She knows she is a strange thing, even in a world filled with the strange. She knows it, but she refuses to flinch beneath it. It would not change who she is or what she had been born into. Her father hates the bones - the curse he has passed on to so many of his children. Azure does not however. Hating it would be like hating what makes her who she is, and she has not yet learned how to do that.
She may be a woman fully grown, but there is a naivety that still lingers around the soft lines of her face. She has lived a sheltered life - a gift from her parents. Even the darkness had not been enough to erase that from her. The monsters had been gruesome and terrible, but everyone she loves had made it through intact.
The wolf-marked mare does not even realize how truly blessed she is.
So Azure smiles at this stranger, kindness in her eyes and trust in her open features. “Yes,” she replies, agreeing with his assertion on waking up earlier. A faint, happy sound hums from her throat as she shifts her gaze back to the exploding colors. After a moment, she sighs softly, her contentment threaded through that gentle exhale. “I rarely miss them.”
You do that every morning? he asks, drawing Azure’s faintly surprised gaze back to him. It occurs to her she almost never has witnesses to her transformation. Not this one, at least. There is something almost private in that. An intimacy she hadn’t realized he now shares with her until this moment. Nodding faintly, she eyes him, something curious, almost pleasant swelling inside her chest.
He startles a brief, shy laugh from her with his admission that this is his first sunrise. How could he possibly have never seen a sunrise before?
“Truly?” she asks, unable to keep a note of incredulity from creeping in. She considers him for a moment, relaxing unconsciously beneath his smile. She returns it, unable to keep herself from responding in kind. “Then I am glad to have shared it with you.”
But then he asks if she shares her sunrises with strangers often, and a faintly embarrassed heat tingles across her chest. She ducks her gaze, not certain why that simple question had felt so probing. “No,” she replies quickly, because it is true. Only her family. And only because they understand what it is like. “You are the first.”
Azure
you take the shape of everything I'm drawn to
@lannister