the rain that falls upon your skin
it's closer than my hands have been
The moonrise does not find Lepis sleeping, but that is no longer unusual.
Slipping between the trees by starlight is easier than sleep. What rest she does get is fitful, full of dreams and emotions that her unconscious mind cannot control. Better to stay awake, she thinks, and so tonight she does.
There is a quiet patter of hooves from ahead, someone slipping into Taiga from the west. Someone from Tephra, at this time of night? Lepis is no imposing guard, but she sees no other figures, and knows Pteron to be away in Ischia. She will find the visitor, and in time she does. It is a little spotted mare, dusty white with dusty black spots – or perhaps black and white and simply dirty. The scars across her crest and withers are almost familiar, but Lepis cannot quite place them. (They are scars like her mother’s scars, scars from a kelpie’s claim).
Lepis pauses beside a tree to watch the other for a moment, several dozen yards away. The stranger stands still as well, only the twitching of her ear and the soft rise and fall of her too-thin sides to indicate she even lives. The Comtesse is suddenly, almost overwhelmingly, glad that she has stopped here. A second mare joins the spotted one, her ruby coloring bright even in the shadows. She thinks she might slip away, but then Aten joins them from directly across her line of sight, and Lepis knows that she is spotted. Times like these, she wishes she had the invisibility possessed by her children.
She joins them, pulling her golden wings more tightly to her sides. Feathered barriers, she thinks, as though they could do anything at all. With more sleep and less stress, without the words she had shared with Aten not so terribly long ago, Lepis might have been in a better mood. It is not possible to tell that she is not, not with the friendly smile she wears, and the brightness in her blue-grey eyes. She glances at Aten and then at the spotted mare, and though her gaze does not land on Lilliana in greeting, the Comtesse does acknowledge the mare when she speaks after Aten.
“Lilliana does know quite a bit about secrets,” Lepis says with a smile, and now she does meet Lilli’s pretty blue eyes. Not for a moment does her expression flicker from the polite friendliness she shows their visitor, but she does hold the red mare’s gaze for a beat too long before returning her attention to the spotted visitor. Closer, she sees the feather in the mare’s hair, and that too reminds her of…something. The name comes to her then, and where it comes from means that she delves no deeper into the origin.
A cruel twist of fate, she thinks, with a wry smile that edges past her mask. The only one missing is Wishbone.
“You’re Breckin, aren’t you?” she asks. “And a little far from Nerine?”
lepis, comtesse of taiga
queen of loess | queen of sylva | queen of the south
lover of wolfbane | mother of pteron, marni, tiercal, eyas, gale, celina, and elio
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@[Breckin]
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