The sensations that the magical tree presses upon her drive her heart to beating all the faster, and when the mists reveal no presence, she feels a cold terror begin to edge from the ice in her belly, out through her veins. No one was there, she tries to assure herself, doing her best to coax her heart back to a normal rhythm, her dark nostrils fluttering with her deep breaths, but no matter how many times she said it to herself, the fear that someone most certainly was does not ebb away.
The sight of the descending aura in the mists, then, fills the girl with immediate trepidation. Having barely had time to venture through one half of Helovia before it was annihilated, the filly does not associate shining, radiant light with magic, as many of its denizens surely did. No, to Gwyn, the pretty, subtle glow that approaches her is as malevolent as the cold fog, or the darkness that devoured everything beyond it. It was the same sort of unknown that had ripped her home world into atoms, and cast them back out to the universe, and it fills the normally brave youth with a fear so potent, that she cannot move, or speak. She merely stares, her mouth partially parted, and her icy-blue eyes are wide and fastened on the light.
It becomes apparent, however, the nearer the radiant orb gets, that it’s not an orb at all. The silhouette of a figure darkens its heart, and if Gwyn isn’t mistaken, the figure belongs to a pegasus. Just as the stranger has not seen a unicorn, the youth has not seen one of the winged ones, aside from her half-sister, and her glowering dam; having been raised by an elitist father, her opinions of the appearance of the feathered mare are equally judgmental, when they do not fluctuate on the fretful worry that the stranger was not a safe one. The sparks upon her back do not dissipate or lessen, their silver-blue light a glowing halo behind the little one’s lifted crown.
She does not look dangerous, Gwyn decides of the painted stranger. It hadn’t been kind of her to tease Gwyn with whispers from above, though, either, and the fear on the dark filly’s face takes on a few lines that indicate her displeasure with being picked on by a grown up.
“I’m lost,” she answers, slowly, her head lowering ever so slightly, though her blue eyes are still watchful and wary, “some… some beastie, it chased me. And now I can’t find my dad.”
Her frown is a pitiful thing, full of all the pain and fear that rises to the brim of any child’s heart, when they find themselves separated and alone. She does her best to remain strong, however, hearing her father’s voice rise to mind: we are the wolves of the North.
“Why’d you whisper that weird word for?” improperly questions the maiden, not bothered with tact or grammar without her royal father about to grunt with displeasure at her broken language, “wasn’t very nice. It gave me the heebie-jeebies.”
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Uwaritace
