Floating Key
Tentatively diverging from Dallilja and Shahrokh, he was blind, she’d wanted to challenge, to object, to oppose—yet she’d let him leave without her, loath to be like her brother, to demand control, to separate him from her the way Destry had been, she’d meandered away with more than her share of misgivings. Perhaps she ought not’ve been so demure, he was a child after all, Dallilja a filly, but her chest aches and her head is foggy and all she can fixate on with any certainty is the sweeping, crushing, flood of loss.
There is no sunlight here—mother is gone, gone, gone gone—branches prick at her sides and she heaves her breath out raggedly, there isn’t enough air here, either and—Dagr and Nótt are gone too, dead, dead like mother is—and when her hooves sink into the sand of a shore her blurry gaze takes in the sight of the sea, at least it’s the same, the same as Arazar’s coastline. So she keeps moving, keeps trying to think about not thinking—stupid, shortsighted Azarel and his stupid crown, her throat constricts—and then she’s careening into the frothy swell, water lurches in her wake and drenches her skin, stings the cuts in her hide. She hisses softly in discomfort and, perplexingly enough, relief. For a brief reprieve, her hazy thoughts are cleared by the steady burn beneath her skin, and as her surroundings come into rapid focus, there is land ahead of her too, welcomingly green beyond the bank.
Gritting her teeth, she won’t think about home, about the Oasis and unfathomable amounts of dust, she clambers from the brine soaked to the marrow of her bones, she gratefully escapes the seemingly ceaseless drizzle and into the undergrowth, heedless of her own vulnerability as the foliage beneath her cracked and snapped. The air was heavy with the aroma of syrupy blossoms and plump, saccharine fruits, extraordinary in their complexions and genuinely pleasing to the senses, Dagr would’ve liked it here, the reflection slips in unbidden. Therefore preoccupied, it comes as a mild shock when she emerges unhindered from the vines and, rather straight, before a dichotomy of youth, a colt and a filly.
And something between them on the earth, something unmoving and small… before Cahira knew quite what she was doing, she’d taken a few steps towards the pair, her heart knocking about inside her like a drum. Her own worries seemed to evaporate in the face of anything less fortunate than herself, and the creature on the soil was most certainly unfortunate. "What’s wrong with them?" Then, as if chagrined she’d been so brusque, still craning her head to try and better see the thing, "You’re both fine, I presume? My name is Cahira." The halo about her rapier gleams faintly, the poor thing doesn’t seem to even breathe. By the time the odor of death invades her nostrils, it’s far too late to leave.
@Castiella @Abigor
'CAUSE I'M GONNA BE FREE
AND I'M GONNA BE FINE
