Her obedience is expected. The expedience with which the child understands this serves her well and the violence that is waiting behind the stallion’s lips ebbs back, fading away into the preternatural stillness of his demeanor. Not gone, only crouched down into the shadows.
The icy wind breaks around the tree and pulls at his the course tangle that false across his broad forehead, he has raised his head a degree to lock eyes with the spindly girl. For the first time (though not the last) he considers that some unseen thing must have delivered this gift to him. Perhaps a demon amused by his lurking under the cloak of night sent him a shroud. Those creatures did often have the most base ideas of a good joke. He does not have any reason to leave her question unanswered, though his reply will not be a balm to the wounds he has already inflicted. “Would you rather die alone in these woods, Shroud? You are mine now, and I am yours. I will keep you warm, and you will grow up. You will not be a dead thing in the trees for the foxes to eat. You will be a girl who does not get lost in the forest. You will be a woman who knows not to let her children wander into the night. I have taken you, and you will be better for it.”
He holds her brown-eyed gaze after he has finished speaking, the inevitable barbs in his words have dropped into her little ears and fallen to cling to her narrow shoulder and he would like to watch how she bares them. The morning is very far, and children are taken by sleep as easily as they are taken by death, and so he does not demand she look for rest but allows it to find her when it will. In the early light of morning they will sink into deeper forest, and Beqanna will think her as dead as the thing that lies in the trees nearby.
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves
as though we were drowning inside our hearts
@[shroud] I finally got him to come out, and apparently i think getting eaten when dead by foxes is really scary.
