[open] we wrote our own story; any

[Kensa]

KENSA

we were golden. we were fire. we were magic.

Once upon a winter meadow.
She was last here about a year past and met a stranger she never saw again. The world has changed and she has allowed it to leave her behind watching it go on swiftly with distant and hardly focused eyes. Kensa has been turned inward for so long that today when she steps out of the trees and into the bright snow strewn day she doesn’t recognize where she is for a moment. Once familiar trees have grown tall and thick, the deer trails through the snow and tangle have shifted just enough to look foreign. 


Kensa stands just beyond the break in the trees and blinks at the painful whiteness for a few seconds and for the very first time sees beauty in the winter time, in the cold death. She has hated the common lands during the frigid months since the very first day she’d arrived. Now she remembers, and sees beginnings, a winter womb awaiting the quickening of spring.


It would be unfair to say that this is the moment in which she is healed, freed, and cleansed of what has transpired but this is perhaps the first time she can just exist in a moment and enjoy it. Once she might have lunged out into the smooth expanse of whiteness before herself and churned snow and mud up into a beautiful mess. Instead she drifts absently out into the meadow leaving a single narrow track in her wake, disturbing as little as possible. She might look angelic moving gracefully through the snow like this, but nothing as beautiful as Kensa could ever be such a cliche of purity. 

((Hi open mess because I need to write again and that means making something happen with my favorite girl))
—

[Set]

Across the river, on the edge of the forest in the near distance, a large unkindness gathers. Their blue-black bodies stark against the dull gray of the winter sky, they fly in a broken sort of unity. The sun filters weakly through the snow-burdened clouds, now and again giving their feathers an iridescent shine. They wheel northward and settle raucously into the outstretched branches of a tree whose life has been drained of vitality; it will not be resurrected come spring, when the earth is warm and new life is everywhere. The birds squabble with one another for a minute or so, flapping wings and squawking, pushing one another until the best branches have been claimed and the snow below is littered with hastily pulled feathers and several droppings.

He bursts out of the forest at a dead run, entering the Meadow just below the conspiracy-laden tree, a crow of laughter peeled from his sweat-stained muzzle. It would have been impossible for them to hear him coming - for any to hear him coming - because just seconds ago he was soundless, twisting and turning amongst the irregularly placed trunks. The dead tree explodes with startled ravens and they fill the sky like some ominous harbinger of what’s to come, but he pays the cursing birds little mind, continuing his sweat-streaked charge toward the River. The water, though lazy here where the banks widen, is still a mass of open water, littered with rock and wood. Glorying in the burn in lung and muscle alike, the sweat that warms his piebald skin, he uses these natural forms to traverse the surface and gain the Meadow-side bank.

Set’s hooves find slick purchase in the snow on the other side, his steps confident and sure. Slowing his pace only just, he bunches his hindquarters beneath him and wheels off to his right, running several strides before jerking to his left with another wild shout of glee. His striped hooves churn up the ground beneath the snow, his unruly gambol destroying the pristine spotlessness of the otherwise empty common-land. Well, nearly empty. He does not miss a beat, frolicking in the now-dirty snow, steam rolling off of him, a lawless, coltish grin on mismatched lips. A rather sizeable clump of snow levitates in his wake, hurtling itself toward the impossibly beautiful mare who trails along his periphery.