Desreal: nah, the dark side has too many silly hats;

“ We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. ”

- Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“You seem lonely,” the filly’s voice rises from silence, soft as a kitten’s mew.

He always is, the winds mutter and she smiles to them: they know much, her winds, but as is the case with most youths, they rarely make an impression in her mind; as he should be, the little spark within her retorts peaceably; it has an implicit warning she is quick to ignore.

Warning notwithstanding, she draws besides him, unknowingly mimicking her mother’s own actions from years ago: a tall, slender, black shadow darker than the summer night.

Jörmungandr likes the darkness. It blends easily into her, almost like a living thing: she thinks of it as snakes (perhaps a remnant of her namesake’s inspiration), writhing together in breeding-frenzy. She’d seen it once, while exploring the mountains of her birth, dark snakes in a mess of breeding.

She didn’t understand then; she doesn’t understand now.

He, however, doesn’t bring to her the idea of snakes (as she knows nothing of dragons), though he has scales. Instead, it stirs something else, some other impression she can’t quite touch – right there, in the outskirts of perception.

Like a patient hunter, she draws back, and waits for it to grow weary and dawn on her.

“Why?” she asks, somewhere between bewildered and simply curious, a hip cocking idly as she stares at the place his eyes follow. Beyond, she can see the blot-marks of Andarin, beyond the purplish-gray of the woods.

Her eyes, incongruously, are silver, rimmed with a darker, graphite gray. She doesn’t look at him; she has no need to, not when she is so close she can feel his body’s warmth and the sharp pressure of static blending into her own, much weaker one.

***
jörmungandr
there is hope, but not for us