i'm on the wrong side of heaven, and the righteous side of hell
His heart was concrete by now. At one time it had been made of the flesh and blood that makes up other equine hearts, and those had been simpler times. Then the first break (mother) followed by the rest. Perhaps after his mother he’d been left with sandstone- soft still, but with a certain hardness to it. Through the frictions of life and the iron clad grip the world had on him, it had gradually hardened to the mess it was today. Beating only through magic and for a kingdom he’d given his life to.
He’d tried, once, to soften that concrete. That had been a mistake. He wasn’t meant to love or be loved. The creator had built him to be a warrior and nothing more, and that was the visage he retained. Old habits die hard after all. If anyone had been worth laying down his armor for, it had been her. Smolder, his wayward Queen and someone he thought he loved. But love was an illusion for fools and dreamers, and he was nothing if not a skeptic of both.
She shakes her head at his apology, and he offers a small smile in return. Clearly she wasn’t bothered by his awkwardness, and as such he relaxes himself. “Tantalize. A pleasure.” he says in his easy baritone voice, dipping his head slightly. She smells of Amazons, and kingdom he knows little to nothing about. A part of him wonders if Smolder had had an Amazonians strength, if things between them would have been different. Strength, after all, was something he could understand and relate to. But he pushes his rose gray deer from his mind, focusing instead on the winged mare in front of him. “Good question. One I don’t have a good answer to. Boredom? Thinking?” He longs to say reminiscing, but thinks better of it at the last moment. He doesn’t know this mare, and she doesn’t know him, and it seems foolish to spill all of his secrets at once, though a part of him is begging for release. Suddenly she tenses, and he finds himself mirroring her stance. His neck tenses and he listens hard into the forest, all the while breathing deep of the breeze. He hears nor smells nothing out of the ordinary, yet still she remains on guard. “Whats the matter?” he asks, his voice little more than a low growl. Hopefully it wasn’t his luck to run into a wayward woman with a scorned lover tracking after her. But, that would be his luck.
warship
