Cressida does not understand tension—is not skilled in the art of navigating it. She did not even understand the wilderness that lived in the brambles of her mother’s heart. She didn’t know what it was to yearn for the horizon or feel the constant pressure to go faster, fly higher, want more. Instead, she knows the ease and the quiet of the evening hours. The slumber of the night being the rhythm to which she lived her life. She lived in the lulls and in the exhales. She lived in the moments where most others closed their eyes—constant to wander the wood by herself, save the nights when her brother walked alongside her.
So she only knows ease in this interaction with the strange stallion, her panic quickly fleeing to be replaced with a calm knowing. Her heart trips slightly at his use of the strange word to explain the moon, to name herself, and she tucks it away for later—content to hold onto that for safekeeping.
“I have never envied my brother his sunlight,” she answers honestly, her face an open book. “The moon and the sun love one another—they do not attempt to drown out what complements them best.” But his compliment is not unnoticed and her heart warms beneath the attention of it. The light around them grows just a touch more radiant in response and she tips her head up to catch the glittering light of it before sending out a thread of it to him and the small companion who now slithers around his ear.
A warm wash of it under his chin and then down his neck, rippling along the length of him.
And then a smile.
“I am Cressida.”
@[Chemdog]