Ni'Srilan: The Desert: hi mom!!!!!!!!! --

“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.”
- Blade Runner

“I still say we should keep him,” a smile breaking through a handsome face. The tone, he knows, is coaxing, if laced in mischief; truth is, he is bored, was bored, and had always been.

The mare just snorted and threw her head back in silent amusement. The sands stirred at her feet as she did, suddenly alive.

She was born of wind and it shows: her body is willowy and light.

But just then she belonged to all elements, and that was enough.

*

Hi mother.

Picture a mosaic, every word, every voice, every strand of wind tittering through a funnel. That’s how the voice felt like to her: disembodied, of course, rising from everywhere and nowhere and made of everyone and everything.

They hadn’t met in a long time – ever since, she thinks, Solira first fell – one of many falls. Down and down they went, jaegers and hunters and wolves, but that first fall she would never forget. How could she, when scar drew like worms upon the tender flesh of her throat?

And just then she doesn’t know what to say. She never loved her mother (or, in honesty, anyone at all outside of Icarus, Wyvern, Corrigan and Accendare), she’d never even known her. Her children, bred out of duty, didn’t know their grandmother outside of words and even then more as legend and shadow than as someone of their blood. Just as well: she knows her mother cared as much as she did, which is to say, not at all.

Still, she supposes there must be some smidgen of gratitude, or some emotion like it.

Nah.

Hey, spawn, the wind comments in the colt’s general direction – whatever his name – hey, stranger, in the mare’s general direction – as she moves through the sands as easily as if she’d been born there.

Which, in a sense, she was.

fenrisulfr
some there be that shadows kiss,
such have but a shadow’s bliss