[open] i've got some damn bad intentions | walter, anyone

[Djinni]

Even her name contains her magic.

Yet Djinni has none.

There is no sound but the give of the earth beneath her hooves as they carry her down a well-trodden path. The silence is eerie, and she shivers, the motion sending her black and white mane flapping against her mousy hide. The ageless mare does not appear to be watching where she is going (her dark eyes are focused on something in the distance) yet her stride never falters as she makes her way down the Mountain and towards the Meadow.

She had been trying to leave the Chamber but had never made it. Stuck in a slipstream, she tumbled through the universe until Beqanna spat her out atop the Mountain a day ago, though she feels that eons have passed. Perhaps they have.

The dark shadow of her head turns toward a sudden sound, and she flicks her dark ears as she draws to a halt.

"Who's out there?!" she calls, doing her best imitation of Starlace. She was the bravest horse that Djinni had ever known, and if she can command even a fraction of the authority that her mother had held with such ease, she could conquer Beqanna.

@[Walter] (if you want, of course :p )

[Spear + Spark]

They’ve been caught up in the same whirlwind of confusion as everyone else.
Been spat out in the same places as everyone else.
They are faring better than most, because they have each other and never had anything to lose but each other.

Spear and Spark are playing, as they have always done from the moment they slipped free of mother’s safe dark womb. They cavort with the shadows of clouds on the ground, trying to outrun them. Their tails stream out behind them, one black and the other pale as snow, like from the nonexistent Tundra that throbs distant now, in their bloodstream, a memory of cold and ice. Spring keeps them warm and on their toes, happy and sassy as they grow, leaping and bounding and like deer. Well, the smaller one has their grace and nimbleness - Spear is too thick to be as nimble as Spark is, he stumbles at times, more clumsy on his large feet than she is. Still, he keeps abreast of her for most of their adventures.

Like now, when their games take them too close to a tobiano mare that tries to mask the fear in her voice. They turn their heads as a pair to her, answering to the authoritative command in her but they think it is only a ruse - she clings to something to keep her had about her shoulders, and they know this all too well, have come to recognize it in most of the adults around here. The grumbling earth and newborn mountain have made them all go funny and strange, and the twins cannot figure out why, other than that those who had things different about them are suddenly the same as they are - just horses. “Just us,” he calls back, sounding petulant as if their play had disturbed her and she reprimanded them for it.

Spark nudges him, he was entirely too boorish!
“We mean you no harm,” she says, coming out from Spear’s overprotective side.

[Djinni]

The mouse grey mare has never been especially fond of children. She does not dislike them, but the patience and time it takes to be truly nurturing are not of much interest to a creature such as Djinni.

She knows this about herself though, knows that she is not cut out to be a mother, and has long ago come to terms with it. She does not need to leave her mark on the world by filling it with her descendants; she'll mark it some other way. Of course, when she had had her magics, marking the world had seemed much easier than it is now. Djinni had always told herself "later". "Later" she will take back her parent's kingdom, "later" she will make her ancestors proud.

It seems that "later" has finally come around.

Fortunately, the children are not the especially small kind, so fragile as to need their mother. She doesn't feel the need to worry about them, to be concerned for their well-being and safety. So because of this, she treats them the same way she would any adult, because her own parents had always spoken to their children as if they were adults.

"That's reassuring," she replies, well aware that with her abilities gone she is nothing more than a short and slender mare with decades-old battle instruction. Djinni flicks her dark tipped ears forward as she takes a stop closer, within comfortable speaking distance for the two youngsters. "Where did you two come from before..." she trails off, uncertain what to call this change in Beqanna that has wrought so many changes on the horses themselves. "Before all this?" she finishes, deciding to simply gesture into the air around her and assume her meaning is clear.

[Spear + Spark]

Before;
That is how they think of everything now, how everyone does.

They came into the Now (they have no other name for it!) from the Before;
It is like a second birth, rushing through a big dark tunnel that spat them back out. It might have been a big animal throat connected to a big animal mouth, or a vortex of time and space - they're not sure yet, but it was one and the same to them.

Their mother is… well, they suppose somewhere on the mountain. Father is in the meadow gathering horses to him, and they - they are forever exploring. That is how they've come upon her; manes and tails blowing about their heads and legs, still shaggy as dogs. They will lose their thick winter pelts soon enough; their hair will fall out in clumps caught by the wind and blown away into forever.

She asks where they came from before all this happened; they share a look between them and Spark, the filly, says “From the Tundra.” Spear doesnt stay quiet for long, piping up with “Where did you come from?”

[Djinni]

The Tundra.

Had she been there? The name of the land conjures images of icy cliffs and a frozen ocean, a bitter kingdom manned only by the strongest of stallions. Yes, she decides, she has been there - but it was long ago.

They turn the question back to her but she hesitates to answer. The easy answer is the Chamber. She had been there before she left, fleeing the maelstrom of emotion that was Walter. But she has been gone for years, and the sweet scent of pine has faded entirely from her sleek coat.

"The Desert," she replies at last, "at least originally."

"I'm Djinni." She adds after a moment of silence during which she watches the wind tug at the tussocks of grass.

[Spear + Spark]

She says the Desert;

They’ve heard of it, but it is all muck and stories to them. Mother told them that she had been of the Desert prior to the gods (or maybe it was another of Coyote’s tricks…) sending a great flood to turn desert into sea. They would not have known the Tundra if the Desert had not been flooded; Scalped would have birthed them on the hot sands in the shadow of saguaro instead of just outside the ice wall that kept the Tundrans in and the rest, out.

Their eyes go wide; she is like a relic to them.

They’ve never met another aside from mother, who can claim any residual tie to the Desert that she often spoke about. Even then, Scalped’s tie was thin and breakable at best - she had not been there long, only long enough to push two daughters out onto the sands, and talk to the queen and her daughter.

Spear and Spark look at one another, then follow the tobiano mare’s eyes out to the windswept grass. It bends, bows, springs back straight after the wind goes by whistling by it. Something about the wind, the grass, and the mare seems terribly lonely. “Do you miss it?” Spark asks, curious beneath her black-capped ears and forelock. She takes a step closer to Djinni, even as Spear tells the mare their names; “I’m Spear and she’s Spark.”

Spear & Spark

[Djinni]

Their eyes remind her of the moon - round and full of wonder.

She had walked on the moon once, bouncing from place to place with the ease she was sure a cloud must feel as it dances through the sky. But her voice has echoed into the empty little sphere, and eventually she needed to hear a sound other than one of her own making, and she had blinked back into good company.

"Do I miss it?" She repeats, puzzling over the question as though she had never considered it. She hasn't really, now that she thinks of it. She does miss her family - her mother and father, her stampede of younger siblings. She has avoided arid places in her wanderings since, each dry breath reminding her of her family. "Yes," She finally says, "Yes I miss it very much."

She turns her head away for the moment, watching the distant mist as it shifts and sparkles. Is the Desert still out there? She wonders, but she also doubts. Her homeland had been the first to go, drenched in seawater that had no place on the golden dunes. It is gone, she is almost certain, drowned beneath the distant waves. Lost in memory, she does not quite realize that she has fallen oddly silent.

[Spear + Spark]

Each of them is still thinking about the grass; about a story their mother told them one chilly night as they lay back to back against one another at her feet, their faces upturned and curious. Scalped had told them about their ancestors, how they run among the stars and sometimes, come down to run amongst the grass and the sound of them going by is the noise the wind and grass make together. But Djinni is speaking to them and they slide their eyes to one another and back to her;

She repeats the question that Spark had asked her, clearly puzzled by it as if she had never given it thought.

They cannot imagine what it is like to never think about any of their ties to anything - family, a land, one another. It makes her seem so terribly alone to them; grand, but alone. They almost crowd closer to her, especially as she takes a breath and admits that she misses it, and maybe more than they ever thought she could. They miss the Tundra, but not in the same way that she must miss the Deserts. Spear and Spark miss it in the way that it was simply always there, but they are embracing the way the mists waver than part and new paths appear that groups of horses go down before the mists swallow them up again.

(They are excited to play at the feet of a bubbling volcano and a big talking river that rushes around their legs.)

“Do you think it could still be out there?” That is Spear talking, because he has followed her gaze towards the shimmering mists, and he is truly curious - if she believes the Deserts or some piece of it is left out there, could the Tundra too, then be there somewhere? Spark nuzzles her brother, as if knowing his thoughts, - knowing, that he was ever the adventurous sort and keen to discover things,  much more keen than she was. Spark was curious too, in her own way - “What do you think of all these new lands?” First, a volcano then a forest and an island, and now more woods. The earth is remaking herself, and Spark is curious as to why - why were the old lands not good enough to remain?

Spear & Spark

[Djinni]

"No," she replies. The Desert is gone - she is sure of it. Even stripped and barren as she is, Djinni knows that her birthland is gone. She used to feel it, a warm stone resting in her chest, but now there is only emptiness there.

She could fill that space, she thinks.

She won't though. She wouldn't dare.

Blinking, she looks at the the children as they ask her about the new lands. What does she think? She's never seen them. She'd have to...she'd have to walk there. Walking. What a strange idea. She's only ended up here because she's wandered downhill from the Mountain. The absence of her shimmering gold feels suddenly all too obvious, and Djinni shrugs her white shoulders in a futile gesture.

"I'm not sure yet," she replies. "I've not seen any of them. Have you?"

[Spear + Spark]

They share a look between them;

What do they know of birthlands and beginnings?

Only their own; only the place where permafrost meets grassy steppes and they only know of the Desert through the way the grit of that place clung to their mother’s fur like an ill-forgotten memory that they asked her about. She always answered them with faraway eyes and a sadness in her voice that made them look away from her, as if the things on her face were private and not meant to be seen by the two of them.

Their eyes slide back to her; ever to her --

They watch, and they wait, even as she blinks and shrugs and seems not to know.

“Only one - Tephra.” Spear says that, but there is something in his voice that makes even Spark look at him sharply. To her, it sounds like there is a hard bitter yearning in the way he talks back to the mare that makes her look at him differently from a moment longer than she should. He refuses to meet her eyes and that makes Spark nervous, her ears thread their way into the mix of bone white and inky black hair along the top of her head.

“That is the land our father petitioned the mountain for,” she explains cautiously, still not sure why Spear refuses to meet her eyes. Instead, he looks at his feet and rather glumly too, as if contemplating kicking a rock or two. He almost looks guilty - he’s never once thought of leaving his twin’s side but she seems content to go no farther than Tephra, the forest, or the meadow and that is beginning to bore him.

Spear & Spark

ooc: raene to woodrow! <3