a new world hangs outside the window
beautiful and strange
it must be I've fallen awake
I must be

Her ankles were soaked from the fresh snow, and more of it continued to gather in her wild mane and along her back. Unlike her mother, Wasp didn't mind the cold. Her aptitude for it coursed through her veins, thanks to a sire she barely new. But the dreary winter weather hardly did anything to lift her spirits.

Wasp settled her pace after she barked at the mare, but she was still surprised to see how aggressively she was greeted. In turn, Wasp's own ears flicked back against her poll and her amber gaze tightened into slits. She bat her tail over her haunches and shorted once, stiffening until the mare finally acknowledged her with some type of verbal response.

The bay mare only softened when Adelheid did. She sucked in a deep sigh, and let her muscles unravel. She even cocked one hip high on the right side, and allowed a hind ankle to fold neatly under her for rest. But Wasp's ears only flicked forward when the mare explained who she was. The names Inka and Jetta sent a somber chill down Wasp's spine. Adelheid was family, whether she knew Macabre or not. Wasp looked away for a second then, as her amber eyes filled with salty tears. She blinked them back quickly however, and snorted before returning her stare onto Adelheid.

"I'm Wasp." She said, her voice hardly as stern as it had been before. "I've lived here my whole life."

She didn't mean for this to sound like a pissing contest. It certainly wasn't. Wasp was intrigued by Adelheid since their very first run-in with Solomon and his runaway mare. She carried herself as if she belonged here. Clearly, she did.

"Listen, I'm sorry if I came off... a little rough." She said as her gaze flitted to her hooves buried in hard snow. "We've been through a lot of change recently. Most of it has been... hard on the herd."

Her dark, damp tail flicked over her haunches again as she breathed another sigh. "My dam was Macabre, long the Codebreaker of the Peak. She was friends with your mother and your sister. I'm not sure if you remember her at all." Wasp said, trying to get the words out as quickly as she could, just to get it over with. "My sire is Diamant." She hadn't said his name out loud since, well, since Argento showed up here. Before then, she wasn't sure if she'd ever said his name before. "Macabre died in the war at the hands of the Lagoon Boss. We're still trying to pick up the pieces after all that."

There. She said it. For better or worse, Wasp revealed more about herself than she had to anyone else, and Adelheid was still just a stranger.

W A S P