the fault in our stars

[aletta]

The silver mare can feel her brow start to arch at Scorch’s comment. "Is it?” the former Regent counters. And while it is meant to be a play at part of this banter, the question strikes too close to her heart. It isn’t like the wanderer to drop the iron veil she has adopted over the years. The smaller mare clears her throat, "I’m sorry to hear that.”

Aletta looks out onto the Field again, tactfully eyes a few mares huddled together with some weanlings between their shaggy winter coats.

When her dark eyes glance back at her companion, they drop to the tattoo on her chest. She stares at it, trying to remember why something like a marking would nag at the back of her mind as it does. (If only she had paid better attention during those stories - about the reigns of Prague and Asylum and Twinge.)

No matter.

The answer that Aletta is given isn’t what she expected. The first part, perhaps. The pale mare has traveled to enough places, seen enough lands, to know that emptiness within can cast itself out in many ways. It’s part of the reason why she stands here, again. Aletta frowns, "and so you came out here for..?”

She doesn’t mean to be unkind when she asks this but then the gray mare has always been something between a pistol and preacher.

"Do you find any of that here?”

Her refined head jerks back when the fire sparks at the hairless mare’s ankles, burning the grass. Magic. Of course, this mare with a lack of a pelt would have something else instead. It’s been decades since she has last been here and it appears some things don’t change; Beqannians will rise to any occasion to wield their powers, to flaunt them in the face of their simpler cousins.

The frown deepens, "When did you get it back?” The Magic, the flames flickering at her ankles, she means. They had lost their powers the last time she had traveled through this place. They had been stripped of it and for every horse she encountered, that was all they could say - affirmations and oaths that they would get those powers back.

Imagine, some part of her thinks, if a horse actually had to survive on their wits and their hooves alone.

"I reek of Beyond because I am of Beyond,” and now the mare does flash a proud grin. Aletta turns her slender face to glance at @[Scorch], satisfied that if she reeks of Beyond then, "and you stink of Beqanna.”

um i love them?