Annapurna’s roots are strange things.
She’s of an old bloodline, for one, with her siblings dead centuries before she was born, though Beqanna runs amok with half-siblings. She would have been royalty if she was born when her full sisters were, and it would have been quite the different life.
(Now the kingdom is long dead, and her mother haunts the afterlife like a strange queen, and her father swallows galaxies and spits them back as children.)
Blood aside, the land she knew – the land she called home – was a strange thing unto itself, a cold and lonely mountaintop. Except she didn’t know cold, didn’t feel it. She didn’t know loneliness, either, having been raised in such stark isolation that she wasn’t aware it was an option.
It is why this land feels entirely too hot and too loud, sometimes, the throngs of horses and the beating sun. She tries to keep the cold and snow with her – it obeys her, somewhat – but her power is still weak, atrophied from disease (what use had she in generating cold atop a mountain, with snow already swirling around her?). There’s a chill that radiates from her, still, as if she’s just walked in from a snowscape.
She is thinking of snow when she first spies the other mare, bright colors standing out, catching the eye.
(Color still shocks her, sometimes – she knew white and gray, mostly, and the blazing blue of the sky.)
She pauses when she comes closer, examining her, and then she manages a smile. It is somewhat stiff, because she is still learning, but it’s there, and honest enough.
“Hello,” she says, then, “your color is very striking.”
Light touching the gold of her, refracting. A brilliance like sunlight on snow – yet not.
“I’m Annapurna,” she adds, as if a name would somehow add sense to her words.
tell me that girl is not a song of burning