Loathing crawls up the back of his throat; it is hot and violent, his reaction to this place. No land should affect him like so but the meadow is spun up in a web of love and loss that he feels every time he stands on the edge of it. His distaste is snorted out, blown through large red nostrils that gap and drink in the air around him in great gulps to fill the big lungs inside his brawny chest - Mandan is a big stallion, bay and hulking, and more than a little menacing with the horns atop his head. They spiral upwards, two alike, hard and sharp at the fierce tip as they come twisting to a point.
He has never had to make use of them - once, he entertained the blackest thoughts to ever sashay through his head, of skewering her breast with the pair of them. Only the innocent faces of his children (not hers’, thank the stars! They only ever had the one before she chose power over love and made sure he knew he was too lowly for her - she would always love the Falls first, and it’s King second, but always more than she had ever loved him and he can hear her flowery voice from long ago, plucking lies out of thin air) had stopped him from such ill action.
Why then, is he here now?
He cannot stomach the meadow much, these days. But he is there, lurking as he did the first time, in the shadows and the trees. He had tried hard to keep to himself, but there had been something carefree in him then that is lacking now - he is hard, too hard to enjoy the way the sunlight paints his skin in low heat as it tries to fend off the snowy cold. Even the snow is no match for him, his stride too rangy to be caged in by the tricksy drifts of snow that are shored up solid and deceiving. He barrels his way through them, breaking the icy crusts wide open, before disappearing into the trees again where the snow is softer underfoot since it is hardly fallen here.
Mandan comes to a stop just beneath a birch tree; the lowest reaching branches of which tangle-touch his horns and he just stands there, peering into the snowy dusk with eyes black and hard.
MANDAN
 I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
Adaline had never liked the meadow much either, but for different reasons.
When she stood here, Adaline felt traces of her mother—traces of her father. Her mother had been dead and still smelled of the ocean when she had given birth to Adaline and her twin; Tabytha brought back from death long enough to give life to her last children and then lead their father to their now shared watery grave. It was one of her earliest memories and it was made up entirely of her senses beyond her vision. She remembered the salt in the air. The feel of her brother against her side. The grass tickling the delicate flesh of her belly. The kiss on her poll. It remained a marriage of life and death here, and she found herself battling grief whenever she stood in its embrace.
That did not change today—the mare of glass feeling on the sidelines as much today as she ever did. In her heart, she still thirsted for adventure as much as she had as a child, but it was a thirst tempered by knowledge. Adventure was not without cost. She had discovered love, but it was not a love that she was meant to have; she had discovered battle, of a kind, but the only bloodshed had cut her to the very core.
So while she hungers for it, she also now fears it—leaving her landlocked in her own desire. It is this mixture of both need and fear that keeps her ghosting along the edges of the meadow, her steps delicate and tattered, papery wings trailing lightly behind her. It was only when she sees him, wild in a way she didn’t understand, that she convinces herself to step out of the shadows. Her eyes do not leave the horns curving majestically, dangerously, out of his skull; they were unlike anything that she had ever seen.
For a second, she imagines what he had once—the ends piercing through flesh as deftly as a knife through butter—but she finds she is not afraid.
“Hello,” a greeting as delicate as gossamer, voice barely audible as she nears him. “I hope I am not intruding,” her lips curve into a dreamy smile as she finally allows her gaze to drift from his horns to his eyes. “I have just never seen anyone like you before.” She does not notice the hardness to him, the stiffness in the way he held himself. “My name is Adaline.”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
An odd sensation crawls down his throat, like suffocation - like a lack of air, it claws at his lungs and gut until he shakes the idea of it right out of his head. His horns clack against the branches, still tangle-touching as he blinks away the blight of emotion that grows dark and horrid on his heart. Or blinks away as much of it as he can, because it remains, a small fetid stain that spreads through him until his loathing for the meadow sits fully and heavy inside him, almost as if it is another self that crowds his skin, pushing at the edges and emerging in the raw shape of a shadow thrown large against the dusky snow.
It is a battle he that he loses to pure apathy as the snow banks itself against his knees, settles deep and hard around him. He does not feel the cold, even though it is ever warm in his canyon tucked away secretly in a corner of the badlands. Nor does he spare a single thought towards the trio of mares that occupy it - they tolerate him as much as he does them, and it is through mutual toleration one another that they are able to coexist in such balmy splendor at the edge of the desert now thrust under layers of water and angry magic. The goings-on around him have not been missed but he spares little thought towards them; the swell of night is too snowy and quiet to do little but numb him, freezing out bit by bit, all the time they shared there as he courted her and she swore her love to him.
Lies, his black heart murmurs to him. All lies, and he’d love to cut the tongue right out of her queenly pink mouth if he could. He can still hear the first I love you in the wind as it tumbles around him until he shakes his head again, sending snow flying and the branches clattering against his horns noisily, and thereby drawing undue attention to himself in the form of a small red mare that has an odd delicacy to her and a papery whisper to her wings, the latter of which caught his attention as much as his horns catch hers’. His nerves feel raw as she comes close, smiles and talks and finally meets his eyes with her own that seem to have gone dreamy and soft in a way that he is unfamiliar with. He has never seen a look quite like that and he almost thinks her daft, feeling pity claw at his throat.
There is a certain fragility to her that ought to have aroused some instinct in him to shelter her, but he seems rather bereft of it at the moment and only stares back at the mare, not quite sure why she looks so out of place amidst the snow. She has a delicate stiffness to her that is much more refined than his own, almost like she was made of something other than flesh and blood… he doesn’t realize that he has stretched out his nose and come so close as to almost brushing it against her own, until he snorts himself back to the moment at hand and pulls his head back to where the branches hug his horns tight and noisily to themselves.
He almost tells her that she is intruding, because that would be an almost easy end to a conversation hardly begun. Mandan is cut to the quick by her honest admittance of having never seen anyone like him and he’s not sure what she means by that… the horns maybe, as it dawns on him slowly and he lowers his head a fraction to where she could better study the addax horns without the addition of the branches catching up in the two hard spires of horn. “Well Adaline, I don’t suppose I’ve seen anything quite like you either.” he admits, and not because of the wings that droop by her sides, tattered and papery and so like the leaves in autumn, red and dry and ruined. It is the odd sheen to her skin that makes him faintly curious of her, of what she is, and if she is like that on the inside too; he doesn’t know it is glass but finds his mouth opening and shutting on that itch to feel along her ribs and spine, to poke and prod until he discovers exactly what it is that she is made of.
Mandan wants to know just what the oddness is that sets her apart from all the rest; that makes him more tolerant of her in the dark, as if that made all the difference, because she was a small red candle giving off heat and light in the snowy dusk that beckoned to him from within the shadows that keep threatening to steal back her flicker of dreamy daft life that for once, stirs him from his thoughts of a love betrayed.
MANDAN
I'm wasted, losing time; I'm a foolish, fragile spine
I want all that is not mine; I want him but we're not right
To love was to lie.
She had lied to Contagion when she had told him that it did not matter—that the months spent mourning a death she had caused did not matter. She had lied because nothing had mattered more. She had cut herself on the glass of him splintering and shattering on the falls floor. She had pressed herself into the shards of it, knowing that it was he who cut her and that it was right in some way. She had caused this; she had made him into this. He had been whole and beautiful and perfect; he had been in love.
She had been selfish and silly and screamed out the ugly disease of her heart.
And he had died for it.
And she had told him that what happened after had not mattered.
It was a lie that she tucked into her heart because she could not bear to tell him. She could not bear to tell him how she had wandered and begged and pleaded for a solution. She could not bear to look him in the eye that she had found one and that solution was why he stood and breathed now—but that the solution did not come without a cost. It was a heavy one, and one she could not bring herself to tell him about.
She couldn’t force herself to watch his eyes change when he learned the truth.
She would not survive it.
So she lied—to him, to herself, to the world. She lied and spent hours by his side, knowing it was wrong to love her brother as she loved him but not caring. She spent hours by his side and, when they were apart as they were now, she let herself go dreamy. She lied to herself and let herself believe in the gossamer world that she had weaved for herself as a child. It was so much easier than looking at the stark truth of it.
“Most haven’t,” she says with a smile, shrugging her thin shoulders. “Although most do their best to look at anything but me.” She didn’t mind that truth; it had long since lost its edges. She remembered some of her first wanderings in the meadow—when disgusted eyes had cut her to her core. When it left her uncomfortable with tears pricking the corners of her eyes. Now, she simply accepted it. As much as she accepted the naked curiosity in his own gaze. “Glass is not made to survive as long as I have,” she admits, wondering at how easy that is for her to know. “I think that impossibility makes others uncomfortable.”
in the darkness, I will meet my creators
and they will all agree that I'm a suffocator
To love is to die.
He has not loved since she ripped out his heart and spit all over it.
With her spittle, and the adoration in the eyes of his flesh and blood, he glued the pieces of his heart back together but it was too late, the poison had set in deep and Mandan was forever changed.
(If he had only stayed, never heeded the wind’s call to wander, he might be queen’s consort and still her lover but she tossed him aside like yesterday’s trash and played the hurt abandoned mare so easily. He never thought it within her to do that, but she loved her big spotted king more, and he loved nothing and not again.)
He had only truths now - harsh truths, a boorish mouth and enough pain in him to make his joints ache as if arthritic. Mandan would prefer a crippled life of hermitage but instead, he surrounds himself by those that care as little as he does - they all just want a haven from life, and somehow, they’ve intruded upon his. Or, he has offered them intrusion to his badlands, country as rugged as his face is as it stays turned to her in the dark. She glows, as if lit from within by heart’s blood and something else that he cannot put a name to because he lacks it, passion or purpose, maybe. He is bereft of either, to be honest, and while capable of a lie, he cannot lie to himself except where she-who-shall-not-be-named is concerned.
(He lied to himself, like she does - like they all do.)
“I suppose not,” he concedes to her statement and her shrug; she is altogether something else that is not likely to have come down amongst them often or very much - like a star, but not. Her next statement intrigues him despite his best efforts to show little to no interest in her, but he has already been caught in a subdued state and he is not his usual harsh self in her glimmering presence. “Why not?” and he cannot help the note of curiosity that has attached itself to his words; why do they not look at her? A horn-tip knocks against a branch above, knicking it, as he adjusts his head to regard her further. How could they not marvel at her, at the light she makes that shivers across her skin? Maybe that was starlight on glass, rounding out hips and ribs, smoothing down her skin, trembling across the make of her that made his breath hitch in his throat.
He cannot lie to himself, her beauty outshines even the salmon-bay of a mare that he once admired - loved, even. Mandan snorts to himself, not usually given to how one looks - beauty hides the cruel heart within, and he knows this all too well, as he lifts his head and tangles his horns further into the branches. He can feel a twig poke his head and he does not jerk away from the subtle pain of it; it serves to enforce the idea that beauty causes pain and even the delicate look of her is not enough to make him fall prey to the things that flare up in his brain, bright hot spots of things he will give no name to - not this night, maybe not ever. Glass, she says, and he almost murmurs it back to her but his mouth is sworn to silence as he swallows back the word that dances on his tongue.
“Impossibility should make no one uncomfortable in this day and age,” he mutters, feeling a stab of something horrid in his heart. By now, not a single one of them should be shocked by the unexpected - the land is rife with things that should by no rights exist but they do, and she is not any stranger than some of them that lurk out there. He cannot help himself though, Mandan is given to his impulses and they tell him to comfort her, so he does with a quick touch of his muzzle to her neck. She feels hard and smooth but alive, so very alive! That shocks him more than anything else about her does, that she feels as hot as the heat that she gives off in the dark, a tiny odd glow that should hurt his eyes but doesn’t.
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