Common

Xiomara, of course, takes Kore's words well. She knows the tone of the voice that comes back towards her, smooth and level and frozen throughout. It's like she's back in Nysa, held captive to Demeter's long-winded moralizing, or even atop the Dunes with Maslakhat, his body outlined against the rising sun. She feels like a child again, disciplined and talked down to, scrutinized by those who thought themselves above her, and she hates it, squirming under the ill-fitting label in discomfort. How were they always so... unfazed by it all? No matter what she said or did. They were rational, completely calm in opposition to Kore's passion, casting her wants and needs and emotions aside in the name of logic and reason. She remembers being berated like this, powerless, having to sit there and take it and not say anything for fear of retribution by words and hooves and teeth. How easy it must have been, resting back on their laurels, looking down at her from on high and tutting her foolishness. How simple. How wise.

Time and experience might have given them wisdom, sure. The hard parts of leadership held much of it. But they were so deeply entrenched in their roles, their glory, and their innate, holy authority that somewhere along the way, they'd lost the smarts that won them the luxuries they took for granted.

Xiomara turns to leave, leaving Kore to pick up the pieces of herself just like all the others. It's a feeling as familiar and natural as breathing, trying to keep her fractured heart from flying like shrapnel in all directions, and some small bit of her wants to fall apart like she always does, pick herself up in the aftermath and hide away until the new scars stitch themselves over the old. But the years since her arrival to the Islands have changed her. No longer is she a maiden of four, skittish and easily cowed and incapable of recognizing her own self-worth. Come Spring, she'll be eight, and half of her life will have been spent here. She has been a Queen, not just of one territory but of an entire Island, and wears the proof of her conquests in the silver-white scars marking her neck, thigh, and croup. She has known love - not false, controlling, transactional love like she'd been raised with, but true love, the kind that gives selflessly and doesn't hold a hand out for restitution. She has raised a child from birth, and not by virtue or the necessity of having carried it in her womb. She has lost everything, built it back up from ashes, and lost it again, all while the family the bald-faced mare left behind plotted her downfall, speaking in hushed voices beneath the boughs of the jungle she protected.

How dare she disrespect her like this?

Kore darts from the cavern, her steps first loud on the stone, then quiet in the snow. White clouds of powder sail behind her hind legs as she pushes forward, scrabbling for purchase, and she cuts directly into the blue roan's path, skidding to a stop. Her head tucks to her chest, paperthin nostrils blowing out hot air in sharp bursts, and when she speaks it's like fire coming from her throat. "Don't you ever," she says, anger gripping every syllable, "turn your back on me, Xiomara.

I gave up my claim to the Shore because my family was no longer there. I cared for the family you left behind without so much as a goodbye, and the only thanks I got for not chasing them to the Crossing came from your stallion Angel. I held your herd together while you were out doing who knows what. I raised your heir," Kore continues, her volume rising with every beat, "and this is all you have to offer me? A chance to see the fruits of my labor given to the spoiled, selfish brat-prince who undermined me at every turn? What has he done to deserve it?"

Her multi-hued tail snaps in frustration. "I was Queen of Atlantis. You come here with fucking scraps and expect that to satisfy me? After everything I've done? After watching your son waste a year sulking and embarrassing himself in front of your allies?" She remembers that day on the beach with King Solomon, remembers Fritjof talking over her and his betrothed shooting glares at her for ruining their special arrangement. As if Kore was the one at fault for all of it. As if Xiomara hadn't left of her own volition, burning the bridges she'd built in the process and leaving the wreckage for someone else to deal with.

"You say the Shore is my home, too, but your hobbling princeling begs to differ. I showed your family nothing but kindness, and in return they never stopped treating me like the enemy. If that's how you behave towards each other, then I want nothing to do with it."

Kore snorts, cold fury in every line of her feminine physique.

"You want me to join you? You're going to have to try harder than that insult you call an olive branch." She steps aside, angling her body so that the Shore queen might pass, and when she does the vagrant mare holds her crystalline gaze, unafraid. "Because right now, the only way I'll ever go back to that wretched place," Kore murmurs, her voice velvet-soft with promise even as her body tenses, ready for everything in between, "is as Queen."

She lets the implication hang, one heartbeat, maybe two, and before the fog made by her remarks can dissipate, she's off, galloping through the dark forest without another word.