she got blood cold as ice
and a heart made of stone
The forest and the river are familiar. As a child she had played among the trees and alongside the water, the kind of games little girls play; crushing tree frogs underfoot and savaging fledgling birds who hop-hopped along the ground trying fruitlessly to use their untrained wings. Those same feathered appendages on her own back had been underdeveloped for much of her youth though one would not know it now. That intolerable frailty is behind her, outgrown like mothers and fear.
From her own side of the river Leokadia watches another woman who’s wings burn upon her back without smoke or tinder. It reminds her of a woman who interrupted her when she’d been trying to catch snowshoe hares once, with wings made of light that she had found interesting enough as an infant. Now the flames rippling and twisting are a different sort of glow, impressive and constantly changing so that there is something new to see each and every moment. Of course she doesn’t need anything from the ombre woman and so just watches her make her way along the river’s edge. The water is very fast in some places. Perhaps she will go in and Lo can see if the wings go out, if she gets washed away, how someone drowns.
Her head tips slightly, ears flicking atop her bare head. Her mane never returned after the plague and she does not miss it, her neck is short and strong does not require that particular decoration. Wings shift, worn loosely against her sides so that the long flight feathers nearly brush the ground. Her cremello coat is dingy, a winter’s filth that she has only occasionally bothered to scrub at with a bit of grooming or a roll in the snow but she has always rather enjoyed being muddy or bloody, or otherwise.
The high strung flame stops beside the river not too far from where Leokadia lingers. Stepping from the brambles to the opposite edge her pale eyes drift over the stranger and then she speaks and her voice is low, and sweet with very little inflection when she says. “Why don’t you go in?”
but she keeps me alive
she's the beast in my bones
Leokadia
@[brunhilde]