Come little children // Chaos kids

[Sabra]

It is survival. Me or her. I know this, deep down, because it's a truth that's been resurrected in my mind. Golden palomino and gaudy lavender and pink blur in my eyes, a cackling voice goading me on from a safe distance. The scent of rotting meat is in my nose, cloying and throat-clotting. It's like blood, that way. 

Stuttering, halting words bounce off my mind. I snap at empty air, looking for an outlet for the violence. "You took her, you took her, and you're wearing her skin." I mutter, feeling the world slip unexpectedly beneath my feet. The glinting banners of my wings shoot out to balance myself, shedding a flurry of pastel down as they do. 

Never mind that she is far younger than Miela would have been by now. That they look nothing alike. My mind has blurred them together in a wobbly caricature, and the look of fear is the same no matter who's face is wearing it. 

Survive, that's what I've always done. Some days with more success than others. 

I ache, I throb, and I want it all to go away. A wordless scream rips through my throat. "Give it back!" I demand, in a voice I don't recognize. I lunge snapping, and instead of dull equine teeth, it's a raptor's cruel beak that seeks to tear the skin from her flesh. 

At long last, my exterior reflects the fractured depth of me. I am caught between bird and horse, in the most grotesque of ways. Feathers sprout randomly from my skin, my hooves are half-split into stubby claws. I am a thing that exists when it very clearly shouldn't, and I am weeping with the pain of it. 

@[Aela]

[Aela]

If it comes down to survival, then it will always be Aela.

She is so filled with a sense of purpose, with an idea that she is meant to do something great, that she won't allow herself to be reduced to something less than that. Some horses wait for saviors and to be saved and then there are horses like Aela (and some part of her thinks Sabra as well) that understand salvation is a myth.

Living will always come down to the core moments like this one. Whatever joys that this world has to offer, they can be taken from you if aren't prepared to fight to keep them. If you aren't prepared to argue and battle and hone yourself so sharp that the only choice is to cut your way through life and its hardships.

There are simpler joys: family, love, relationships. But all it takes is a Magician or some source of roque magic and what happens? Land can be recreated by the whim of a Dark God. Lives can be taken and erased with a blink of an eye from a powerful mage. Aela always intends to be better, to be the very best at whatever she attempts. That will come from moments like these, where the opalescent mare before her screeches and electrifies the air around them.

The pegasus seems to think that Aela has taken something from her and Aela tries to feed into her frenzy, feeding the frantic mare memories of the child that she had glimpsed in her mind. Had she hoped it would distract her? Had she hoped that it might lull her into dull grief? Had she hoped that she would grow wilder?

Their interaction becomes more savage by the second and Aela doesn't shy away. When the blue woman charges at her, Aela is quick to greet with a rage of her own. The palomino flashes memories (the top of Tephra's volcano and the lava in the crater below, the blast of Nerinian stone as Magic flies, the mighty trees of Taiga as they burn and blaze) in an attempt to overtake her sight and move away from the sharp beak that grazes against her shoulder. The striped girl is bleeding from a deep wound when she finally comes alive with flame and they dance and flicker on her golden skin in warning as she moves off to the side of Sabra, at an angle that will make it hard for the large bird-like creature to strike her again.

"I took nothing," she seethes and her ears disappear into the flaxen cornsilk of her mane. "You're the skin-changer," Aela accuses the other by firing a glimpse of @[Sabra] in this feral shape.

image credit to footybandit