down in the valley with whisky rivers; djinni

[zai]

have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
just a cage of rib bones and other various parts

Djinni is, as always, everything that he is not.

His dark ears pin back in play at her teasing, his gray eyes rolling. “You know me, Djinni. Polite is not in my DNA.” He reached over, pulling on her forelock. “I don’t care if you are leader or Queen or Empress of Beqanna, I have no qualm of telling you to shut it.” Not that he particularly wanted her to be quiet. It was so much easier to carry on a conversation when she did all the heavy lifting for him.

It was, in fact, his favorite way of talking to others.

(Not talking at all, that is.)

Still, he eased gratefully into the silence, one ear flicking at the sound of branches cracking beneath the weight of snow before focusing back on her and her talk of her daily duties. He rolled his eyes a little but gave her a small smile, growing increasingly comfortable in her presence. “I have a hard time imagining you being responsible.” A shrug. “But what do I know? Perhaps you’ve grown boring in old age.”

He hard a time thinking of Djinni as anything but that seemingly young mare he had grown up around; the mischievous look in her eye and her wily way of getting into trouble. To think that she now had her hand on the helm of an entire land? Not unfeasible but difficult to reconcile with the vagabond of his memory. “I suppose I have nothing better to do,” he grunted, although some small part of him thrilled at the idea of fighting. Even easier than sitting in silence was losing yourself in a bare-knuckled fight.

He may not have a way with words, but he certainly knew how to make a point with teeth and hooves.

so it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess
and to stop the muscle that makes us confess

ZAI

[Djinni]

djinni

His difficulty in imagining her responsible is nothing compared to her own. She still struggles, many times a day, but there are things that bind her now, things that are not so easily broken. Still, she does not suffer for it, and so she accepts his teasing with an amused smile.

“Perhaps I have,” she concedes, though there is enough mischief still lingering in her bright eyes that it seems unlikely. If it were only age that has made her boring, she should have been dull a decade ago. She’s all but forgotten her true age, and while she’s no crone, she knows that the years she has ticked off while adventuring have encompassed many generations of Beqanna. She knows Zai, and she had known his father, and his great-grandfather, and his great-great-great grandmother. Old age had happened to her a very long time ago.

“Good,” Djinni replies when he accepts, though she watches him a little more closely. She had been fairly certain he’d enjoy the prospect but does want to be sure. “I’ll get around to organizing the kingdom eventually. Perhaps you can start by teaching my son?” She’s buried the lede, she knows, but it is often still hard to form that three-letter word. Not for any reason she can fathom (she is an attentive and caring parent), but then again, she is sill processing emotions.

all my fragile strength is gone