Carry my Banner {All herd/ Riva}

[riva]

Riva is still inwardly seething; feeling tricked by the fact that he quite obviously doubles as a slave for some kingdom and her suspicions raise their ugly heads and tell her that it is most likely the Dale since it is a neighboring (albeit conquering!) land. It is hard for her to look at him demurely like the other mare does; it is just not in the paint’s nature to look all moony-eyed over a stallion. What does come so naturally to her eyes is a look of pure anger because she knows that he has been withholding information from her and that peeves Riva to no end. She wants to stomp her feet, bite and kick at him, but something stays the violence that bubbles up so righteously (so she believes) inside her and she tamps it back down with a hard angry swallow of her throat. If only she had known they shared a common thread of abandonment to family members less likely to really raise them right and in the end, just up and leave them for good. But he kept his history to himself, as much as she kept hers to herself - it just wasn’t something that came up in conversation, aside from the fact that he seemed to think she would make herself right at home here. Riva remembers committing to only a visit here; her life was given over way too easily to the Amazonian Queen and the Jungle would come first before the black stallion with the cobalt hair and wingtips. She doesn’t think he knows this though and it might be a pleasant little shock to him whenever she decides to hightail it back to the swampy heat of the Jungle. But for now, she is temperate (boiling really, below the surface of her skin) and eyeing him with the beginnings of something that might be disdain as he moves closer, encouraging the other mare to follow him close as well. Riva didn’t like closeness, but she tolerated him at times for some godforsaken reason that made no sense to her, but she balks at his invitation of the other mare to remain tucked beneath his wing and therefore, closer to the paint mare. “I’m the same as I was when we first met in the field,” she tells him coolly, her eyes shifting from him to the plains and okay, she cannot help but admit that his land is rather pretty and the long golden grass beckons to be played in but when did she ever do something as casual and frivolous as play? Not even as a solemn shadow of a filly could she remember games or fun, and chalks it up to some inherent equine desire to possess the earth in fast ground-eating strides of a galloping run but she shakes it off with an imperious shake of her thinly shaped head. Riva fell far short of being pretty, she was too harshly made for that - all skin and bones and hatred wrapped up in the bay tovero body that made her what she was in shape and form (hatred burned up all the rest, shaped it out of still-hot coals and embers flaring to life and what she had for a soul - if she had one - was blackened and shrivelled from the hot hot heat of her hate). “The war wasn’t exactly kind to you,” she says to him, stating the obvious.