[open] i've got some damn bad intentions

[Djinni]

He must be gone.

It is the only explanation, she thinks, the only way they can both be in this minuscule bit of land and yet unable to find each other. She cannot blink to him, cannot picture his yellow face and appear at his side in a puff of golden sand. She can do nothing at all.

She can be a horse, yes, but that is nothing.

She is just a mouse-grey mare with a splash of white across her withers, small and slender with a face as open and as pretty as a summer sky. Her appearance does not inspire curiosity, her actions do not gather onlookers. She feels dull and empty, and she will not be at all surprised if no one wants her.

The spring sunlight warms her back, and a light breeze tussles the black and white strands of her mane. From where she stands in the center of the Feild she can see the Mountain to the west, and the slowly widening lands where the mist has begun to recede. It will never shrink back so far as to reveal her Desert, she knows; that is gone forever.

Instead, she will find somewhere else to call home. She has no powers anymore, nothing to tell her where she is welcome and what places she should avoid. She can only wait, wait and see what this new Beqanna might want from a djinn with no magic.

[Longear]

She had been the opposite when she was intact. Now, with that soul bled from her body (and mind – she still cannot wrap her fingers around that unrelenting quiet), she is more ostentatious than ever. A strange thing to imagine, given the small, round, wild, grey pony that winds her way through the run-off of winter and the rugged banks of this strange new world.

So perfectly, utterly normal and plain. She is short and stocky, like a stone stuck in a turbid river – she looks made for the wilderness, and so she is. Moss-grown and flower-scented, it is hard to imagine the magic that had gone into crafting something so hewn of nature.

She is the Mother’s thing, through and through.

But the Mother had made something special that day.

Before, she could be so small. So out-of-the-way, that few likely even managed a glance her way. She could be nimble-swift, through nooks in brambles and underbrush. She could be hidden, but watchful. Cautious (so cautious). She, with her primal agouti, could blend in; except when in danger, where she could use her bright, jolly scut like a flash-bang to disorient her pursuer.

She might not inspire much, either way, but for in the heart of that coyote, because they could share stories of meddling gods and goddesses. They came together in the queerest kind of perfection, carnivore and prey animal.

That has always been enough.

She feels awkward in this body. She hadn’t before (they had learned to be comfortable in each other’s skin, that rabbit and her), but this feels like a forced thing. An imprisonment, of sorts. So when she comes to that magicless djinn, her coat still fuzzy from the winter months, her daughters left behind in Tephra to play, it is with a similarly fragmented feeling (the dark and brooding mountain at her shoulder, far away, holding those things that would replenish them both). “Hello,” she smiles, and it is a pretty (albeit tired) smile.

She wonders if she has lost anything, but it’s no use. Her severed soul is up there, alone and wailing, and there is naught to be done. “I’m Longear. I come from Tephra,” it would have been the Jungle, and then the Gates. Now they are memories, both. 

She still has that jolly, cottontail, in place of a horse’s coarse, long one. That she had been allowed to hold like a keepsake and a promise. Perhaps, for the first time in their shared times, she is the stranger of the two because of it.

[Djinni]

The grey mare reminds her of someone, but Djinni cannot quite put her hoof on it.

It mustn't be a bad someone, because the smile that she returns to the grey mare is quick and easy. It is not often that she finds someone smaller than she is in her natural form, and for a moment Djinni wonders if this must be what it was like to be born tall. But then she laughs it away - she knows what it is like to be tall, and it is no different than it is being a pony.

"Hello Longear." Djinni replies, her voice as soft as her smile. "Tell me about Tephra?" she asks, the name unfamiliar but pleasant on her tongue. It must be a place beyond the mist, once of the lands that Beqanna had chosen to regift to her children.