06-15-2017, 11:45 PM
the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky
The Tundra. Tephra. The Meadow.
But she shook it away from her nostrils and breathed his odd smell in, of horse and some other animal scent that could not be separated from his - ripe and old, snowy almost, and she thought once more of the Tundra and almost felt it snow behind her eyes in a memory that played across the gray matter of her brain. “Hello,” she called out to him, as she came closer but kept a respectable distance between them.
These are her haunts, not so much the first because it was swallowed up in the Reckoning and only the common lands and those shrouded in mist were spat back out, along with all of them, the dispossessed. It had not bothered her as much as it did others, because Spear was there at her side and she found Giver not long after, and somewhere her mother and father had come into it all too, so she had not lost the things that mattered to her - they were found, as easily as all the stars in the night sky can be found, one by one, as certain as the next.
She cannot imagine the snowy realm of the Tundra now, and how it could be house her. Since her transformation, she has come to relish the heat of the volcanic island more than the other lands that beckon of large lakes and rolling hills, of a sea ringed by caves and cliffs and an island tropical and savage as an untamed atoll. Her imagination does not run rampant and rife with explorations of them, and her feet remain planted firm in the ashen soils upon which she stands.
But every so often, she pulls up her roots and sojourns into the common lands, sometimes running as if on fire (and sometimes, she is - a creature of flame that seethes and shimmers, hot and burning) through the forest like she’ll burn it down to ash around her. Sometimes, she makes a long slow trek through the meadow just to stop and smell the flowers that are as wild as she is, or thinks she is. She might be more tame now, tamer than before now that she is almost elemental, fire incarnate and chained to an altogether new and unasked for shape that comes unbidden to her as the most unlikely of times.
Walking could make her mane burst into flame.
Arguing with her twin brother could make her skin burn up and away until she stood there, the embodiment of fire.
It was this lack of control that bothered the little medicine hat mare the most; she felt like her fire mimicry ought to be something that she could handle but it seemed too elemental, too wild, too hard to handle. She, once dispossessed, had become possessed and not by anything she could ever have imagined! Was this what it was like to love? She once thought so, but Giver had soured that a bit for her and she preferred her newfound fire to the heat he roused in her, a heat that had gone cold from neglect in his absence.
Perhaps this and this alone, is the very thing that drove her forth not in search of wildflowers to sniff but something else to break the tedium of her days. That might have been why it was easy for Spark to find him the coming dark, because the soft chestnut of his skin was not hard on the eyes but rather, inviting. It held no hard metallic sheen to it and the forelock that fell across his eyes (she has yet to divine the dark pit where once an eye had been, now only sunken and thrice scarred by rent and ripping claws) was tangled cream unlike anything she had seen.
A flaxen chestnut stallion should not have interested her like so, but Spark reacted to the way he stood alone against the oncoming dark and she moved towards him, pale but for the black shield on her breast and the black bonnet that encapsulated her ears and brow. He seemed a better choice than the flowers that began to sicken and rot beneath the heat of the summer sun, though she tipped her head up towards the night that began to close in on them and she thought she caught the faintest whiff of the first fine chill that spoke of the next season to come full circle.
Spark