loving you isn't the right thing to do; how can I ever change things that I feel?

  Weariness settles into the very pit of her bones as her tired limbs push her forward, fatigue wearing into her. Her heartbeat thrums heavily within her chest as a surge of hormones flood through her veins, an agitating side effect of what stirs and develops deep within her womb. The dawn of the breaking sun had long since waned into yet another dusk, the light giving way to the heavy blanket of stars overhead and the looming moon tucked somewhere off towards the horizon - alas, there is nothing but impenetrable darkness and thick, stagnant humidity to receive her. The moisture in the air weighs upon her already tired wings, but she draws them closer to her lithe body, hazel eyes searching through the shadows for something - someone, her senses and interest piqued. 

   Exiled from a long slumbering land, she had little alternative but to leave - she could have fought, yes, and drawn his ribs away from his sinewy muscle and contorted a limb from a cartilage-fused socket, but she had gone with little else but spoken word left between. Loyalty runs deep within her blood, for those deserving of it - those who seek strength but not power, and favor humility over ego, and yet she had been cast away for questioning the self-important Zeik. Irritation festers still, and she mourns what will become of the warm sanctuary she had come to know as her own for so many years - stirred from the ashes and yet flammable and liable to burst into flames. 

   Her mind wanders to Sahm, the gentle but fierce and loyal magician, and his kind eyes. He is too true, too vestal - a beacon of light; if only there were still a refuge to shed light upon. Magnus soon weighs heavily on her mind, and her heart sinks within the pit of her aching chest. His hardened lines and warm smile would not so easily leave her mind, and somewhere within her is new life, growing and developing after a coupling that had left her both breathless and restless - of this she is certain. Emotion wells up within her esophagus, but she swallows it, unwilling to yield to it.

   At last, she is drawn from the recesses of her own mind, and a heavy stench of estrogen emerges from the thick of the jungle. With her flaring nostrils pressed to the moist soil, she inhales the mark of many. An unseen borderline; of which she would not violate. The dull brims of her hooves linger along the invisible boundary, and as she tilts her chin up to the heavy canopy above, her voice echoes - a call for any; a call for the Queen.

i don't love you;

but i always will.

Riva refuses to acknowledge that they might have anything in common between them.



She looks up at him, even as his wing settles around her to ward off an offending branch and she doesn’t shrug him off as is the expectation. Riva is shocked to find they have crossed into the Jungle already, but she stays beneath the shelter of his wing to the point that her side almost touches his at every other step. His feathers tickle her ribcage, as she tells him - “Welcome to the Jungle.”

Riva

LET ME IN THE WALL YOU'VE BUILT AROUND.

WE CAN LIGHT A MATCH, AND BURN IT DOWN.

  The heat is stifling, and in solemn silence, he begins to feel as if he might suffocate. With the air so thick with rampant humidity, his massive body has already begun to encase itself in a sheen of trickling sweat, unnerving him to the very bone and leaving him uncomfortable. Clenching his broad jaw, he maintains a steady stoicism as his heavy, muscled legs carrying him through the thickening brush, listening carefully for the more dainty, effeminate steps of the two females that trail behind him. His breath his warm on his whiskered lips as his nostrils flare, his large skull tilted towards the heavy canopy that has begun to fill in overhead. The stench of estrogen has begun to settle in the depths of his senses, and his pace begins to shift into a gentle lope. 

  His weight causes the moist soil beneath to sink slightly - no more unsettling than the ice and the snow that he so often treads across. His searing red eyes peer around, taking in the vibrant greenery that lines the marked but unseen border. He casts a glance to the two females lingering at each of his sides (Josie to the left, and Maribel to the right), giving the faintest of nods as a marker to slow their own pace. At last, they come to a halt, his breath heavy and his lungs filled with heavy, damp air. 

  His matted tresses fall in the way of his eyes, matted to his moist flesh, which continues to uncomfortably trickle perspiration. He longs now for the icy wind, the frigid snow and bitter cold - but it will have to wait; there are more important matters than his own level of comfort. He presses the brunt of his nose against the rain forest floor, and the overwhelming scent of heavy rains and carefully placed markings reassure him he is, for certain, lingering just outside of the border.

  Respect is of utmost importance to him, and too many had stirred a festering anger within his own heart for crossing his own borders so carelessly - he would not do the same to Lexa or her Sisters. 

  He had long since kept away from the dense land, knowing what lie behind it - but with the blood bath that had reined upon them all with a quest victorious to no one, with the disappearance of the very Queen he had fought eye to eye with - change was certainly shifting throughout the land, and he knew that no one was safe from the vengeance of the Gods above. No kingdom had been spared the loss of their magical entities; he sorely doubted that the Jungle had escaped their angry revocation. Alas, though the former Amazonian Queen had attempted to vengefully end his life with her hidden, poisonous ability, he held no ill will to the land itself - Lexa had fought bravely, fairly, so he had been told - and he longed to know where the kingdom now stood. A new era has begun, and a new age is upon the horizon. 

  He could hold no resentment to many for the actions of one.

  Craning his long, powerful neck towards the dense canopy above, his vocals call out, echoing across the land with a masculine prowess. Time would only tell what such a meeting would hold.