11-24-2019, 09:36 PM
I was in the darkness, so darkness I became;
The gold queen’s ears snap flat to her skull as the dark stallion manifests from nothing (a bird, in the corner of her eye, and then a horse, an unsettling magic). She steps forward, muscles tense, when she feels something thrum through her own body, a strange, foreign sense, electricity zipping through her nerves. What had that been? She’s never felt such a sensation before. Her own powers, the ones given to her by her mother, were rarely used, far less strong.
Of course, she’d used them once, right after taking them, a sin she tries to forget, as if it was easy to forget you’d killed your own mother, hypnotized her into walking into the sea. Never mind that madness had held her in the chokehold, the action was, ultimately, hers.
The stallion speaks, backing up the mare’s words with his implication. Craft feels dizzy, ill, and with a faint and insensible fury throbbing in the back of her mind like a headache. The deserts can’t be gone. It simply can’t.
“What…” she says, struggling for the words, still convinced – still hoping, desperately – that this is some stupid, cruel joke that they’re playing on a queen. That it makes no sense – that they are all strangers, that the stallion had happened upon them, that they have no reason to lie – prickles at the back of her mind but she tries to shove it back.
“What happened?”
She searches their face, hoping again to find evidence of deceit. That she could, perhaps, simply hypnotize them into truth-telling has not yet occurred to her – or perhaps it had, and she is still too frightened of the truth to allow such a thought to surface.
Craft