[private] so give me hope in the darkness

[Islay]

Perhaps she is foolish to assume he is good because he is star-marked.

Islay has seen the cosmos written on the skin of others and yet as she smiles at Mariner, it doesn't occur to her that he would not be kind. Her stars have always been selfless things, always threatening to fall from the heavens above to make room for another. She has never known starlight to be anything less than wonderful and moonlight to be anything less than magical and so she smiles to this stranger with all that wild wonder shining from her dark blue eyes and lifting the corners of her lips.

"I'm glad," she tells the stallion with the warmth remaining in her lilting voice. She says it like this is some great secret, some great discovery that she will keep between them. Wherever the stars above have gone, she won't tell anyone about his because the galaxies still need to shine somewhere.

Her white-and-blue face tilts up, looking towards this shadow. @[mariner], and suddenly her mind is filled with stormy seas and horizons that remain just out of reach. Her expression stills. It's an unsettling feeling for a girl who has been taught to reach for the moon. "I was looking for a friend," she explains (never thinking why she shouldn't, Islay offers her honesty as easily as she offers her friendship). She gives a small roll of her slender shoulders, "I haven't found her yet so I've just kept searching." The shores of Tephra had changed to the obscure jungle and then she had found herself here, had found Mariner.

"There are too many wicked things roaming about," she says about the monsters (and not just the creatures, some souls are just dark). It's an unsettling thought. Islay glances to his glowing knees again and finds that she likes his stars there. Should he ever stumble, he would have the heavens rise with him.

It makes her wonder: "Are you searching for something good?"