Sometimes the heart can lead you astray [any]

[Memorie]

one lives in hope of becoming a memory

If I could bristle like a cat, I would have right then and there. Instead, I grin slyly, unfazed by her needling. Even with my guard up, I can feel the malice embedded within her words that she speaks so sweetly. I honestly have no idea what she is talking about, a monster in the woods, but one wouldn’t have been able to tell by looking at me. As long as I had been in Taiga, I had never heard of a monster, unless you count the monsters that haunt the darkness in all corners of Beqanna while the sun is hiding away. Somehow, I doubt that is what she is speaking of, though.

“Hasn’t been a monster in ages.” My tone is bordering on smug. I shrug my shoulders and roll my eyes. “What can I say? Monsters don’t scare us. We scare the monsters.” I remember that moment that Cheri had been attacked by a Monster beneath the redwoods and how I had sprinted headlong into the darkness to help save her. She had screamed at us to kill the thing, but in the end, it shed its physical form and melded itself to the shadows that surrounded us, disappearing to seek out its next victim.

When the older mare quips that she hasn’t seen the Taigans here–wherever ‘here’ was, I give her a rather superior stare. “Well, then maybe here isn’t worth visiting.” Well, I seem to be feeling rather confident and cocky today, don’t I? Well, perhaps it was the thorns that spike the air around us causing me to act this way.

Her next words do catch me slightly off guard, though. I keep my face stony, though, unwilling to give her the satisfaction that her words had perturbed me in any way. The land that razed Taiga. It had been before my time, just before mother had come to these lands. Her and I had spent months at the burn scar, healing the wounds inflicted by the Pangeans, a story that father had told me. He had been there. I wonder if this mare had seen him, but that itch will likely never be scratched.

I stand before this mare, unwilling to give up any ground to her. When her memory hits the walls around my own thoughts, I let it caress the fringes of my mind for a second before I let it in. For a moment, I think on her words and the force of the memory. Then I grin, an expression that can just barely be made out through the shadows that separate us. “It wasn’t that hard to build back. And now we’re better than ever. So I guess that means I should thank you.” As I say it, I gather up my own memory to send right back, one of the burn scar almost fully healed before the shadows plagued the land. I give her a rather satisfied smile. Somehow, I don’t think this conversation is going the way she’d intended it to go.

Memorie

Image by Calcifer

@[Aela]