it's out of my hands; camrynn, any

[Tarnished]

We were young and wild and free,

fightin' in a love we couldn't leave.

I’m fine one second, blind the next.

It happens so suddenly that I cannot help for snarling and thrashing around, I try my best to clear my eyes but my vision isn’t coming back and—oh, well surprise, surprise! It’s only a little ball of black fur blocking my view and I go cross-eyed trying to look at her. She looks the same as that day in the Meadow, acorn in hand, almost as if to remind me that I’d lost both the battle and the war; my ears flick back when she bites into the nut and I struggle to fight back a grin when she swallows it down.

Cheeky girl.

“Ah, well, I suppose you should get used to it,” I sit back down, because if she isn’t going to move I’m sure as hell not going to attempt to walk around with her perched on the bridge of my nose. But then—well, what if I don’t have a nose? Smirking, my body quickly dissolves until it’s nothing but dust in the wind. I scatter, then pull myself back together some feet away—a horse, for once. I don’t think she’s ever actually seen my original form and I figure if I’m ‘visiting her,’ she might as well know who I actually am. “Tarnished,” I offer, flicking my tail and swiveling my ears ‘round so I can actually look like I’m listening. See my ears? See them? Yup, paying attention. “Or Nish, everyone seems to like calling me that.”

I say no more, because what more can be said to a squirrel? I’m not even sure if this is her actual form. I doubt it is, but stranger things have happened, yeah? It occurs to me that she’s probably a magician, a mere shape-shifter cannot pull things out of thin air; I should probably run, or something, but she calls the Deserts home. As does Yael. So she cannot be all that bad—but then again, Nocturnal had been a cannibal and they had let her be Queen of the Deserts.

Elected her, even.

Details.

“So who is ruling these days, squirrel friend?” I wonder, because last I heard, my father had been murdered and Yael sat on the throne alone and then—well, I’ve been trying to not keep up with Beqanna politics unless I have something to gain from them. They’re often too complicated and messy. Too many allied to one another to not piss someone off and all that.

tarnished

vanquish x nocturnal

Even on the way down, even on the way down.