living for the past

because the future's gone. praying in the dark that you won't go home. i should've said it better, i should've set fire to a letter. but i could run to your apartment, hope i get it started better than before; and i could write it in a poem, pretend i used to know you better than before.

If it hadn’t been immediately obvious in the first few moments of Wishbone’s arrival, there is no way around it now: Beqanna is infected. Scents of sickness and death hang in the air, pungent and thick despite the bitter, thin taste of the winter season. The common-lands are swollen with creatures who are either too thin and weak to stand or too heavy and bloated with illness to move. Dangerous, infectious blood weeps into whatever clear water might be available and stains the snowy embankments in shades of maroon.

The bodies — whether barely alive or finally dead — are beginning to pile up.

The Nerinian mare watches a future mother (her sides starting to swell with the promise of a child) rub her neck against the roughened bark of a tree. Large tufts of creamy hair snag on the tree, leaving something that resembles a mutated squirrel against the trunk. The stranger doesn’t seem concerned, despite a sudden winter breeze sweeping through the Meadow, and instead coughs out a thick blood clot. Wishbone wonders if the mare will make it through the winter, let alone the labor and delivery of her child.

Her thoughts become uncharacteristically worried for a tender moment: she had begun to notice the stirrings of pregnancy in her own body, yet she had also woken covered in sweat and stiff in her joints before traveling to the Meadow. Wishbone shrugs it off as symptoms of growing a child (little does she know, children) inside her body. She is just turning toward the outskirts of the Meadow, contemplating returning to the warmth of Ischia, when a dark stallion approaches her.

Her tangled forelock slips across one bright amber eye as she inspects him curiously. “I figured it would be nice to keep it warm for you on a cold day like today.” Although the patch of dead grass is small, Wishbone moves aside so there is enough room for the stranger. He seems healthier than everyone else in the Meadow, with mischief shining in his eyes rather than sickness. “I’m Wishbone.” She remains quiet after that, refusing to acknowledge any fanciful titles she might’ve once held — Khaleesi of Nerine, Princess of Tephra — and simply stating her name. For the time being she is only that: Wishbone.