There is a storm in the distance, and she feels the thunder when it rumbles. She watches from beneath a tree on the outskirts of the forest, her bright eyes trained on the bruised sky. The storm lingers mostly above Tephra, and she will always find that fitting. She remembers being born there, close to the Taigan border. She remembers when the sky had been dark with ash and manifested shadows, and she had thought this is what the world was. She was born in the middle of a war and she grew up thinking things were meant to be burnt, that all things will catch fire eventually.
Whatever innocence and naivety had been salvaged had been destroyed by the time she reached adulthood. Adventures no longer had the childish thrill to them; not when the adventures led to a blood-stained battle dome. Not where she learned things about herself she had rather left hidden.
She turns her back on the storm when the rain begins to pelt the ground, angry and relentless. The shelter of the trees is not enough to ward off the rain here, and the water falls in near torrents through the limbs and the leaves, saturating her bi-colored skin and plastering her black mane against her neck. She continued into the dark of the forest, until the the rain was reduced to a mere sprinkle and drip-drops, water running in rivulets off the long tendrils of her mane and down her shoulder.
It’s when she hears the sound of something — someone — landing not far from her that she nearly starts, swinging her antlered head in the direction of the noise.
Curiosity gets the best of her, as it always does. She has decided that few things in this world are worse than having to kill a version of herself on the plains, and so she picks her way through the bramble and brush, not exactly making an effort to be silent. Whatever it was would either be another thing to fight, or it would be startled by the sound of twigs snapping and flee.
She is only mildly surprised to come face to face with a winged stallion, the rain still dripping from him similar to the way it did from her. She looks at him with vibrantly pink eyes, and with a tip of her head and an almost crooked smile she says, “Do you always fly during storms, or were you just feeling especially reckless today?”
Aislyn
she set fire to all the things that held her back
and from the ashes she stepped into who she always was
@[Warden]