Desreal: I always hate the morning after, Severus.

The world is brightly colored; it is shadows and lights and all the shades of gray; and yet, as her eyes return their unnerving intensity back to the pale stallion she’d just casually (and rather conveniently) found, something like sobriety (though not really) returns to them.

They are like stones, she explains and suddenly her tone becomes lecturing. Small stones, sometimes a bit sparkly, that only happen where is wet. They bite too.

Ah, the beauty of the scientific process.

And then, most curiously, the world takes a shift to the left and darkness ambushes her.

The sun, she thinks after an indeterminate amount of time, is far too bright.

Consciousness emerges slowly, cleaving through the darkness and the fog as a swimmer. Somewhere, she can hear the woods bristle, her winds coiling close, the temperature fluctuating between cold and colder; around her, everything seems still, almost dead. For a moment she just lies there, grimacing at the dull ache in her muscles and the kinks that seem to have found a foothold everywhere in her body, before pushing herself to her feet.

Every instinct in her screams against the vulnerability of her position, lying sprawled and exposed to anything and anyone. Something tastes like ashes in her mouth.

Every other instinct in her rebels against a sudden jolt of excitement – that is alien to her, so much she knows instantly where it comes from and why.

Betrayal. How predictable of him.

Well. It is not her problem, what her keeper does, unless he calls for her – and she doubts he will.

And to complete the trifecta, she groans inwardly, there are the memories, returning to her in a flood.

How embarrassing.

It isn’t very hard to find him, taken in the updrafts of her shame; nonetheless she takes a moment (hidden, as she could, by the shadows) to observe him from afar before breaking upon his solitude for the second time in less than a day.

Even when sober, she realizes with a faint smile, he still does sparkle a little, though she knows better than to point out that particular fact now.

And then her eyes fall upon something else.

Blood.

Like Betrayal, before he took her. Like Stelios. Like Datura.

Don’t be ridiculous, her sanity warns her, don’t assume things. You don’t even know if Datura has… that… or if it was just a random, meaningless wound.

Still.

Still.

But she drowns that line of thought, as she steps into sunlight again, head low and properly contrite, the portrait of chastised mortification. Hello again, her winds say, and I am so terribly sorry. I swear I am not like that all the time.

Oh, speaking like that, we might even believe you.

I’m Fenrisulfr, by the way, she quips, may I ask who are you?

-- godslayer --
I am not the only monster on these moors.
I met an old woman as wild as the wind
Striding in white out of midnight's den.
Her cloak was in rags, and her flesh, it was lean,
And her eyes, her murdered eyes...