07-10-2019, 11:51 PM
Many things can become reality, and the dappled mare is apt to maintain her bored demeanor for quite a lot of them. In what capacity would she see the flies? Would they be clear and sharp? She’d never believe them real. Would they be blurry like everything else? She might fall for it, but so what? Neverwhere is not disgusted by flies, and they often do cover everything, in some seasons, and some places.
She does pause when the other mare speaks after what appears to have been a moment of actually considering her question. Of course, Neverwhere can smell that she is not made of flies, can hear that she is not made of flies, unless they are unusually silent as well as inexplicably surviving the winter. One ear flicks, a better voice in her head reminding her not to underestimate magic.
Do not assume logic.
“I don’t know about convenient, it seems like flycatchers and frogs would become tiresome.”
Just one unfortunate summer day and you’d be down two legs, one ear, and half your tail when you re-swarmed into your horse-form. Not to mention only living a few months. No, you’d want some regenerative power to go along with that one or you wouldn’t last beyond your first season.
She drops her head when the other asks after the scarring, not out of embarrassment, or any effort to be coy, but because thinking about it directly makes it itch. Rubbing wet eyes against her knee, she wipes away the sand and vision improves in one eye, worsens in the other. This is so typical as to barely register, though she does blink several more times as though that will work to clear the problem. It does not.
“It is nothing.”
This isn’t entirely true. It would be hard to accurately describe the scars that run between eyes and muzzle as nothing, inflamed and angry as they are in the dry, freezing wind. The skin of her nostrils and lips is mottled with small sections of ropey scar tissue as though she had been burned horribly. And, in a sense, she had, but in perhaps the dullest of way.
“Nothing very interesting, rather. The sun burns it. The wind chaps it. Every year, it grows worse, or, I suspect it does. Bit hard to see.”
If Neverwhere could shrug, she would. The delicate pink skin of her muzzle and eyelids was never intended for exposure to sun, and while the winter itself does not worsen the scars, the dry winds do nothing to help. Similarly, the pale blue of her eyes makes them sensitive to the light, causes the squinting and the damaged vision. Causes the redness of the surrounding sclera and the dark tear staining on the bit of white hair remaining.
It was simply bad luck. Nothing could be so banal as these disfiguring scars.
She does pause when the other mare speaks after what appears to have been a moment of actually considering her question. Of course, Neverwhere can smell that she is not made of flies, can hear that she is not made of flies, unless they are unusually silent as well as inexplicably surviving the winter. One ear flicks, a better voice in her head reminding her not to underestimate magic.
Do not assume logic.
“I don’t know about convenient, it seems like flycatchers and frogs would become tiresome.”
Just one unfortunate summer day and you’d be down two legs, one ear, and half your tail when you re-swarmed into your horse-form. Not to mention only living a few months. No, you’d want some regenerative power to go along with that one or you wouldn’t last beyond your first season.
She drops her head when the other asks after the scarring, not out of embarrassment, or any effort to be coy, but because thinking about it directly makes it itch. Rubbing wet eyes against her knee, she wipes away the sand and vision improves in one eye, worsens in the other. This is so typical as to barely register, though she does blink several more times as though that will work to clear the problem. It does not.
“It is nothing.”
This isn’t entirely true. It would be hard to accurately describe the scars that run between eyes and muzzle as nothing, inflamed and angry as they are in the dry, freezing wind. The skin of her nostrils and lips is mottled with small sections of ropey scar tissue as though she had been burned horribly. And, in a sense, she had, but in perhaps the dullest of way.
“Nothing very interesting, rather. The sun burns it. The wind chaps it. Every year, it grows worse, or, I suspect it does. Bit hard to see.”
If Neverwhere could shrug, she would. The delicate pink skin of her muzzle and eyelids was never intended for exposure to sun, and while the winter itself does not worsen the scars, the dry winds do nothing to help. Similarly, the pale blue of her eyes makes them sensitive to the light, causes the squinting and the damaged vision. Causes the redness of the surrounding sclera and the dark tear staining on the bit of white hair remaining.
It was simply bad luck. Nothing could be so banal as these disfiguring scars.
Neverwhere
.........
