[open] i've got some damn bad intentions

[Longear]

She had been the opposite when she was intact. Now, with that soul bled from her body (and mind – she still cannot wrap her fingers around that unrelenting quiet), she is more ostentatious than ever. A strange thing to imagine, given the small, round, wild, grey pony that winds her way through the run-off of winter and the rugged banks of this strange new world.

So perfectly, utterly normal and plain. She is short and stocky, like a stone stuck in a turbid river – she looks made for the wilderness, and so she is. Moss-grown and flower-scented, it is hard to imagine the magic that had gone into crafting something so hewn of nature.

She is the Mother’s thing, through and through.

But the Mother had made something special that day.

Before, she could be so small. So out-of-the-way, that few likely even managed a glance her way. She could be nimble-swift, through nooks in brambles and underbrush. She could be hidden, but watchful. Cautious (so cautious). She, with her primal agouti, could blend in; except when in danger, where she could use her bright, jolly scut like a flash-bang to disorient her pursuer.

She might not inspire much, either way, but for in the heart of that coyote, because they could share stories of meddling gods and goddesses. They came together in the queerest kind of perfection, carnivore and prey animal.

That has always been enough.

She feels awkward in this body. She hadn’t before (they had learned to be comfortable in each other’s skin, that rabbit and her), but this feels like a forced thing. An imprisonment, of sorts. So when she comes to that magicless djinn, her coat still fuzzy from the winter months, her daughters left behind in Tephra to play, it is with a similarly fragmented feeling (the dark and brooding mountain at her shoulder, far away, holding those things that would replenish them both). “Hello,” she smiles, and it is a pretty (albeit tired) smile.

She wonders if she has lost anything, but it’s no use. Her severed soul is up there, alone and wailing, and there is naught to be done. “I’m Longear. I come from Tephra,” it would have been the Jungle, and then the Gates. Now they are memories, both. 

She still has that jolly, cottontail, in place of a horse’s coarse, long one. That she had been allowed to hold like a keepsake and a promise. Perhaps, for the first time in their shared times, she is the stranger of the two because of it.