even monsters are made of stardust
She’s staring at the stranger until she’s not.
The girl disappears just as Zosma is inching her way forward to converse, the air curiously and suddenly blank of the object of her attention. Oh well, can’t say I didn’t try. In the next second though, there’s a telltale pop into the water behind her. She’s used to parlor tricks aplenty (her lady had enjoyed both harmless ones and those that only seemed to be harmless at first), so she isn’t shocked when she turns and sees the girl has reappeared behind her.
She is rather surprised at the resemblance, however.
So her suspicions have not been unfounded, then. The painted dreamweaver has indeed settled down from her time of midnight trysts with perfect strangers in the common grounds. Zosma has perhaps been holding out hope that it hadn’t been the case. But seeing the proof now, here in the flesh, she finds herself less affected than she thought she might. After all, Kagerus had been a tempting and dangerous resolution to a conflict she had no part of herself. She had been a balm to a burn that had left Zosma aching more after the encounter than less. But she hadn’t been a future. Even now, staring at her daughter – likely the fruit of real devotion - the demoness knows it wouldn’t have lasted, wouldn’t have compared.
Still –
“I am Zosma,” she says in that deep voice that echoes in the hollow of her own chest. She doesn’t ask the girl’s name right away. Instead, she tilts her head to regard the water-stationed filly with a searching gaze. There are so many eerie similarities between her and the dream spinner that it’s hard to imagine any contribution of genes more than those of Kagerus herself. There is one thing.
“You are injured.” It’s not a question, and as soon as it leaves her lips, she’s stepping forward into the water for a better assessment. The forked gash on the girl’s shoulder is angry but not new, she realizes, not actively bleeding at least. For one as intimately familiar with pain as she is, Zosma can almost feel the sting of this attack in her own muscles. The cutting and slicing of one’s own flesh isn’t readily forgotten, especially a wound so new. “Does your mother know about this?” She asks it conversationally, without too much interest. She knows how much of a hellion she was at this age, how little the chance she would have told her own dam.
There is really no good reason for her to care about a few scratches on an unknown filly in the middle of a kingdom she can’t even call her own. But she does. Damnit, she does.
zosma