"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
“Oh.” is Anuya’s very eloquent reply as she feels appropriately admonished for shouting. She tries to reason to herself about how was she supposed to know, even though all the evidence had told her that she should have at least tried to talk in a normal voice first. So far she had succeeded in shouting at three different stallions and earned varying degrees of ire from all of them because of it.
Would it take a fourth for the lesson to sink in? What happened after no visible ears? Inverted ears?
The reptilian stranger isn’t so aggravated that he leaves, though, and instead, he moves to stand beside her at the river’s edge. Someone with a little more sense or experience might have known the rattle of his tail or the shape of his head was a sign that violence was also a possible reaction - but in all her years Anuya had never managed to annoy someone to the point where they had attacked her. Postured, flattened their ears, or even chased her but violence wasn’t something she would ever expect.
She frowns first at his next words - the idea that the fairies of the mountain were pulling a prank on her - but it is a fleeting expression as she watches him flick a rock into the water with his tail. Well, that was very cool.
When she replies to his greeting, she is trying to flick her tail towards some pebbles but only succeeds in brushing some dust off of the surface of the ground. “I'm Anuya.” Her hair being remarkably less successful at rock tossing than his tail, she moves to lower her head again before stopping and looking up at Riptide. “Would they really do that? Pull a prank on me?” She's thoughtful, but there's a spark of a smile in her turquoise eyes that suggests her thoughts are leaning towards mischief. “I bet I can think of more ridiculous ways to complete my quest than they can. They actually just said to move things, which is incredibly vague.”
oh, I see stars rushing through my mind, colours have no time to fade
oh, I found out there's another side where the sea and sky collide
