etro --
in the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon,
I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom
It is different than anything she has seen before, dangerous—clearly a predator, although her senses to such dangers are dulled by generations of horses living in relative civility. Still, there are warning bells that ring in the back of her mind, and her nerves are set on fire with the need to run. But she doesn’t. Like always, she ignores that faint calling to save herself, to preserve her life, and she just takes another step.
Her mouth twists with pleasure at his attempt at a greeting, and she nods in response. “My name is Etro.” The only of her family with such a different name. The rest of her siblings were named in her mother’s tongue—names that were rich with spice and beautiful in that foreign language. She, however, had named herself, or at least that is what her mother had whispered to her. A name without meaning. Just a name.
She wonders if it has a name, if it has ever clicked and growled syllables to refer to itself. She thinks it hasn’t, but then again, she also has a hard time imagining such a thing being born. It looks like something that simply crawled out of the ground and became something out of nothing. Such a thing could not have a mother, could not have been cradled close at birth, loved from its first breath. The thought saddens her.
“Are you by yourself?” She looks around them and does not see anything, anyone, that belonged to it, but she feels the urge to ask anyway. Perhaps because she wants to know if there are more around (some faint attempt at staying aware of nearby dangers) or perhaps because her heart aches for the bladed creature before her. Perhaps her feral heart simply couldn’t stand the thought of anyone being alone like her.
-- vanquish and yael's forgotten trait-negating princess --
