[private] each time the feeling fades

[Tantalize]

tantalize

I make excuses to stay away from home

I'm looking for an answer in my heart

I'm looking for a fresh start

I need a reason to keep on living in the city

The ways of the jungle had never left her and her son is far from sneaky, he is easy to track after his warning rings through the beautiful blooms and a sense of foreboding smothers her like a thick blanket. Her pace extends and she winds her way through the Pampas, following the same trail her red-eyed boy had taken. Voices alert her that she’s getting close and she starts to slow, already feeling tired from such a short jaunt across easy terrain. When had her age started to catch up with her? Something she can’t worry about now, not when she peeks around a hill and her sharp golden eyes land on Obscene and the same indigo stallion (morphed though, with strange wings and claws) that had been in Tephra stare each other down with little distance between them.

It’s her son’s words that strike a strange feeling in her chest. A forgotten feeling of fear. And worry. And care. He speaks of killing the stranger, Gale, and she remembers the way the magician had held her bones and exploded the hummingbird with a flick of his tail. Whatever her son had become, taking in the scales and fangs, it was no match for the likes of someone like this. And she, an old mare with no magic, was even more useless.

But if she was expected to just stand there and watch her son die then Gale would be sorely disappointed.

Her wings are awkward after those long years of being unused but the feeling of flight is as familiar to her as getting back on a bike. Centuries ago, Tantalize had ruled the Amazons. She had changed the long line of Queens into Khaleesi’s and reformed the warrior mares into something new. She had fought in the Alliance, had brought war on to the Dale. And won. Her body ached and gray covered her dark muzzle but she had never forgotten who she was or what she was capable of, even when she had languished in the humid dark of Tephra’s jungle.

She had always been an Amazonian. And she would die as one.

Before her son can barely take a step to meet his attacker, the jaguar mare is there. With unexpected force, she throws herself between the two from the sky, barreling into Gale and snarling like the jungle cat she had always been, fire and brimstone raging in the tarnished gold of her angry eyes. “You will not touch my son.” She growls, her hooves lashing out at whatever exposed part of him she can find and her blunted teeth snapping at his face even as his too-wide jaws wrap around her own neck and blood begins to flow from where his teeth sink into her dappled flesh, deaf to the loud angry bellow behind her as her son unleashes himself from horse into snake.

@ Gale