at world's end; Fayella (and Lagertha too!)

[riva]

i don't love you;

but i always will.

“Quite,” she says through a grinning mouth.

Her natural inclination would have been to come back with a witty retort but she rather liked this mare. There was a spark in her that drew Riva like a moth to the flame to be perfectly cliche.

It feels like home already.

That one statement hits Riva hard, or the truth in it does. It took her a year or more to figure that out and she doesn’t begrudge her friend that instantaneous feeling of home at all. She knows now that that is what the Jungle is to both of them - home, and then it happens - magic rends the entirety of Beqanna apart, like a great sucking void of absence, and Riva cannot say that she is sad to see it go. Magic ran rampant through all the lands and perhaps, in its absence, they’ll gain more semblance of how things should be - ordinary and extraordinary alike, none greater than the other, but with it comes the loss of Lagertha and Riva feels this perhaps no more keenly than any other sister, but it still stings to know the gray mare is lost to them. Not dead, just lost, and Riva feels that same thread of abandonment tug on her torrid little heart and she snorts fiercely at the feeling.

In the aftermath of everything, she looks for Fayella - calls out to her, “Fay!” having nicknamed her friend. She hopes she hasn’t lost her too, she really couldn’t cope with that devastation…

Riva