She was not quite what you would call refined
Nothing will beat the Taiga for hidden caches, but she is not the first child of the redwoods to find that the close sovereign trees leave no room to spread their wings. Besides, the land is watched by her and Nashua's mothers, and Poppy has no desire to challenge them for it, to be chained to the understory shadows when she can have the sky, and so, though her own wings disappear when she does not wish to carry them, she directs the bird to Nerine and it's rocky, sea-worn cliffs.
The raven takes the feather, and the eyes, and heads dutifully north, and the dark little bay doesn't even blink, as if she had expected exactly this all along. It doesn't surprise her at all when he does as she asks (after all, she'd asked very politely) and her dancing gaze follows the black shape as it wings away. She doesn't know yet what she will do with them - or even if she will be able to retrieve them from the raven, if she wants to - perhaps she will do nothing at all, but like the ravens and the jays, she has a penchant for collecting the little things that catch her eye*; the strange rocks, the colorful feathers, forgotten bits of someone else, and black, carnivorous plants, sung out of blood and fire and magic by a strange colt no older than her abandoned twins. Her heart is a magpie, it wants all of those things.
The raven is swallowed by the sky, by distance, and her ears catch the sound of footsteps from behind. It swivels back a moment before her head, unharried, unthreatened. Popinjay has always been so sure of herself, and even before her sight falls over the familiar mare, that mischievous grin is growing across her lips. Her smile is like a bird singing in a tree. It isn't always there, but it feels as if it is, especially in the early morning hours, when you are least in the mood for erratic, insistent, twittering.
"Straia," for better or worse, nothing about the mosaic magician lessens the intensity of her laughing expression, "are you sure it's not you that's shrunk?"
The raven takes the feather, and the eyes, and heads dutifully north, and the dark little bay doesn't even blink, as if she had expected exactly this all along. It doesn't surprise her at all when he does as she asks (after all, she'd asked very politely) and her dancing gaze follows the black shape as it wings away. She doesn't know yet what she will do with them - or even if she will be able to retrieve them from the raven, if she wants to - perhaps she will do nothing at all, but like the ravens and the jays, she has a penchant for collecting the little things that catch her eye*; the strange rocks, the colorful feathers, forgotten bits of someone else, and black, carnivorous plants, sung out of blood and fire and magic by a strange colt no older than her abandoned twins. Her heart is a magpie, it wants all of those things.
The raven is swallowed by the sky, by distance, and her ears catch the sound of footsteps from behind. It swivels back a moment before her head, unharried, unthreatened. Popinjay has always been so sure of herself, and even before her sight falls over the familiar mare, that mischievous grin is growing across her lips. Her smile is like a bird singing in a tree. It isn't always there, but it feels as if it is, especially in the early morning hours, when you are least in the mood for erratic, insistent, twittering.
"Straia," for better or worse, nothing about the mosaic magician lessens the intensity of her laughing expression, "are you sure it's not you that's shrunk?"
*lmao get it? catch her eye? I am hilarious.
@[Straia]
