11-14-2022, 12:19 AM
feel around until you find where your heart went --
She doesn’t leave the Pampas often anymore, but it is not out of a sense of duty. She knows the land would fair just fine without her constant presence, and that it was unlikely it faced it any outside threats to begin with.
She stays in the Pampas because every time she leaves she is reminded of how drastically different Beqanna has become.
Water remains flooded across places it had never touched before, with trees seeming to grow from its depths in some kind of twisted Wonderland-esque fashion. There are places where just beneath the surface she can see what had once been worn footpaths, with meadow grasses swaying with the current rather than the breeze. Somewhere beneath it all, so far down that it is as deep as the sea, she knows lies Hyaline.
She hated the change, and in order to avoid seeing it, she chooses to teleport nearly everywhere, and today it is the river that she finds herself landing in. The morning is still young, bathed in that certain kind of golden light that only seemed to happen this time of day, as if the sun itself was still warming up. There is a faint fog that hugs the riverbanks, and save for the stirring of smaller creatures and a few early risers, the entire setting is serene despite the disasters Beqanna has recently endured. Then again, that is the only kind of beauty she is accustomed to—the kind that can be found in the middle of catastrophe, the kind of beauty that only breaks free when everything else falls apart.
Belatedly, she realizes that she has landed herself relatively close to someone else, can feel their presence pressing in on her, and she tilts her head to find an unfamiliar mare. She reminds her a little bit of the Baltian that had come to the Pampas—not in such a way that she thinks they are related, but in the sense that they both carried a certain kind of otherness about them, as if their very blood and bone is not made from the same things Beqannans are made of.
“Good morning,” she says with a barely-there smile, not moving from where she stands but not moving away either. She cannot pinpoint it exactly, but the other mare seems troubled, or perhaps merely lost in thought. She doesn’t want to pry—not really, anyway—but her interest is caught, and perhaps a stranger could be the distraction she is searching for. “Is everything all right?”
-- r y a t a h
@Tavani