Brinly
Brinly had never been a creature designed for love.
She was not made from it. She was the result of lust and want, the consequence of her mother’s inability to turn down any opportunity to flirt with danger. While she had not been especially hard or guarded as a young girl, she was also never too eager to expose herself. She had assumed, naively, that eventually, someone would come around that made it easy for the armor to fall; she had thought she had all the time in the world, that it would pay off to be patient and wait for such things.
Any chance that she could have learned to love was dashed the moment she was cursed with being untouchable.
There were a certain few that could withstand the heat of her skin, but of course, they were never the ones that she was drawn to. She was fated to only catch the eye of those that she could never have; those that she would leave burnt and wounded by a simple touch.
Brazen had been different, almost. She could have been different. She could touch parts of her, at least. The stoneskin and the bone armor — but that isn’t what touching is supposed to feel like, Brinly always thought to herself bitterly. Skin against shield could only satisfy her craving for intimacy so much, but more importantly, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was causing more damage to Brazen than good. It was unfair to keep her locked in that romantic purgatory, lingering constantly on the edge of something always out of their reach.
Brinly had not learned much from either of her parents, and so she can’t be sure if her ability to sever ties and disappear was something she picked up, or if she was simply born with it. It came so naturally that she is sure it must be part of her genetic make-up, because even though she feels threads of guilt at times when she thinks of Brazen, she had left without looking back.
When his voice pierces the air, when she turns to find a young stallion with a face carved from something so familiar that it feels as though she is facing a ghost, there is a moment where her heart seems to stutter in her chest. She has never been particularly good at masking her emotions, and they flash across her face one after the other; surprise and confusion, guilt and shame, and then a single thread of envy that echoes her suspicion. “Who are you?” She answers his question with one of her own, the words simmering with the same heat that shifts uneasily beneath her skin.
She thinks he will know that she is not asking for only his name.
— if i’m on fire, you’ll be made of ashes too —
@Reave