12-30-2025, 11:52 AM
look how they shine for you
look at the stars
Any comfort she had previously found with the company Topsail had provided after her experience at the river was gone. Fear swallowed her whole. As the scream that shattered across the night fell silent, she felt Topsail's voice in her mind despite no flesh existing on her body. Something about a dream and a nightmare. She was terrified. She felt a cold chill running along her even though she had no hide to feel it. She swore she was shaking, even without muscles to twitch and tremble.
Starbry felt as if she was a child again. Like she was trapped in a nightmare, thrashing about, hoping her mother would wake her to comfort her and count the glittering specks in the sky with her until she calmed down and settled back into sleep. Something about this felt too real - too real and too terrible to be just a nightmare. Tears would have streamed down her cheeks had she been capable of shedding any.
Grasping for any hold on reality she could find, Starbry forced her body to move forwards. Bones clicked in the night, shining under the moonlight with an eerie alabaster glow. Her hooves pulled from the freezing muck along the river and she moved away from the water, the bones shifting and joints bending as if muscle and tendons and ligaments were still pulling them along. Magic was a mysterious thing.
"This is real, isn't it." The words somehow formed and flowed from her as she stopped a safe distance from Topsail, wary she might be contagious. She didn't notice any changes in the other mare yet, so consumed by her own shock and fear of the abrupt shift from navy and bay to fleshless, white bone. Starbry felt weak. "What do I do..." She murmured to the earth, almost to herself but knowing her companion with mind magic would certainly pick up on it. She lifted her skull back upwards to face Topsail. The infrared vision she possessed that enhanced her ability to see in the night seemed...off...when she looked at her. Starbry couldn't quite place what wasn't right, but Topsail's heat signal didn't seem right. She brushed it aside, deciding an altered heat signal was the least of her worries right now.
starbry
@Topsail