fault lines tremble underneath my glass house; a kristin pony

[Ilka]

Her heart sat like ice in her chest, too heavy, too cold, so frozen and all wrong. It was different before. Before the twins, before the purple stallion and the night that never should have been, before the Gates burned. Back when the world had been full of mystery and expectation and hope was still an unshattered warmth in her chest. But it was different now, the world had changed and it had tried to changer her, too, except she had gotten caught in the in-between with a heart too eager to love and a trust too broken to remember how.

She was stuck in a role she couldn’t fill, a life she had no idea how to live.

It wasn’t until the sun had risen high enough above the trees to leave golden dapples against the black of her skin that she realized how far she had wandered through the night. The twins were gone, the chamber was gone, and the ice in her chest felt a little lighter, a little warmer. But even the morning on her skin, the sun, the spring breeze, the promise of new and fresh and peace – it wasn’t enough to thaw the winter in her veins.

For a long moment she closed those gold eyes and turned her delicate face towards the sun. This was the first time she had left the shade of the chamber in months since the twins had been born, her beautiful independent magicians. It was impossible to think that they could be any part of her, but they were. Bone and blood and everything that mattered, they were hers.

All but love.
That was the only thing missing.

She could see it in their stone sharp little faces, in tiny eyes as bright as stars and filled with entire universes, heaven and earth. It was the way someone might look at their reflection. That is mine, only mine. It will never be yours, but I do not love it. I do not need to. It was an understanding that filled her with stones, kept her feet buried in the dirt long after her solemn eyes had opened and she had turned her face to look back in the direction of the place that wasn’t home.

She loved them, how could she not, but it felt like thorns buried in her chest.

ILKA

makai x oksana

[loam]

Loam has a heart, obviously - she was not the walking dead after all.

She has a heart; the meat of it is slick red and throbbing.

What her heart lacks is motivation - either love or hate, there is only neutrality and indifference there now.

Loam’s heart is overripe, rotten - an apple full of worms.

The black hates the mornings; they are frivolous and frail.

One by one, the stars disappear and the sun burns too hot and bright. She keeps to the overgrowth and the underbrush where she can stay cool and shadowed. Loam could care less about the missing chill in the air, that snowy rivers now run thick and muddy. She is restless away from her scummy pond and in her restlessness, she strays right up to the side of a mare who looks sad.

“Why the long face?”

Oh the irony! Horses have long faces already but Loam is ever so serious… no, not really. She's not exactly laughing though. “You look like the world has ended.” Her face isn't exactly friendly, just sharp - because it's all flesh and bone.

Loam cocks a hip; it's not the solemnity in the sabino’s long stare that drew her in but the cracks in the heart that she sensed, a bit of iciness that makes her wait for the story. Okay, maybe it was the air of opportunity that Loam perceived was there, for what though remained just out of her reach. She frowns; “You seem familiar to me…” it escapes in an accusatory hiss. “I am certain we've never met before.” Her moods are mercurial after all.