the rain that falls upon your skin
it's closer than my hands have been
The admission of Lepis’ champagne champion had not come as a surprise. The dun mare’s flaws do not include underestimating her enemies, and despite Heartfire’s insistence otherwise, Lepis is certainly wise enough to recognize a worthy opponent in the roan mare. She’s begun to think of the northern queen as a spider, and the impression only grows stronger as the blue mare slips out of the fog ahead of her like some predator of the woods. Her web is spread all across Beqanna, and Heartfire twitches and tugs it easily, guided by the sight of far too many eyes. Someday, the roan mare will catch a meal too big for her to swallow, but Lepis is no longer certain that she fits such a description.
It is foolish to feel exposed by something as silly as an uneven parting of her mane, but Lepis has begun to realize that she is guilty of foolishness far more often than she had once thought.
She is guilty of a great many other things as well, but she tucks them all behind a calm golden face and quiet blue-grey eyes.
“Was Castile not appropriately cowed by the visit you and your bullies boys paid, then?” She asks, finding a small pleasure in keeping anything but curiosity from her voice. She doesn’t need to add anything more though, not with the words she’s chosen. Lepis knows at what she prods, and finds that doing so feels like courting danger. But danger is better than sadness – anything is, really – and she lets it flicker in her chest, feeds it.
Lepis casts her gaze north for a moment, and the thrill of danger slides up her throat, crisps the edges of her tongue.
“But…I understand. I will take my leave from the North.” Now she looks back, and indeed, her expression looks almost like acceptance. That is the decision she has been weighing, after all, the one that she suspects a bright white mare had come to influence, the one whom Lepis had humored as if she had not smelled of granite and the sea as strongly as Heartfire does. “And I will be taking Taiga with me.”
“We will go peacefully,” she adds, the words not half as quick as her heartbeat. It is a struggle to stifle the words that so want to follow, the addendum that the peace will exist unless her hand is forced.
“Because that’s what we both want, isn’t it? Peace?” It’s what Lepis wants, what she has been perfectly clear about since the very moment they cornered Aten on a dark night. Her methods are…unusual, but they’ve been rather successful as well. Something that she is sure Heartfire knows as well, else she’d not have finally come south. Is she threatened by their growth, Lepis wonders? Has she finally heard the growing number of voices from the redwoods echoing on her lonely cliffs and realized that Lepis had been truthful? Unlikely, Lepis thinks, but she waits, poised despite her relaxed posture.
Heartfire had promised to destroy her during their last encounter, and Lepis knows that she walks a very thin line.
@[Heartfire]
lepis, comtesse of taiga
queen of loess | queen of sylva | queen of the south
lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio
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