loving you isn't the right thing to do; how can I ever change things that I feel?

  Weariness settles into the very pit of her bones as her tired limbs push her forward, fatigue wearing into her. Her heartbeat thrums heavily within her chest as a surge of hormones flood through her veins, an agitating side effect of what stirs and develops deep within her womb. The dawn of the breaking sun had long since waned into yet another dusk, the light giving way to the heavy blanket of stars overhead and the looming moon tucked somewhere off towards the horizon - alas, there is nothing but impenetrable darkness and thick, stagnant humidity to receive her. The moisture in the air weighs upon her already tired wings, but she draws them closer to her lithe body, hazel eyes searching through the shadows for something - someone, her senses and interest piqued. 

   Exiled from a long slumbering land, she had little alternative but to leave - she could have fought, yes, and drawn his ribs away from his sinewy muscle and contorted a limb from a cartilage-fused socket, but she had gone with little else but spoken word left between. Loyalty runs deep within her blood, for those deserving of it - those who seek strength but not power, and favor humility over ego, and yet she had been cast away for questioning the self-important Zeik. Irritation festers still, and she mourns what will become of the warm sanctuary she had come to know as her own for so many years - stirred from the ashes and yet flammable and liable to burst into flames. 

   Her mind wanders to Sahm, the gentle but fierce and loyal magician, and his kind eyes. He is too true, too vestal - a beacon of light; if only there were still a refuge to shed light upon. Magnus soon weighs heavily on her mind, and her heart sinks within the pit of her aching chest. His hardened lines and warm smile would not so easily leave her mind, and somewhere within her is new life, growing and developing after a coupling that had left her both breathless and restless - of this she is certain. Emotion wells up within her esophagus, but she swallows it, unwilling to yield to it.

   At last, she is drawn from the recesses of her own mind, and a heavy stench of estrogen emerges from the thick of the jungle. With her flaring nostrils pressed to the moist soil, she inhales the mark of many. An unseen borderline; of which she would not violate. The dull brims of her hooves linger along the invisible boundary, and as she tilts her chin up to the heavy canopy above, her voice echoes - a call for any; a call for the Queen.

i don't love you;

but i always will.

Dusk finds the bay tovero slick with river-muck.



She is first to lay eyes upon the flier, who looks rather tired. Riva cannot blame her, the energy it must require to hold such mass aloft and on such delicate looking wings! She notes the way the mare stands on that invisible territorial divide, toeing the line but not crossing it as if unsure of her welcome. Riva, still in a rare mood of friendliness, emerges from the dark and offers a wry grin of greeting. “Welcome to the Jungle.” as if the mare had no idea as to what earth she had planted her hooves in, and Riva almost laughs. Instead, her brown eyes spark with that selfsame fire that fuels her (even after the thing that she has done, a dirty but necessary deed that throbs with secret pleasure in the pit of her foul heart) and lends character to Riva’s rather severe face.

Riva