06-08-2018, 02:34 PM
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I t should occur to her that there is no escort for the stallion to cross.It should occur to her that no recruit would try to cross in the darkness. It should occur to her that Sylva could come to Tephra, even when there has been such silence over the past month. None of it occurs to her though, and so (though her thoughts were filled with tension only moments before) she invites the devil — devils — into her very own, warm bed. Perhaps it is the characteristics of trust Wound has built up. Her brothers always frowned upon this very incident — speaking to strangers, inviting them home — and, after hearing it for so long as a child, the possibilities of such a thing ever happening had quietly slipped from her mind. Coffee-brown eyes squint into the growing darkness, ignorance blinding her from the shifting of the currents just before her feet. Wound wonders if he will cross or if her words had been swept away by the whispering of the waves and the hush of the evening breeze. Her mind is distracted from these thoughts when the tide before her suddenly writhes and spits. Before there had been simple, soothing summer waves but now the ocean is powerful and angry as if a storm were destroying the volcanic island. They remind Wound of Nerine’s powerful northern ocean, rising to fall roughly against the granite cliffs and gray beachfront. Their strength is dragging as well, seawater pulling at her heels as if trying to whisk her out to sea. She’s experienced this sensation before, swimming in Tephra’s sea, when a riptide had nearly drowned her. She’d managed to push herself out of it, but these waves feel fiercer, more dangerous, than those before. Wound scrambles backward, heart springing into her throat as she backpedals, and suddenly the twilight glow is shadowed by a form. A water-horse form, in fact, seawater dripping from tangled locks and dark eyes so intense Wound wonders if they will drag her into the sea with their sheer force. Fear grips her — and this fear is more real and suffocating than the fear of her anxiety — and a deliriously-desperate cry leaves her mouth. There’s no denying what this is now — there is no recruit waiting on the border, but rather a simple yet perfectly planned piece of a plan. The salt-soaked waves still pull at her legs, but Wound manages to drag herself free long enough to clamber away and onto the shoreline. Everything feels slower now, in her desperation to escape, and the sand sticks to her soaked legs as she begins to turn and run. There’s no call for Warrick on her tongue, knowing he had left earlier in the day to meet in Ischia, and it brings about the emotions of dread and hopelessness even stronger. All she can do is turn and hurriedly race away, struggling up the beach and hopefully into the foliage, if she will even make it that far. It’s doubtful, with that damned leg. |
credit to nat of adoxography.
@[Crevan] / @[Maugrim]