04-04-2017, 07:52 PM
Baptiste haunts the riverside; it is all that she knows, all that she is comfortable and capable of trusting. The river will not lead her astray, but their disused trails and dung heaps do. She wrinkles her pretty little nose at the scents on the air - rain is coming, far off, but it is coming. The distant rumble of thunder confirms as much as the far off scent of petrichor does, since she can never trust her eyes - they show her nothing, only darkness, and to others, a pale bluish milkiness of the truly blind. For a moment, her head points in the direction of the slow building storm before it cranes back towards the river, blind in its pendulum swing until it settles on something that she’ll never quite be able to see, just shadows - always shadows, no shapes, only smooth darkness and memories of her father’s lips on her blue speckled brow.
She thought of him - often, but no amount of thinking made him materialize out of the shadows and pull her close in an embrace. Thinking, or rather the remembering of him only made her sadder and the smiles came less and less to her face, leaving her somber even in the summer, - a thing that she only knew of because of how the heat built, slickening her skin in some places like under her armpits and along her neck if she stood still for far too long beneath the unmerciful sun. She knew the turn of the seasons because of how the temperatures affected her, or that’s how she knew now. Before, she had only to riffle through someone’s brain and pluck the ideas of summer and winter right out of their pretty unperturbed minds and they never knew of her silent invasion.
Baptiste is not sure which she misses most - her father or her telepathy, and only the latter because of it’s usefulness to her in her blind fumbling state. It was the only crutch the world had given her and then it was quite simply gone, and she felt like a piece of her had been stolen so expertly and decisively from her that she’d hardly even felt it going! That mountain and those fairies had deft hands in their taking, but she gives them little thought and even littler blame - what was done, was done and no amount of hoping otherwise could change it all back. Still, she felt naked and a little afraid in that, because if not for the river… well, she had nothing else and hardly trusted herself despite the fact that she was a plucky enough thing.
The little blue roan mare almost thought of leaving the river to explore the meadow, or not quite explore but the hot heat of the summer day was starting to produce an itch in her still-shedding pelt and a remembrance of nearby trees beckoned sweetly if only to soothe said itch. It is as she moves in shambling indecision from one direction to the next, that she takes no note of the approaching mare and blunders into her by sheer accident. “Oh no!” she blurts out, instantly apologetic by the expression alone on her face as her head shunts blindly from one side to the other in that same familiar pendulum motion that she is so accustomed to. It stills for just a moment, “I really didn’t mean to bump into you.” she amends, a little more smoothly as she musters some sense of decorum her father would have naturally instilled in her.
“I just… I just didn’t see you there.”
It is a lame half-stuttered statement but no closer to the truth than before; she couldn’t have seen the other horse even if she tried to. Baptiste should have known though, should have smelled or sensed, but she was too caught up in her nonsensical fears about leaving the river’s side.Baptiste
tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.