She still doesn’t know exactly what causes her skin to set aflame each morning.
Doesn’t know anything other than this subconscious twinge—this biting feeling that something is wrong. Castile had dodged the question, looped around the topic until she had finally fled, too frustrated to try and grapple with it any longer. He had promised her his heart again and again. Told her to not give up on them. But he hadn’t admitted anything beyond that. Hadn’t told her anything was wrong.
But a woman knows.
She had known.
The knowing had driven her from Loess and into the common lands. Left her reckless and furious; left her hunting things she shouldn’t, finding fights she should avoid. She healed quickly but her body was still tired from it all. The scars that should have littered her bruised underneath the flesh instead and she felt the way her skin felt too thin, too weak—as though regenerated too many times, in too many places.
She curses it this morning when she wakes up, rolling to her feet as a tigress but rising as an equine. She feels the slashes and gore of her last fight and the exhaustion that simmers beneath the surface. It would be enough to distract her if she gave it the time of day, but instead she simply does what she alway does these days: she leaves. She flicks her tangled tail behind her and moves forward into her favorite hunting spot, the forest, although her belly is full and she has no heart for it today.
No heart for anything but wandering.
It is only when she catches the scent that she even pauses, her dark head angling, the light catching the impossible blue of her blaze. It was a familiar scent—one she had picked up in the tangles of Castile’s mane when it still meant nothing—and she doesn’t pause to track it. She moves quickly through the trees until she comes across the pegasus, her silver eyes flashing and her expression carefully neutral.
“Hello.”
she said a war ain't a war before both sides bleed