i can feel the flames on my lips; crimson blood on my skin
A single wing is back in an eye-blink, and the curled thumb at the top joint is stretching out toward the tobiano stallion. It catches him beneath the chin, turns his head this way – then that as the grey’s lips purse and her soft eyes narrow.
She nods then, clearly satisfied, and the bony thumb strokes his cheek for just a moment before it fades to red smoke.
“You were always my favorite,” she tells him, aware in death that she had not told him so often enough in life.
Then her attention shifts to the boy with hollow eyes, the one at which her Favorite gnashes his teeth. Carnage’s, she thinks, son of a dark god. His methods are crude, and the boy smells of old blood. “Did you kill them yourself?” She asks, and there is a hawklike intensity in the way her head tilts to the side, waiting for an answer regarding the origin of the toys he as left behind. She hopes it is in the affirmative.
The patter of light feet – many light feet – approach in the snow. Children, children like the dead star boy, and only one bold enough to speaks. Starlace does enjoy boldness in the young. “Says the leader of the youngest army I’ve ever seen,” she replies with a flicker of her eyes across the four faces. Yearlings in the field in the dead of winter; how else has Beqanna changed in her absence? How much will she need to correct?
The smells of rotting flesh she thinks might be Stave, at least until an eighth figure joins them. Infection. But her’s too, he claims, and Starlace’s wing-thumb returns to shift his head back and forth as well. Carnage’s too, she sees, and a brief flicker of disappointment in that odd daughter flickers across her gray face. Still, he is effusively eager to have found her, and she does enjoy praise. “Lugosi.” She repeats with a nods, and her soon-vanished wing chucks him beneath the chin like one might a beloved hound.
“When was the last war?” She asks her assembled crowd. The Hall of the Slain does not receive them all, but the offerings have been meager of late. Surely her world has not become entirely pacified. Surely there is chaos to be roused somewhere, blood to be spilt, bones to be broken. “And when will be the next?”
@[stave] since u r next
Starlace