07-11-2016, 03:53 PM
i don't love you;
but i always will.
Riva is all too familiar with disappointment; it is kin of sorts, to the hate she harbors in her heart. Her family disappointed her and therefore, she is doomed to repeat history and disappoint herself and others. So like Lagertha, she disappoints and is disappointment itself at times. She also knew that she had abandoned the Jungle for around two years and knows that this too, must be a bit of a family curse - be abandoned and to abandon, and her life is nothing but the perpetuation of the very things that have shaped her into such a callous mare.
The Queen says her name and draws Riva back into herself, or rather upwards since she had drifted off in thoughts about perpetuity. “Quite,” she sneers, hardly aware that she is doing it but there is such disgust in her at the idea of submitting to a boring life as a broodmare - she just couldn’t do it, couldn’t even foresee babies in the future (though she still bore a tiny annoying inkling of something like like for that damnable stallion… He got under her skin like a thorn and stayed there), and figured those things are not meant for the likes of her. “I think I would rather die than choose herd life, it was so ungodly boring and the way they threw themselves at him for attention!” She scoffs, still quite sickened by the sights she had seen there in the golden plains, at least the tall grass rippling beneath the sun was something to behold, everything else just wasn’t.
“Sounds like I haven’t missed much,” Riva says with a conspiratorial chuckle. Oh how they delude themselves! The kingdom is quiet, like a grave, though life trickles here in here and there, like a stream that tries to grow but only in spurts. Granted, the Jungle is still growing since the War but she was doing so at a snail’s pace. Riva though, as usual, deep in thought, still has her eyes focused on the python, rather mesmerized by its slow climb up the tree and a deeply ingrained response shudders through her body - snake bad, says the quaking of her flesh, in clear terms of danger even though the Queen assures her that it is not. Her eyes slide towards the gray at the pensive note in her tone that also seems to have taken over her face like a dark shadow, “I’m a survivor, what can I say?” It is her attempt at uplifting the Queen’s sudden plummet in joviality (if one could say Lagertha was ever jovial…) and it unnerves her to see the mare this way.
“It hasn’t really bothered to try and eat me since I’ve come and gone from here.” She falls quiet for only a moment, “I don’t mean to pry but… seems like you’ve got something on your mind.” Oh Riva! She still hasn’t learned that curiosity killed the cat, except she’s a horse and harder to kill than that - or so she likes to think, not that’s immortal, that would be a joke; they might have actually kept her if she had been special in some way like that. Hm, she manages to snort, more to herself than her present company.
Riva