[private] Imitation Game (Woolf)

[Brine]

Rain trickles down mercilessly. The soft touch of water rolling down her ribs in steady streams, her shoulders quivering from the soft breeze. The ground is tarnished with an array of leaves; yellow, orange, and red all littering the floor.  There is a softness about the air around her, like how the glow of an overcast sky leaves a muted tone on her normally vibrantly painted blue hide. It is as if a painter has come in and smudged the scenery, leaving a soft focal where the dim light seeps through thickly branched trees. [/font]
 
She hides because she fears the social obligation of lingering in the open. The fear that she will be pushed to discuss things she does not quite understand. Things that do not make sense to her. Kings. Queens. Recruitment. It all blended into a mush of words that seeped out of her ears.
 
Her stomach sinks as the low rumble of thunder echoes. Her jaw tightens, the flash of lightning following thereafter. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to stand in the middle of the green hills, surely no one would be stupid enough to linger within striking distance.
 
No one wants death.
 
It is an interesting thought though, a thought Brine finds herself thinking about perhaps a little too often. The curiosity of afterwards, what happens and when. Do you linger in the ground, your sole bound to the body which it inhabited for eternity? Falling into a never ending slumber, a permanent coma? Or does your soul lift from the host which it occupied and find its way to another dimension. Is that dimension better than here?  
 
Any dimension would be better than here, a world that had taken both of her parents from her reach and left her to fend by herself.
 
Left her to be taunted and teased, looked at in disgust.
 
Not everyone is open to her appearance. Wings outstretching in long fans at her side, she waves off the beads still clinging to her feathers. She is an odd creature, a mixture of horse and bird. A terrifying mutation that caused her to walk along talons and not hooves. A mutation that gave her a feathered coat rather than sleek hair. Her ability to lay eggs. A horse-eagle mix.
 
It is not true. Beauty is not from within.

B r i n e

@woolf

[woolf]

the wolves will chase you by the pale moonlight
{drunk and driven by the devil's hunger}

She, like many these days, is not what she seems.

He watches her as she slips through the crowds, as Beqanna envelops her, welcoming her back to the fold. He watches as she avoids the majority of souls, as her expressions play across her face. Of course, he does not need her expressions to read her thoughts; he could just as easily dip into her mind and sort that out for himself, should the fancy strike him. 

But, for reasons unknown to him, he abstains. Not because he has suddenly been struck with the need to respect privacy (he is above and beyond such things, for he is more of the cosmos then the earth), but because it would more interesting to puzzle it out for himself. Things these days were so often terribly boring. It does him no harm to entertain himself.

And so, he moves forward, the sky splitting open above him and the autumn rain beginning to fall. For a moment, he tips his heavy head back and considers the storm before he brings it back down again, his heavy footfall bringing him closer and closer to the strange mare. Physically, he is impressive. He was an easy 17 hands and broad across the chest, his head heavy and figure imposing. But it wasn’t the strength in his back that made him powerful, made him dangerous. It was what simmered beneath the surface.

“You have picked a strange time to make this open area your home.”

The rain continues to fall, but he himself remains dry, the water diverting itself around him. He tilts his head to consider her, dark green eyes studying her from beneath his forelock, before he shrugs. “Although I have seen stranger things in my time.” 

He does not offer his name or say anything more—just watches.

Woolf