I'd love you if I only knew how to // Any

[aletta]

She and Scorch have come to an… understanding. Aletta won’t call it friendship because she no longer uses that word. Friendship died with Brynn when she had offered the remaining half of her heart (the part not afflicted from the disease that wasted her soul from the inside out) to her daughter, Kalina. Aletta had promised her dearest friend that they would find a way to heal her, a cure. Brynn was supposed to live - long enough that the silver mare and her gold companion could enjoy the six grand-foals they shared together.

Brynn was supposed to live.

She hadn’t and so friendship is a word that Aletta refuses to use anymore.

The pair are supposed to be heading North - to Nerine. The name Stillwater doesn’t seem to bring any recollection to the current Beqanna generation and the wanderer in her wants to see the grey ledges for herself. She has nowhere else to go, anyways. Keav had only said to go Beyond and so here she is, past Beyond and beyond it.

If she is meant to find whatever it is the stars have sent her searching for, she won’t do that by standing still.

The pale lady finds herself drawn one morning to the River. Walking beside it keeps pleasant enough company and Aletta enjoys the (rippling) one-sided conversation. There is no need to indulge a river. The river, though, seems to want indulging and reveals a startling figure: an opalescent pegasus who stares down at her reflection. As if looking down on herself should reveal something that the living, breathing image cannot.

The small mare slows because the branch that juts from her chest is disturbing. Aletta stops and fixates on the troubling tree limb, wondering how a horse even survives with a wound like that. She has her fair share of scars (a jagged one on her left haunch from a fight with Sirocco, an indent on the same-sided shoulder from hurtling Murdoc off-course) but she has never seen anything like the spear that protrudes from @[Sabra].

Her mouth curls as she fights the uneasiness settling tight between her shoulders. The mare is most likely alive because of magic.

Aletta isn’t immune to the sadness that comes rolling the other mare (and what has she to be glad of with an injury like that?). But she has always had little time for such an emotion; it would have prevented her from doing what she needed to do. There have always been eyes looking to her, mouths to feed, horses that have depended on her and all sadness would have done is stifled her in place while those around her suffered.

"I hope the tree looks worse than you do,” the former Regent starts. If she can’t offer comfort, then perhaps she might at least offer a distraction.