[open] any | CATCHING FIRE AS THE WIND BLOWS

[Sylvane]

Besides the wind and the subtle creak of the branches it blew past, there was an overwhelming silence down on the forest floor.  Where the creek once moved in a slow, but perpetual trickle there was only pools of still water barricaded by icy walls.  Mother nature had long since banished away the rustling greenery and all that once depended upon the creek was now deep in a slumber.  And what of the fauna that sung and played and otherwise filled the air with their raucous?  They were stilled, perhaps, by the presence of a stranger who passed through quite oblivious to their reservations of her.  She moved slowly, deliberate steps placed carefully around the fallen limbs and rocks that were hazardously coated in ice.  Snow slipped in through the bare limbs overhead and clung to her hair and back, dampening her coat and then icing up again.  How bothersome.

She recalled, with some disdain, that she had a home by the ocean once.  It was a paltry cut of land and her herd mates were sickeningly fickle, but there never blew a single cold wind off that sea and the sun seemed to always shine--even when it rained.  The thought alone made her shiver, her body refusing to let her forget herself by diving in to distant (and frankly pointless) memories.  She had always been too restless to keep a good thing going and so what good did reminiscing do her anyhow?  That was a thing for the ones she left behind, along with the vaguest hint of her aroma and the broken bits of promises she hadn't managed to keep.

She did always manage to make an impression that lasted long after she was gone, though she might not ever realize it.  Physically, there was nothing so astounding about her that a man's memory would take a snapshot.  She was tall but not very muscular, velvety skin that was so black the dapple gray of her coat barely lightened it.  Her hair, of which there was plenty, swirled around her face and shoulders in unkempt curls.  A pair of ivory horns pushed backward through the mess of hair at her brow.  There was a slight spiral in their shape and an obvious lack in symmetry as they were neither the same length nor perfectly parallel to another.  They did, however, bare the tell tale signs of frequent use. Words were her weapons of choice, of course, but one must never be without a backup plan and it was almost shocking how often she had to rely on hers.  She found that few and far between are those who can be reasoned with, and in a world where so many had once possessed bountiful powers of great magical force but do no longer, there was even fewer.


ooc ;; quick post, fleshing out a new character! 

[gun]

He prefers the silence in the forest, jarred only by the odd creak of wind in the branches above his head.
Those same branches sway in a precarious dance of intrigue and threat; the threat is the dumping of armfuls of snow on him but he is not afraid. He eyes their miserable movements and dares them with a single look to soak him in snow and cold, but the branches shiver and settle back into place, the snow subsiding sloppily above him like miniscule avalanches that cannot gather enough speed to roll downhill. Besides, he’s damp enough as it is - damp all the way down to his bones, beneath the thick fur and trappings of heat that do not little enough to thwart the cold. It settles in him, like an ache he just can’t shake and he thinks that gentler temperatures can’t come soon enough. But since when has nature ever been gentle to him?

Gun knows nature in extremes - extreme heat, extreme cold, thirst or starvation.
He thirsts no more, since coming here.
He hungers no more, since coming here.
But still suffers the cold as if it is little more than a thorn in his side.

Snow plops down on his back and drives him forth from beneath the shelter of the branches.
He knew the slender boughs would bend beneath the accumulating snow and it had. So much so, that he now had to shake the snow off his back and find a new place to almost hibernate in - that’s how it felt to him, that he shored up against the cold like a damn bear and took to hibernating because he had nothing better to do, not since Caw up and left them and not since his encounter with the magic-mare that made lightning sing across her skin. Gun was beginning to realize that he sought them out - the strange, the different, the Un-horse. He could not say why but it happened to be that way since he was a milksop of a foal.

Maybe that is why he encounters her in the snowy woods that day at that particular moment.
(He never believe it in Fate, things just aren’t fated to be.)
She is of similar height, similar shape and spots even, then the differences begin. Or rather the singular difference begins in the horns that spiral up from her brow. He might have thought her lovely if he had a head for such things, but he saw only the horns and the mean twist of them that said she had weaponized them as he had his teeth and hooves (still blunt, not as sharp as the tips of her horns looked to be). In the end, it did not matter because he gave pause to where he was going and just stared at her like he’d never seen anything like her before and in truth, he hadn’t.