something wild calls you home

[aletta]

It takes them some time to travel from the Field to Nerine. They use it to her advantage as Scorch tells her of the things that have transpired in Beqanna since she was last here. Ten years, at least, though Aletta knows its been much longer. She hasn’t yet reached her second decade and it seems that more than one has passed since she last walked with bone-shaker and spoke with the water horse. 

Beqanna was stripped of her powers and then they were given back. (Pah - would they do without them? How would they ever survive on instinct and intellect alone?)

There were wars though Aletta spends little time considering them. She has known one in her lifetime and the thought that there has been several here... there is no point in tempting fates and reflecting on devastations that aren't her own. One war was enough for her - none would have been better. So many fates might have been spared - so many stories might have gone differently - if the one war she knew never happened. 

Scorch mentions a plague and that does make the silver mare look at her curiously, wanting to know what kind of disease afflicted the land. (She thinks of Brynn - of the disease that ate away her soul and turned her eyes red, made her hunger for blood and death.) They talk about many things and as the pair leaves the mountains of Hyaline behind them, they venture north with the River towards Taiga (not that Aletta knows this - a forest is just a forest in her mind). 

There is something to admire about the trees in this one. Aletta has been made to feel small many times in her life - the impossible views from mountain summits, the wide sweep of the ocean and starlight from shorelines. She has felt that way standing below a waterfall as she watched her heart take on promises that she had never thought he could keep, that the world would prove to be far too much for him to promise. 

(It was a shame he hadn’t traveled, she thought. He had been a prince and an heir and so sure of his place in his world that there was no one to teach him how small he really was. How big (and heavy) the world could be outside Paraiso.)

It takes them longer to travel through Taiga because she finds herself wanting to admire the trees. The pair separates so the pale mare can satisfy her wanderlust. Scorch keeps traveling to Nerine and Aletta falls in the embrace of her first love -  exploring. Distracted, she doesn’t see the pair of yearling twins who have stopped to stare at her. It had been a brief interlude - the striped one with wings had flared them, asking what she was doing while the other … the other had blue eyes that caught her off-guard. 

The wrong shade of blue, she told herself. The pair - twins, she assumed - put her in mind of her own grandsons because they were about the same age that Tarian and Liam had been the last time she saw them. She blamed the copper wings of the pegasus, for making her think of her pegasi grandsons. 

Aletta had been short with them - terse and tense - and it seemed to suit the green-eyed colt that she left so she had. She leaves them behind with the unexpected ache they had brought on. That feeling can stay there - aimless and drifting with the fog.

When she arrives (and crosses) through the craggy borders of Nerine, she thinks that perhaps it would have been best if she had stayed with Scorch. She doesn’t know where kingdom lines are. Aletta could be trespassing from where she stands and for all she knows, the reception she receives may not be a kind one.

@[Scorch] @[Neverwhere] let me know if you want anything changed