

Once, she was privileged as a horse of the People could be. She remembers being rubbed down with handfuls of grass, being blessed before battle in their ritualized way, keeping warm on the coldest winter day inside the teepee, and being revered for her markings - the warcap and shield on her breast, touted as good medicine. Privilege and love had been hers’ from the first time she opened her eyes, her birth a blessing to the People. Here, she is just another horse with immortality coursing through her veins and she is okay with that. Scalped has never had designs grander than those in her youth before her death and the discovery of her immortality. Everything now is simple - she lives, eats and breathes, makes babies, and the years fall away from her like leaves from a tree. Has she known lust? Lust is how she has ended up in this predicament: the deep gouges of their furious coupling, the characteristic round of her belly that was more foal than fat. Even now, so close to the end of the pregnancy, she can tell it is a filly that pokes her side with a tiny hoof, the motion no more than an outward ripple on her pale skin. She becomes aware of how the scent of him bakes itself in the hot air, growing fouler and more prominent and her own nose wrinkles in distaste at the putridity on her skin. The black mare is close, only a length away with ears pinned back to her skull in the same expression of distaste that is mirrored in Scalped’s wrinkled nostrils. She makes no apology for the way she smells, the memory of the undead stallion crawling across her skin like the touch of a spider’s feet but to the medicine-hat mare, it is no more than a shiver of disgust. “Scalped,” she says, her eyes covering the sandswept shimmering horizon in a broad sweep before resting on the shadowy mare. “Is there water nearby?” She could sniff it out easily, but prefers to be cordial and ask. Her intent is clear - she needs to wash the stink off, “Perhaps a source that would not be easily tainted by this,” and she gestures at herself with a shake of her head, trying to keep her movements to a minimum to not spread the foul smell around, but it is clear that she wishes to be clean again, at least before the foal is born. In the lee of the dune, a coyote pup tumbles and plays. This will be important later, but for now, Scalped gives the black mare a look of expectation.

[Yael]

yael

Yael has known lust; she has six children to her name, and her firstborn was a child of magic and monstrosity. That doesn’t mean that a curious longing didn’t fill her virgin loins at the time, or that she wasn’t filled with shame and repulsion almost immediately after the fact. Her trust was betrayed. A child was conceived by the impossible. And she knew so little of Beqanna’s magic then, that Mikhael’s conception seemed like an abomination.

The little flaxen boy that slipped from her womb was no abomination. He was one of her greatest gifts.

As are Kitra and her twin brothers. And Etro, and Zilpah, and the growing crowd of grandchildren. They are her blessings, and this is how she knows love. Love made her other five. Love will bathe their children in gold. Love can almost - almost - fix everything.

Yael is glad to see her elegant (if a little… sharp-tongued) daughter doing a little bit here and there. She’s never faulted them for leaving her, because she knows they all must live their own lives. If that means traveling to far off places - then so be it. It’s not as if she can’t visit them any time she wants. In the Desert, however, they have decorum. Kitra clearly takes after Van more than Yael when she opens her mouth. It makes her smile, though with that smile comes a soft rebuke. “Keetra...” she says as she approaches from the same direction her daughter came from. It really is so good to have them all home again. “Xello,” Yael greets the painted mare with a kind smile, keeping her features as non-scrunched up as possible. Good God, she reeks.

“Eef you vant, I could…” Yael trails off and then indicates to the sky with her head, where a tiny little gray cloud has manifested itself above them. It could wash her clean in no time.

[Kitra]

kitra

vanquish x yael

Kitra feels the magician well before her mother’s admonishments slide into her ears, “mind your manners,” the Golden Queen had always told her daughter with the too-free spirit. Yael’s presence had always felt like a soft ripple of tranquility that spread across her for just a breath whenever she came – she had always wondered if other’s felt it too. Kitra merely smiles mischievously back at her mother’s sweetly-laced scolding before taking another step closer to the painted mare, amber eyes smoldering like an imp’s, “what a weird name,” she says, off-handedly, “but I like it,” she adds.

“Kitra,” she offers, her gaze lingering on Scalped’s before trailing to the mare’s swollen stomach and hoof-gouged sides, perhaps lust creeped its way out differently for each person. Because when the gold gilded girl thinks of lust she thinks of… coquettish glances stolen before slipping away behind a tree too large, of moments achingly desired. Of memories filled with heat and hunger and no consequence. She thinks of the Freelands, the place she ran to in anguish over her father’s death, where societal boundaries did not dictate desires nor put parameters on how or who you could feed them with.


It was interesting though, still, to note how mother and daughter had shared similar yearnings in their lifetimes. Albeit the two had never discussed such intimate subjects (though Yael could read her daughter like a veritable diary if she was so compelled to), they had both loved women. For Kitra, her lusts were genderless, it was a boiling liquid thing that swam through her from time to time – from face to face.  She appreciated the hardness of a stallion’s chest just as much as the feminine curve of Scalped’s cheek.

“And this is my mother, Queen Yael,” she says, her gold lips sliding into a wide smile as the cloud appears above the mare. Kitra moves to close the gap of space between herself and Scalped before tilting her head back to peer up at the magic wrought thunderhead. “I wouldn’t mind a bath either,” she laughs, waiting for the rain to wet her gold-dipped skin.

[Scalped]

Scalped has loved her foals as best as one like her can; she carries them to term, pushes them out into the world, nurses and weans them all in a year’s time or less and encourages them to go off on their own. She has raised her own foals’ foals - especially her careless indifferent daughter who seems to always manage every other season to find herself in foal with something strange and rather unbearable to raise - like the coyote-shifting colt and the levitating filly, both of which had been left in Scalped’s care.

The medicine hat looks towards the same direction the black mare had come from as another mare appears; it is not hard to imagine how they must control their sense of smell around her - she knows she stinks, that’s what happens when the half-dead mate with you and it makes it all rather unpleasant. Despite that, the golden mare smiles and Scalped smiles back at her. She looks up as the golden mare indicates for her to do so, “Please,” she asks politely and awaits the raincloud to do it’s work and wash her clean.

She laughs as the black tells her her name is weird but likeable.

For Scalped, that is a first and something she has never given much thought - if her name was common or strange, it was just a name, and not what she was originally called but it was often too hard to teach proper pronunciation to others when it came to her name, so she took on something from that era of her original birth and beginning.

“Thank you Kitra,” she says, liking the way the gilded black’s name slides across her tongue, foreign and silky. The black edges closer to share the impending downpour that will bathe them and when it comes, Scalped thanks the Queen with a grateful look and equally simple but effective words of gratitude. It is wonderful to feel clean again, but the birth pangs begin and the mare pulls away from the two of them with apologies and goes off to give birth in the lee of a dune.

To keep with the flow of time, she gives birth to Sinew and finds herself in foal that same season to a stallion of the Deserts. She grows fat with foal a second time and war looms but Scalped never feels less than safe inside the Deserts’ borders, not with Kitra and her mother around though she has taken to spending most of her time with the black mare when she is not off by herself doing whatever it is that Scalped does on her own - probably ponder her immortal existence mostly.

War ends; the Deserts teem here and there with pockets of life and Scalped gives birth again to a pintaloosa filly that has no idea she is immortal like her half-sister before her or her mother. The medicine hat mare doesn’t have the heart to rip this daughter’s ignorance to shreds and she has had to caution Sinew from doing the same, which caused a bit of a rift between the two but Sinew was more headstrong and strange than any of her foals had been thus far. Stoney was the exact opposite; sweet and tender and Scalped kept her sheltered in the Deserts, trying to preserve that innocence for as long as she could though she could not say why this daughter made her feel so strongly about that. Scalped was more the type to break them in at an early age to the realities of life - that it wasn’t always simple and quaint and easy.

Something about the little pintaloosa and Kitra’s presence kept Scalped rather unlike herself, or maybe it was all the years of immortality that were starting to mellow her. Either way, she liked to watch the way her spotted daughter tried to outrun her shadow across the sand and the way Kitra glided in and out, black and sometimes in bursts of lightning that seemed to come for a crackling angry-looking stallion. The war is over, or so it seems, and they have escaped relatively unscathed though Scalped knows better than that, but it seems to have untouched her and most of the Deserts here and for that she is glad - she has had her share of it, though sometimes, the faintest scent of blood on the air stirs something wild inside her and Scalped swings her head towards the direction of it, stretched tight and terrible in her readiness to run and fight but she takes a long breath and lets it ease out of her ever so slowly until her heart calms down in her scarred up breast.

These times, when she is at her gentlest, she seeks out the black mare and calls her name, not sure why she likes her so much - maybe that fire, that youth, both things that Scalped once had and does not any more. But as Stoney grows and leaves her mother’s side more often, the medicine hat finds herself spending more and more time looking for the gold-gilded black mare, shadowy and sleek, and all the things that Scalped is not - intriguing, mysterious, and beautiful though Scalped never begrudges her these things, she finds that she admires them, and has admired her share of horseflesh over the years but Kitra… ah, she was different.

ooc: kind of sped up the timeline a bit since Scalped's been pregnant for forever and has actually had two foals in that timeframe and that's my bad for taking so long to respond but I lubs Kitra and Yael, so I hope you two don't mind!