Wind runs through her mane.

[Nykeln]

the poison on your lips; My inky pelt is rich, dark stains of burgundy taint my chest, my neck, my forelegs. Tarnish my muzzle with a healthy glow of crimson. As I smile, all teeth and glee, I cannot help but picture the years of memories gone by. I may be young but my books have been told, the pens have written scrawl after scrawl on parchment. And here in Beqanna, they continue to write. I watch her, dark eyes, oblivion, deep and never-ending black, they watch her with a predatory curiosity. She is ripe, like summer fruit. Her barrel heaving with the seed of life. I inhale then, she smells of ocean spray and grains of sand, of something bittersweet and soft. My nostrils pique, fluttering against the strange smells. They are nice and delicate, soft and pale. Everything I am not. I am shadow and night, dark and harsh. Every inch of my friesian frame a mass of hair and sinew, of a feral grace that goes unnoticed. Until now. The pale maiden is as sweet as the fresh spring grass, as pale as the clouds in the summer sky. She is the epitome of all that I had left behind in my father's herd, and she is a memory that cracks and creaks in my head. I reach out my dark muzzle, inhale, deep, deeper. 'Companionship. Strange feeling, no?' I query, taking long steps around her, pounding the loam with thickset feet and feathered limbs. I eye her up again, drinking in hr presence. She is with child, ripe and ready, soon to spring upon the land with little hooves and weak eyes. There is a pang, rigid and hard, that hits me. It lulls me for a moment in a false sense of hope. A child. a beautiful child. Flashes of memory come to me and I feel the coldness prick my bones, knot my muscles. I had a child, once. Born dead and cold. The shiver runs down my spine and ends at the tip of my long, flowing tail. 'Why does one wander so far from home?' the question sparks in the air, like electricity. I stalk forward again, an imposing shadow upon her sunlit day. The pounding of her heart, ripe, the life within her, equally as loud in my mind. taunting me with something I had in my grasp but lost because of hellions and fools, and my own damned young body. 'Dangerous things lurk the lands. One in your condition... I dread to think what might happen.' there is a serenade in my voice, a singsong that is as blissful and sweet as the nectar in wildflowers, but as poisonous as the sting from the barbs of a flytrap. 'I'm Nykeln.' because introductions are always necessary, even on death beds and murderous plots. I swing my neck around, looking down to the meadow below, a quaint glaze in my obsidian eyes. 'I live here.' a long, deliberate pause, a flutter of earlobes and a brief snort. 'And you look very far from your home.' I stalk closer still, imposing, walking her closer and closer to the edge of the cliff face. Rocks skittering by my feet as I kick them carelessly. The thud, the delicate pounding of her heart and the child growing within, it entices me near, draws me close. Life and death, such fragile things, quaint and lithe, like butterfly wings. the haematoma in your heart;