i feel a bad moon rising | khalta

[Lepis]

staring at the ceiling in the dark same old empty feeling in your heart Her searching eyes find nothing in the cold darkness. Lepis pulls her wings a little closer to her sides, but does not continue her walk forward. There are too many creatures stalking the night for her to be anything less than cautious. It could be nothing, her rational mind tells her. It could also be a literal monster, one of nearly a dozen types that all seems to stalk Loess of late. The red hills are no longer a haven, though she is determined to return them to such a place. In the moonlight, everything is some shade of gray. She does not see the crimson rose. If she had, she might even have dismissed it as a part of the natural Loessian landscape. This place is known for its flora, after all, plants from every climate growing happily within the borders of the southern kingdom. The don’t all subscribe to the seasons either, Lepis knows. She’s just left a grove of blooming orchid behind at the hot spring, after all. A rose would not merit a second glance. But a rose that turns into a boy? That is not something she sees every day. The shyness on his face is genuine enough to calm her now-innate distrust of shape-shifters. Despite being much larger than he was a moment ago, the rose-boy is still quite small. Too small to be wandering around in the dead of night alone, certainly. “What brings you to Loess?” She asks him, her tone of voice remarkably welcoming despite the unusual circumstances of this encounter. “It’s a little late for kingdom visits, don’t you think?” There’s a bit of humor in her blue-grey eyes as she says this. He’s certainly no diplomat, but Lepis has raised enough children to know that treating them as adults (within reason) is often the best route. @[Khalta] LEPIS staring at the bottom of your glass-- hoping one day you’ll make a dream last but dreams come slow and they go so fast