i'm two quarters and a heart down

[Celina]

Celina reacts without thinking, taking a protective step over her half-eaten meal. This is her meal; she’ll not be sharing it. Her mouth is parted, her sharp teeth bright with fish blood, but she doesn’t snap at him. She refrains, but it is a near thing. He might be an investment but that doesn’t meant she has to share her eel with him. He doesn’t even look like he could eat it, with those flat little teeth she sees in the firefly light. Celina wrinkles her nose, and carefully draws the eel further under her belly (just in case he makes a lunge for it). He seems rather distracted by her companions, and she pulls them closer to herself. They illuminate the sharp edges of her features, and the iridescence of her stripes glimmer pale-yellow green. “Can you turn down that glowing?” She asks him. “You’re going to be really bad and hide-and-sneak if anyone can just follow the moths to you.” There are two of them, she remembers. Twins, a multiple birth like that of her own siblings. (Or so she has heard, having been unable to pin down Tiercel long enough to squeeze the truth out of him). They are important, even if she doesn’t quite understand how. Unwilling to leave her eel where he might take it, Celina narrows her pale eyes and looks him over. The other one has wings. He might have been a better choice, but Celina will make do with what she has. “I’m going to make you the better brother.” She tells him at last with a satisfied nod. She is all early adolescent confidence, the idea that she might fail (or perhaps should not even attempt) never crosses her mind. “That way, when Dad asks why you’re better than the other one, you can tell him I trained you and he will love me the most.” After telling him this, which she assumes he will agree to without question, the filly remembers that he’d said something about her stars. “And they’re fireflies. They’re not stars. Just bugs that ate those real tiny stars you can see if the sky. When the bugs yawn: that’s when you can see the light they swallowed.” Being without a magnifying glass and with a mischievous older brother, Celina has never though to question this fact, and passes it on confidently to the younger colt. “Do you have other cool things? Can you shoot lasers out of your eyes or turn into a rangakoo?” Again, the confidence, the total lack of doubt that Pteron might have been teasing about the name of the hopping things in his and Momma’s stories of Loess. celina i'm that bad type, make-your-mama-sad type make-your-girlfriend-mad type, might-seduce-your-dad type

@[Nashua]