08-22-2020, 02:28 AM
She does not wait long after Set leaves to slip past her mother’s (not-so-watchful) gaze and makes a clean exit. Set had told me to stay put, but he did not say how long … she is not old enough, nor experienced enough, to understand that he knew exactly what he was telling her – and what he was not telling her.
It is not that she does not like the cove the rawboned stallion had led them to. She certainly liked it better than the humid rainforest of her childhood. Here the air is clean, several degrees cooler than the sun’s rays, and the acrid smell of smoke and lava doesn’t cling to everything. Of course, the salt from the sea does cling to everything, but once Set had called a pod of dolphins into the shallow waters of the cove and they had spent the length of the night diving in and out of the silver waters, teaching her how to swim. She giggles, the sound closer to the clicking and squeaking of a porpoise rather than a wild, gray-eyed little filly. Trading her shadow-stained coat and equine form for that of the tiger cub, the animal that comes easiest to her and not in random pieces and parts, she lopes due south, the playground beckoning.
She has already begun to think of Set as her father. Though she is in fact his great-granddaughter, and he had spoken to her about her heritage in depth, she finds it too difficult to reconcile her picture of a great-grandfather with the virile, larger-than-life, twinkly-eyed stallion who had come to fetch them. To her, the past he described, the old Beqanna, is little but a wild, tall tale; a bit of fiction to entertain her on the trek from Tephra.
Nearly failing in her attempt to sneak past Set and the small gathering at the river’s edge in Pangea, Dretch arrives in the fairy-protected playground unkempt and out of breath, long legs churning, wild laughter preceding her. She had tried to shift to a rattlesnake, like the one that had threatened to strike her when she had stumbled over it. She had mostly succeeded, a snake with long equine ears sliding along the ridge just above them. It took foreverrrrrrrr to cross the ridge and escape out of sight, and by then she was marvelously impatient.
She has not quite rid herself of all the snake’s accoutrements yet – her long-legged strides are accompanied by a rhythmic rattling. It is when she chances a glance over her shoulder that she blows through them. Surprised and wide-eyed, she nearly sits down in an attempt to stop, her body shifting on its own accord when she tips head over heel and flips several times, a black and orange blur, before coming to rest at the base of a large tree. Hissing and spitting, she is almost immediately on her feet, pale grey eyes stormy.