The afternoon is long gone. The meadow has settled into a still, moonless quiet, darkness lying heavy over the tired grass. Frost has sharpened everything to hard edges. The stars included, small and fierce and very far away. A low wind threads through the treeline, rattling the few leaves still clinging to bare branches, and Zilla’s breath ghosts out in slow gray clouds before fading. She has been here a while, cropping what little the grass still offers, in no hurry to be anywhere else. Solitude suits her, or the world has decided it does. It always decides the moment it catches the skull of her face and the old horns curving back from a young head. She stopped arguing with first impressions long ago.
Even unlit, her diamond armor drinks what faint glow the night allows, giving back a dim, iridescent blue across her shoulders that swells and dims with her breathing.
She sees the light before she sees the mare. It peels loose from the sky somehow and pours downward, strands twisting together as they fall until they meet the stranger’s coat and sink into her like water into dry earth, gone. Zilla’s ears pin and her jaw stalls mid-grind. For one beat, the plates along her shoulders flare white, seams running with fire before she has decided anything at all. Then it settles back to blue and her ears come forward again, she resumes chewing. A stranger has just swallowed a piece of the night, and Zilla files it away with every other thing the world does without asking her first.
Then, because it seems worth mentioning, she crosses the quiet ground toward the pale silver ward the light has gathered into. With every step, the last of the glow slides from her armor, silver against iridescent blue, two coats of light grown on two backs, neither of them asked for.
“You’re glowing,” she says, flat, laying the words between them like a stone. Not wonder, not warning, only a fact. It does not occur to her that a mare alone beneath the stars might not want a skull-faced thing with ibex horns stepping out of the dark to point it out. It rarely does.
“It suits you,” she adds after a moment, in the same weatherless voice. She means it gently, whether it lands that way she could not say. She never can.
@Evenstar
Even unlit, her diamond armor drinks what faint glow the night allows, giving back a dim, iridescent blue across her shoulders that swells and dims with her breathing.
She sees the light before she sees the mare. It peels loose from the sky somehow and pours downward, strands twisting together as they fall until they meet the stranger’s coat and sink into her like water into dry earth, gone. Zilla’s ears pin and her jaw stalls mid-grind. For one beat, the plates along her shoulders flare white, seams running with fire before she has decided anything at all. Then it settles back to blue and her ears come forward again, she resumes chewing. A stranger has just swallowed a piece of the night, and Zilla files it away with every other thing the world does without asking her first.
Then, because it seems worth mentioning, she crosses the quiet ground toward the pale silver ward the light has gathered into. With every step, the last of the glow slides from her armor, silver against iridescent blue, two coats of light grown on two backs, neither of them asked for.
“You’re glowing,” she says, flat, laying the words between them like a stone. Not wonder, not warning, only a fact. It does not occur to her that a mare alone beneath the stars might not want a skull-faced thing with ibex horns stepping out of the dark to point it out. It rarely does.
“It suits you,” she adds after a moment, in the same weatherless voice. She means it gently, whether it lands that way she could not say. She never can.
@Evenstar