06-06-2021, 03:17 PM
The child is a strange thing. She is small, ungainly, with long legs and knobby knees and a coat full of curls, but these are not the things that make her strange. She is dependent on her mother as most children her size are, and is never far from the mare's pale flank, pink muzzle pressed there like a lifeline. Of course, none of those things themselves make her strange, instead it's her stubborn insistence to remain this exact shape and never waver, never age, though nearly two years have passed. Starlust must wonder if the Eternalchild will ever grow, ever leave her, but the filly has no plan to do either of those things.
In truth, she does not know anything is wrong at all.
The magic crawls through her skin and bones, shaping her into what she isn't without her knowing. Even before she was born, the pallid girl felt her mother's fear, and the magic has trapped them both - one in frailty and dependence, and the other with unending commitment. How many times has Starlust tried to sneak away? How many times has she crept off, only to look down and find the ghostly filly looking up at her again with those dark, innocent, eyes? Did she ever guess that her fear of waking the child is exactly what woke her?
But sometimes - sometimes - that consciousness breaks through and those dark, empty, eyes fill with confusion, fill with multitudes. Sometimes, the magic grows weak - when she is very tired - and it falters. In those moments she knows there is something more to her existence, but she falls so easily into the trap of thinking that she will consider the strange feelings burgeoning in her chest when she wakes up because now, she is so sleepy, too sleepy to make sense of it all.
She is napping at the riverside when he arrives and everything about him is in turmoil. Perhaps this is what distracts her enough that she never feels Starlust drawing away from where her daughter is curled up in tall grass like a white fawn in its nest. Instead what wakes her is the foreign flavor of the fear he draws with him. Is it his own fear, of the changes tearing him to pieces, or simply the aura of his magic? Impossible to say, but the strength of it is intoxicating, and plucks at her heartstrings as if he were a master puppeteer. Enthrall wakens, still the child, not knowing to take another shape, not knowing how, and finds her feet. The demon-stallion is not far, and she approaches him as if he were not a stranger to her at all.
And he isn't, in a way. Fear has always been her friend.
Enthrall The only thing to fear
In truth, she does not know anything is wrong at all.
The magic crawls through her skin and bones, shaping her into what she isn't without her knowing. Even before she was born, the pallid girl felt her mother's fear, and the magic has trapped them both - one in frailty and dependence, and the other with unending commitment. How many times has Starlust tried to sneak away? How many times has she crept off, only to look down and find the ghostly filly looking up at her again with those dark, innocent, eyes? Did she ever guess that her fear of waking the child is exactly what woke her?
But sometimes - sometimes - that consciousness breaks through and those dark, empty, eyes fill with confusion, fill with multitudes. Sometimes, the magic grows weak - when she is very tired - and it falters. In those moments she knows there is something more to her existence, but she falls so easily into the trap of thinking that she will consider the strange feelings burgeoning in her chest when she wakes up because now, she is so sleepy, too sleepy to make sense of it all.
She is napping at the riverside when he arrives and everything about him is in turmoil. Perhaps this is what distracts her enough that she never feels Starlust drawing away from where her daughter is curled up in tall grass like a white fawn in its nest. Instead what wakes her is the foreign flavor of the fear he draws with him. Is it his own fear, of the changes tearing him to pieces, or simply the aura of his magic? Impossible to say, but the strength of it is intoxicating, and plucks at her heartstrings as if he were a master puppeteer. Enthrall wakens, still the child, not knowing to take another shape, not knowing how, and finds her feet. The demon-stallion is not far, and she approaches him as if he were not a stranger to her at all.
And he isn't, in a way. Fear has always been her friend.
@draco