i've got some damn bad intentions - luster

[Djinni]

djinni

The aftermath is too much for her, so she wishes the memory away. It will not be gone forever (she has learned long ago that nothing good comes of that) but she has at least till dawn to exist in blissful ignorance. That is still several hours away.

The forest around her is dark and quiet.

Overhead, the trees rustle and let through dancing beams of moonlight, illuminating the thin path that the slender mare traverses. She is moving downhill, away from the mountains where Sylva glides up to meet Pangea, away from the rocky ridgeline that holds a host of dark and winding caves. Djinni shudder involuntarily at the unbidden memory of dripping water and earthen walls, but whether it was in pleasure or pain she cannot discern. She brushes the thought away as forest starts to thin around her, eventually revealing one of the few meadows in Sylva.

Her arrival startles a herd of deer, and Djinni thoughtlessly mimics their tawny hides as she walks farther into the meadow, adding a sprinkling of white spots. They nearly match the stars overhead, and the mare raises her head to look up at them. The golden rings in her ears catch the moonlight as she does, and they clink softly against each other.

current appearance:
natural build - slim
whitetail deer fawn colored
sea-green eyes

[luster]

Her knowledge of the stars has grown intimate in the last many weeks – the position of twinkling constellations and the places they go to rest when dawn wakes and stretches and puts the sun back up in the sky. She is not entirely certain what it is that keeps her awake – if she dreams, she does not remember it anymore. But she is suspicious of why her mind hides them from her, now, when it never used to before.

Was it a dark man drenched in bone and blood, a man who placed burning kisses where they were not welcome, buried teeth in skin that gave so readily beneath the aggression. It would make sense if that were why, if it was him that came to find her each night, him that her mind hid from her. The wound on her neck was mostly healed by now, bare and pink and ugly beneath her mane, but she remembered when it was something else, something more. Can remember, too, the way skin sound when it is pulled apart.

But she thinks that maybe it is also the absence of a different dark man, a stranger who had curled around her in the night so that she could fall asleep to the rhythms of his heart. Maybe it is impossible to sleep without his mouth warm behind the crook of her ear, without her side pressed to his.

She sighs and shakes her head, blinking rapidly until the thoughts are gone, until there is only the dark and the night and the small flickering lights that guide her wandering feet. It takes a moment for the meadow to solidify around her, for the silhouettes of the slender, spotted deer to peel away from the shadows. But when her eyes do adjust to the dark again, she only has a second to watch them before something startles them into motion.

It is reflexive when she throws her light into the sky just above her head, a hundred softly flickering lights that drenched everything nearby in cool, milky light. She hears first the clink of the rings, a soft sound to match the stars, and then a second later can make out a new silhouette – still chest, still slender, but decidedly equine. This stranger lifts her face to the sky and it must be the quiet Luster thinks she can see in the shadows of this unknown face, or perhaps the strangeness of this skin on a horse, because suddenly she is closing the distance between them until she is close enough to reach out and touch her spotted spine.

She doesn’t though. Instead she is quiet, uncertain, her eyes soft bruises of almost black as she looks up into the sky, too. Her own stars flutter and fade, false stars like sunken ships, until it is only dark and starlight again. “Are you having a hard time sleeping, too?” She asks, soft and quiet, her voice as silver as the stars above them. Her nose drops and her face turns, and her eyes flow like water over the hollows and angles of the delicate chestnut face beside her. They catch on the rings in her ears, a soft, beautiful metal, and she remembers the clinking she had heard moments before. “Those are beautiful.” She says with a small smile, just the subtle quirk of delicate, white lips. Then, a little softer and with eyes that drop bashfully to her feet, “I’m Luster.”

She meant to lift her eyes again, to return them to that chestnut face or the stars overhead, but a flash of color catches her attention and she is instantly immobile. She looks for it again, that familiar flash, and it is as though her eyes remember where exactly to look because they land instantly on a pair of gold bangles, one around each foreleg, same again in the back. She sucks in a breath and suddenly she can move again, though it is only to lift her chin to the stranger and watch her with dark, worried eyes half hidden beneath the tangles of her dark mane.

I don't understand, that quiet face says, though she is as silent as the stars, are you trapped, too?

so we let our shadows fall away like dust

[Djinni]

djinni

The brightness draws her attention from the stars. She turns to look at the soft light as it hovers over the meadow, turns toward it as it comes closer. The pale lights flicker around a young mare, her blue freckled skin illuminated by the lights she must control. The light fades almost as soon as she’s had time to look at the stranger. She had reminded Djinni a little of her sisters, she thinks as her eyes adjust to the starlit darkness. Most young horses do; she has had little experience with children save her own siblings. They had never been alluring in anyway (loud, quick, requiring her to be responsible).

This girl is a little older though, most of the way to adulthood. Djinni feels no innate pressure to supervise, and it is a relief after the initial worry. The roan asks if she is having trouble sleeping and Djinni laughs, the sound as soft as the jingle of her rings. “I haven’t even tried sleeping yet,” she admits with a smile.

Her earrings are admired, stroking Djinni’s eternal sense of vanity, and she decides that she rather likes this soft spoken stranger. “I’m Djinni,” she replies. Her breath catches in her throat as she is distracted by the direction of Luster’s gaze. She expects the same sort of compliment as she had received about her earrings, and the worry in Luster’s dark eyes is startling.

“You don’t like them?” She asks, a certain bit of wryness in her crooked smile. Her voice is gentle though, and her eyes soft; she is not offended. “I’ve gotten rather used to them.” And she has… in the hundreds of thousands of hours since they first appeared. The chains they remind sweet Luster of are far newer, but they have always looked the same. She had wanted it that way.

She’s not sure she does anymore.

“We’ve not met before.” She says rather than risk thinking too much more. “Are you new to Sylva?.” Her smile is simpler now – friendly, open, untroubled.

current appearance:
natural build - slim
white tail deer fawn colored
sea green eyes

[luster]

A pair of small blue ears flick forward to capture the sound of that laugh before it has a chance to disperse amongst the stars. I haven’t even tried sleeping yet, the woman says and her smile is enough to coax something similar from Lusters pale, white mouth. “It’s late though,” she says, worried, as though this has not been made obvious by the moon and the stars and the endless black of night, “are you alright?” The worry in her chest is reflexive, easy, and she cannot help but wonder what it is that keeps her sleep at bay.

She is distracted by a name, Djinni, and she smiles again quietly because somehow the name matches the soft gold of those earrings and Luster finds she likes the balance. “It suits you.” She says, eyes bright and luminous, gentle when they drift from those earrings and back to that delicate chestnut face.

But the worry she feels when she finds those bangles is not appeased by the wryness of the smile that greets her. You don’t like them? The mare asks, and Luster can only cling to her silence because the truth feels to rude to say out loud. No. She thinks instead, vehement and confused, but she is careful not to let too much of that feeling slip across her face. Once she might’ve thought them beautiful, solid sunlight, burnished and bright, but now it means something different and she finds that they make her feel a little sick. I’ve gotten rather used to them.

Lusters small head lilts slightly, tipping sideways as confusion leaks like shadow across the marbled blue of her face. “Gotten used to them?” She repeats it like a question, and she knows she is digging, prying, but she cannot help herself, “you haven’t always had them?” Maybe the worry in her voice will soften the intrusiveness of what she asks.

But Djinni shakes her off with a new question, light and easy and Luster doesn’t even notice when it happens. “We haven’t.” She agrees, and the smiles that appears on those starshine lips so soft, so open. “I moved here just recently with my family. I met a girl in the meadow once - Rora,” she pauses and her brow furrows in quiet question, “do you know Rora? She told me a little about Sylva, and I fell in love with the sound of it.” She pauses again and to keep her eyes from flicking back down to those gleaming bangles, she lifts her chin to the sky to lose herself in the constellations above them. “What about you, Djinni. Have you lived here long?There are stars in her voice, silver and lonely, and when she chances a glance back at the beautiful chestnut spotted mare, they flash in the brown of her eyes, too.

so we let our shadows fall away like dust

[Djinni]

i wrote this on my phone so sorry for mistskeasss

"It is late," she agrees, finding the concern on the girl's face and in her gentle voice quite touching. "But I rather like the stars." And she does, but she rarely looks up at them anymore. They are shielded from her by the thick canopy of Sylva most nights. Here they are visible, and in the few other forests, and above the pool of black water whose moisture still clings to the ends of her coppery tail.

She flicks away her tail and her thoughts and tells Luster that: "I'll be fine. Just thinking; it's easier to do at night." There's a question in her gaze, but it's a simple one - rhetorical. There is less going on when the sun falls, less rushing, less racing, less responsibility.

Perhaps there should be more responsibility, she thinks as she twists her head to free it of cricks and feel the pull of bruises she'd not noticed before. They span the length of her neck, remnants of a stallion's grip that match the hoof scrapes along her sides. She hadn't wished long enough, Djinni realizes.

But she is not alone to deal with the the aftermath anymore; she has Luster to distract her. She refocuses her attention on the girl's face, watches the confusion mar her pretty expression and reaches out without thought to brush it away. The gesture is soft and fleeting, for she pulls away quickly at the pang of memory of her last such touch.

"I've had them for a long time." She replies, "As long as I can remember." There's no harm in her origin story, she supposed, it's just not told too often. "I was not born alive. My mother made a deal to return the life to my body from what had taken it, and these are a reminder of that. These and...other things." There is a purposeful mystery to the trailing off of her words; she does so love suspense.

Luster asks about a girl named Rora, one that Djinni doesn't know. It does sound like something Arrya might name her child though, so the chestnut mare assumes that must be who Rora is. "I don't know her, but I know her mother." She replies, unconsciously emphasizing the generation between them. "Though I'm glad she was able to tell you about Sylva. It's wonderful here." And it is, it really is.

Djinni follows Luster's gaze to the stars and watches them for a while as well, thoughtlessly shifting back to her pied grullo coat as she does. She is asked how long she has lived here, and she answers: "Maybe a year or so?" She's never been good with seasons and telling time, and there's something stirring inside her as proof. "Stillwater would know. I brought him with me." Her tone is light, thoughtless; he seems the type of creature to track time. He considers himself trapped here, surely he carves the days into his cave like a convict. The idea of that amuses her. Not masochistically so: she simply enjoys the idea of him grumbling to himself in the darkness.