and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones
‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs

She doesn’t stop running when she leaves her father.

She doesn’t stop until her coltish legs are trembling and her scaled sides are heaving. She didn’t sweat, her body just didn’t react the same way as a normal horses might. Instead, she just trembles with exhaustion, still running on the adrenaline of her encounter with her father, with the moment where everything in her life came crashing down—when everything began to implode in on her life.

Before she knows it, before she even realizes what is happening, she finds that she is at the field. 

She’s never been here before, never had a need to hunt for a home when her family was her home, but she knows what it is. She takes a steadying breath, the tears having long since dried on her cheeks and tips her head back in a way that is so deeply reminiscent of her mother that Leliana’s breath would hitch if she could see her. Adna doesn’t know what she wants. What she needs. But she knows that she can’t go back home and pretend everything is okay. She can’t face her family right now. She can’t continue to lie.

So with a steadying breath, the serpentine girl walks further into the center of the field, doing her best to look like she knows what she is doing, like she knows why she is here. Her face falls into calmer lines, her sage green reptilian eyes blinking slowly as she looks around at the few horses milling about.

And, desperately, she hopes that her father doesn’t decide to show up here today.

Not until she can find a new home and a new life and disappear into the heart of Beqanna.

Not until she finds a lifeline and a reason to continue holding on.

adna

we're setting fire to our insides for fun
collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home

and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones
‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs

Adna has been trained in diplomacy. Her father has taken her along on his diplomatic trips and although he is more warrior that silvertongue, he has guided her through it all the same. Still, the memory of it—that fuzzy thought of her fanged father gently whispering in her ear—is enough to make her flinch and recoil and forget all of it. She wants to lash out and she feels a lightheaded need to do something reckless.

To be her father’s daughter and sink her fangs into flesh for the first time.

To gain firsthand knowledge of what he means when he says that they are monsters.

She is dizzy with the instinctual need and the fear of herself and the warring desires within her and she closes her reptilian eyes against the headache that begins to brew. When she opens again, she is seeing through a predator’s eyes, watching the heat map of the land around them (the child coming looking more like prey and less like a friend) and she gasps, blinking again desperately, regaining her normal vision.

“Hi,” she says, her voice a little tight, on edge. She doesn’t want to hurt this girl, she reminds herself. She is not her father. Her blood is not cursed. She swallows again and tries to think of her mother, tries to remember that gentleness and tries to remind herself that it is her birthright as much as the serpent.

It is enough to steady her nerves. Enough that she is even able to choke back the pain when the girl asks about her scales. Bile rises in her throat and she shakes her head. “My dad,” she manages. “I look like my dad.” It was once something she was so proud of—something she practically boasted about at every opportunity—and now she can barely get the words out. “My name is Adna.”

adna

we're setting fire to our insides for fun
collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home

and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones
‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs

Everything within her splits her apart.

She wants to be her mother’s daughter. She wants to respond with the kindness that her mother has always shown. She wants to be sweet and soft and accept the offer with a quick twist of the lip. She wants to be that young girl of her youth. The one with the bounce in her step and the laugh in her voice.

But she doesn’t know that girl anymore.

She can’t find it anywhere in her aching, bruised heart.

Instead she is her father’s daughter. She is brittle with her pain and her edges are sharp. Her serpentine eyes are bruised and her lips want nothing more than to peel back from her fangs. She can feel them now, the sharp edges of them pressed against the thick velvet of her lip, the poison in them a dark promise.

She’s never once bitten into something. Never felt that release of toxins.

She loathes the wild desire that beats painfully behind her eyes now.

Her vision wavers between the vision of prey and predator and she feels her pulse stammering in her chest as she tries to keep a slippery hold on her control. “I have my mother’s coloring,” she manages, her voice still tight, the vision of her broken and hollow mother almost as painful as the image of her father standing over that crumpled child. Where had it gone so wrong? Where had they broken?

“Why would I go to Nerine?” she says, confusion flickering across her face. She’s never been to the field before—knows its purpose but forgets it in the moment with her heart pounding and her vision blurring.

“I think I should go,” she says, shaking her elegant head, trembling.

“I shouldn't be here. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

adna

we're setting fire to our insides for fun
collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home