together we're a perfect storm; any

[riva]

Riva has nothing but the bitterness to build her up and many reasons for the bitterness to swallow her up. It fans the flame of a tiny ember of hate that has wormed its way into her heart and for now, it smokes and smolders but the fact that it even exists is enough to sustain and motivate her. To what end, she is uncertain, but she rolls the bitterness across her tongue like a pebble and it works up a good amount of promise and planning - she will be their downfall, though the land hardly echoes now with the breadth of their family, a thing she does not share with them beyond the spurned blood in her veins. The paint is not sure why she has come here; even here, they pass her by and she begins to think they can smell the beginnings of hate on her. Every pair of eyes that looks her way and looks away just as quickly hardens her further until she is volcanic - a hard shell beneath which everything in her is magmic and burning. It is imagined of course, because she is not gifted beyond her capacity to scald them with a scathing look or her caustic tongue, but she feels hot and hard and hateful. Every happy mare and every happy stallion earns a glare from her until she shuts her eyes against all the happiness that sickens her, causing her stomach to roil. They do not deserve their happinesses, she thinks, those small and pitiful moments that make their smiles and their memories. It is the few in the shadows, glum and shy, that make her stand up even more imperious - there is royal blood in her after all, and a dash of a pirate’s - and regal, but it looks odd on her thin angry body. Into the shadows she looks, and out of the shadows walk a mare more imperious and impressive than any she has thus far seen. Riva cannot help but stare but it is a hard stare, and she reflects on the way the lines and thorns thread themselves through the skin of the Amazon before her and Riva, smart as she is, knows this mare to be their queen. For a moment, her heart quickens its thump as she realizes that she has garnered the brief attention of a queen no less and maybe there is something to Riva after all instead of all this bitterness she harbors inside her, but the moment passes and she comes back to her self with a sharp start and a shake of her head as the Amazon remarks on her mutterings. “I thought no one would hear me, no one ever hears me.” she says, brutally honest as her eyes meet the queen’s (she knows somewhat of who rules what, having fed herself on the scraps of their conversations and politics when they fed her nothing else - certainly none of their love or learning). “One day, they will regret having ignored me.” The vehemence is knife-sharp and blade-bright in her voice, and it glitters just as sharply and brightly in her eyes.