you bring out the darker side of me { ANY }

[Echidna]

Echidna is stone, or rather, she is earth. At the height of her power, Echidna could control the dirt beneath her hooves and it made her into a deadly warrior. Her fight was never one-sided, good or evil, right or wrong, it was a fight for freedom. Her very birth had been an orchestra of magic by the gods, created to end a long war, but she’d always been a rebel. Echidna wanted to live on her own terms and by her own ideas, not stitched together by someone else’s opinions. It caused her to become an outcast, which was not far from what she wanted anyway. 

But that didn’t mean there weren’t those who searched for her. Who would come roaming into her hiding places and challenge her for things, whether it be her loyalty to their cause or whatever magical items that might be in her possession at the time. Echidna never knew the taste of defeat and after a while, they stopped trying.

She lived the majority of her life in the cold, but there was a time when she lived near an ocean when the rebellion swept through. Out of hate for her father, Echidna helped them, but it was all for selfish reasons. She knew that until he was gone, she’d never truly live free. So she remained near the coast for a time, tasted salt and ate sweet grasses that would grow in the lush regions deep inside the jungle. Echidna remembers because it was the first time she left her home and it was the first time she ever committed murder.

When the mare speaks, Echidna tilts her head slightly. Her golden ears flick passively, she can hear, somewhere around them, the crackle of twigs beneath a heavy weight. She does not flinch or show any emotion. The sleek mare talks about this being her first winter and how she lived in the warm jungles and Echidna grinds her teeth softly. They are very different from each other and the spotted buckskin feels a sense of contentment -- it makes her relax a little more, sigh against the velvet spot between the other mare’s nostrils.

“Faeries,” Echidna says under her breath. The word sends a shiver down her spine because it holds so many keys to her past. Faeries. Maybe she should -- no. “You are a queen,” she says and it is not a question, rather a statement. Echidna knew royalty, queens and kings, she’d watched them come and go like sand blown up and away by the wind. Titles meant nothing to her and so she doesn’t say anymore on the matter.

Echidna had never been a queen, she refused, but she had been a god. What a tangled past she had and each memory floats to the surface standing here next to this new queen. The little mare shifts her weight slightly.

“My name is Echidna,” she says.

Echidna takes in a deep breath, the cold burns her lungs. She does not ask for a name in return, there is no point. They will part ways and Echidna will forget this meeting. “What are you queen of exactly? Or rather, who are you queen of exactly?”

echidna

no care in the world