[open] lost in the woods; any

[Lepis]

again you’re gone, off on a different path than mine i'm left behind wondering if i should follow The sun that beams down on her raised face is feeble but bright. Lepis can almost imagine that it is summer and warm. It is the wind that saps the heat from her skin, carries the cloud of her breath away. The cloud shimmers as it vanishes into the open air in front of the dun mare and her companion. It’s already freezing already in the bitter wind. She’s just exhaled cloud of laughter, as quick and rapid as the warmth of the sun, its warmth gone as soon as it’s felt. Laughing had felt wrong, and she’d bitten off her reaction to the stallion’s good humor with am abruptness that is impossible to miss. Her pewter eyes, as silver-blue as the sky above them, grew stormy in an instant, the mask of good humor slipping. The expression lasts less than a heartbeat, and the cut-off peal of laughter is long since torn away by the wind. With someone more important, she might have done something different than what she does. Might have. But Tipper isn’t someone important. He’s not someone that will know will even know what emotional projection is, let alone recognize Lepis as the source. He knows quite a bit though, the tobiano reminds herself. While Taiga has made no secret of their defiance of their Nerenian monarch, it’s not every resident of Loess that would know so much about Lepis. The unicorn stallion doesn’t look very old – surely no more than a few years older than the fourteen year old mare herself. Trust, she sends to herself, and she is less careful than usual with the scope of it. Tipper will likely feel it too. [Who are you really?], she thinks to herself – and also directly and silently to the stallion in front of her. She means it as innocently as her suggestion that he play pretend; Lepis suspects nothing about the horned man beside her save that he is not her family, and therefore that he is never to be implicitly trusted, no matter how warm his smile or infectious his laughter. ‘Do you ever want to toss caution to the wind?’ He asks her, and Lepis finds herself smiling despite herself, shaking her head back and forth. Lepis is not innately the type to ‘just see what happens’; she loves her plans. (She is not always good at carrying them out, of course, but she does love the heady anticipation that comes with making them, and that’s enough to make her wary of surprises.) “Only if you have some way of catching yourself,” the woman answers, her words slightly muffled by the navy mane that has been caught by the wind and blown across her face. Shaking it back to a more controllable position means a shake that reveals her scars, but Lepis does so with a grin. “Though if you don’t, I bet I could add Murderess to a list of titles that don’t mean anything anymore. You wouldn’t mind if I took credit?” Her brow, already rippled by a myriad of blue lines, lifts higher in genuine amusement. LEPIS i’m the one who sees you home-- but now i’m lost in the woods and i don’t know what path you are on

@[Wolfbane]