Namaah stepped quietly through the darkness, at home in a landscape others might consider unsettling. Her mother’s strange wanderings ensured that she could at least assume an air of confidence where none existed, but truthfully, she preferred interminable night to day. She felt hidden, a part of the world around her. Like the Beqanna of old had reached out to envelop her and the pretty immortal had only to lean in and let it take charge. She flicked her ears to catch and follow the soft sounds of a stream and wondered, more than a little suspiciously, if her father might have had something to do with the perpetual midnight that now enveloped her old haunts.
Dramatic, her mother would have said, with a tinge of exasperation and good humor. The temper tantrum of a narcissist. Gallows had negative amounts of reverence for the shenaningans of the one many called ‘the dark god’. Gallows never did. She had several other terms that made Namaah blush to hear them and look over her shoulder as if Carnage would appear like a bogeyman out of the shadows.
Namaah herself didn’t have much of an opinion on her father. He wasn’t the traditional sort of parent (although admittedly her mother wasn’t precisely maternal) and the winged dapple gray had only met him the once in passing. His cold eyes and aura of austere confidence, most likely meant to intimidate, had only served to confuse the naïve filly. When she grew up and into her oversized wings and brains, her confusion turned to a vague but general relief that her acquaintance with the giant of Beqanna had ended before it truly began.
She could only suppose he had so very many offspring and projects on hoof that the former Queen of a territory long destroyed and her little daughter occupied no space in his twisted mind. A small part of Namaah wondered if Carnage in fact grudgingly admired Gallows’ spirit and that’s why he’d sired her two children but never extended his reach to harm her.
Namaah was perfectly happy to never have the chance to satiate her curiosity along those lines. Her father was best left as an enigma who existed on a plane beyond her reach or understanding.
She turned farther inland and wished that she’d been born with something useful like night vision.
The stream she’d heard led to a lake, one that had likely existed since creation, and a familiar sight to the petite mare with osprey wings. She’d followed her mother here on Valley business decades ago and it was with genuine relief that Namaah saw it was largely unchanged. Her presence in the field felt cliched, but necessary, like a rite of passage to prove her worth.
To whom, she wasn’t quite sure, but the rightness of it lent Namaah an air of self assurance as she ruffled her wings in the unnatural night breeze and preened loose feathers.
Namaah
gallows x carnage
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