we'll never get free, lamb to the slaughter
She realizes her mistake too late.
A boy turns to greet her instead of an adult like she’d hoped. Perhaps the sun silhouetting his shimmering body has thrown her off? Regardless, she is caught off guard when the yearling about-faces. “Titanya.” She had hoped to sink her claws into someone with sway and potential power simmering just under their skin. She wanted to latch onto the first passerby with a whiff of influence inundating their pores. But this child could bear the blood of royalty hiding with his veins; she only has to do a little digging to find out.
He is like most children of Beqanna these days, dazzling in color and likely hiding a treasure trove of abilities. She wonders what talents he has squirreled away. Her own had been tacked on as the years ticked by, through blood and sweat and luck. Titanya still feels the phantom fire of her most recent gift burning her body up one hair at a time. She swears she can still smell the not-unpleasant charring of her own black and white skin before she became ash. It had been like a holy experience, her death, like a sacrament a long time in the making. Fortunately, it hadn’t stuck.
She had risen, younger and far more alive than she had been before.
Now, she wants to do everything she never did before. With her brother dead and his little clan gone, the sabino wants to live for herself. As she regards the younger male, a smile starts low on her face – the first smile she’s ever worn in this lifetime. There is something about his youth that pulls a tiny thread of joy from the deep well of her heart. Maybe it is good that I have found him first, she thinks, wondering what path she might have gladly walked down if it had been someone less kind and naïve.
“What are you doing in the Meadow today?” Not running away from your mother, are you? She wants to ask, but she’s never been one to treat children like children. Truly, she’s not been around enough of them to know how to act around them at all. Instead, her smile turns into a conspiratorial grin. “There’s nothing I liked more at your age than getting away from my dam and running wild.”
what you gon' do when there's blood in the water?
@[Halcyon]