06-28-2020, 03:05 PM
Maybe what she's looking for is not there, anymore, either. Maybe the sense of guilt and betrayal that she has been holding so tightly to her chest has been a misunderstanding. Her father's domain had never been her own, and her survival in the frozen tundra of the Isle had been in spite of that fact, not proof that she belonged there. Beryl absently plays with the shadows at her feet, they swirl and come together into small shapes, yellow-eyed birds and rodents and reptiles in miniature, to hunt and swallow small stones in the soil so that the bits of rock rain down from a little patch of floating darkness with a sound like falling water as Eurwen relates her story. The young palomino does not know much about the Plague, it's an event whose effects dug great swaths into the foundation of modern Beqanna, and yet it has little meaning to newer generations unaffected by the horror of it. She knows that such a thing existed but not the way it twisted their lives, not the way it shaped the kingdoms as they are now. Life with Leilan had had different lessons.
When the spotted mare stops, Beryl does, too. The shadow creatures run together like water, wind up her leg and twist themselves into her mane, threading the white of it with darkness and those unblinking yellow eyes.
"Both. Nobody that doesn't want both of those things will stay very long. Even the Burning only drove a handful out of the snowdrifts, though I hear it's a little busier since my father took it over." Then she pauses, her head tilting thoughtfully to the side as Eurwen claims to no longer be a princess or an heir, and Beryl wonders if perhaps she knows the other mare's father after all, but it makes her heart skip a beat. She had referred so casually to his de-throning. "The only other horse we ran into out there was Jesper, he's not your father, is he? He tried to show me how to shift back into a horse once, but it didn't take."
It had taken the painted mare's dreamworld to do that.
The memory of it makes her belly ache, the memory of regurgitating the darkness from her own body, the strange physics of that place of metaphor that had allowed her to do it, allowed her to flip herself inside-out until she was a horse again. It had unblocked her from switching between the shapes, made her something stronger, better, than what she had been before. It had triggered the slow trudge to acceptance of that predatory nature humming in the corners of her mind. Her tail lashes her flanks, suddenly anxious again between the presumed insult to Eurwen and the memory of that strange day by the fae mountain, and the darkness around her grows thicker, as though a cloud has settled above her - and only her. She shadows in her mane hiss in her ears, mistaking the threat, but Eurwen will not likely notice their voices.
When the spotted mare stops, Beryl does, too. The shadow creatures run together like water, wind up her leg and twist themselves into her mane, threading the white of it with darkness and those unblinking yellow eyes.
"Both. Nobody that doesn't want both of those things will stay very long. Even the Burning only drove a handful out of the snowdrifts, though I hear it's a little busier since my father took it over." Then she pauses, her head tilting thoughtfully to the side as Eurwen claims to no longer be a princess or an heir, and Beryl wonders if perhaps she knows the other mare's father after all, but it makes her heart skip a beat. She had referred so casually to his de-throning. "The only other horse we ran into out there was Jesper, he's not your father, is he? He tried to show me how to shift back into a horse once, but it didn't take."
It had taken the painted mare's dreamworld to do that.
The memory of it makes her belly ache, the memory of regurgitating the darkness from her own body, the strange physics of that place of metaphor that had allowed her to do it, allowed her to flip herself inside-out until she was a horse again. It had unblocked her from switching between the shapes, made her something stronger, better, than what she had been before. It had triggered the slow trudge to acceptance of that predatory nature humming in the corners of her mind. Her tail lashes her flanks, suddenly anxious again between the presumed insult to Eurwen and the memory of that strange day by the fae mountain, and the darkness around her grows thicker, as though a cloud has settled above her - and only her. She shadows in her mane hiss in her ears, mistaking the threat, but Eurwen will not likely notice their voices.
@[Eurwen]