[open] though rapt in the ruin; any

[breach]

for so long had my teeth held my tongue from a venomous voice
but the poison has passed from my lips to my hands, an incendiary point

The other smells faintly of Nerine—of the saltwater and the cliffs, of the place of her second death—and something in Breach’s belly sours at the thought of it. Her mouth twitches, the lips pulling even further into a frown as she considers the other, but she doesn’t walk away immediately. Instead she shifts her bulk to look at the mare a little more closely, watching with sharpened dual-colored eyes.

“Thanks for the lesson,” she says dryly, not necessarily appreciating the pointers but not in the mood to spar over it. She had tried enough forms in her short life to know that there were other forms more conducive to flight, but that never made them feel better to her. She had loved the hawk from the very first and she was loath to part from it, even when it was more practical to do so.

Not that she felt like opening up like that with this relative stranger.

Instead, she rolls her shoulders and shakes it out. Her tangled, matted hair falling down the sloped lines of her neck. She smiles then, her teeth as pointed as the tiger, and wonders at what brings this mare to her. She had felt like being alone, Mesec’s blood still lingering in the back of her mouth, but she supposes that had she truly wanted that, she would have been wise enough to stick to the peaks of Hyaline’s mountains.

“I intend to win most of them,” her voice still dry, throat tight with all she has seen and done this day, but even then, there is the threading of humor through it—a piece of the girl she might have been still there.

though ritual pyre sending smoke to the sky as the building continues to burn
though rapt in the ruin, the pain in the grave, is lies you leave tied to the earth