Desert

Titania wakes with a start. Death's rattle echoes in her ears, its haunting green stare burning behind her eyelids. Its scent fills her nose, visceral and damp and unsettling, cold in the air she breathes in heaving gulps. She shifts in her bed of sand, joints stiff with tension - and when Death reaches out and touches her, bone brushing against her leg, she recoils, her dark eyes thrown, knife-like, to the source and pinning it in place.

Comprehension breaks like light over her features, and all the muscles in her body relax, the coiled spring of her anxiety unspooling in a long, soft sigh. "Oh," she murmurs, the last vestiges of sleep cloaking her words in velvet. "Hello, darling."

Every night. Every night in the year and a half since Death cast its long shadow over her doorstep, since she'd met it at the threshold, called its name and beckoned it inside, it's happened. Six seasons with Death draped across her withers, and still she is not used to it.

Will she ever be used to it?

The star-flecked mare reaches out towards it, huffing a warm breath over its grinning face. The sky stretches endlessly overhead, tinged with shades of pastel pink and orange. Birds titter in the scrub beyond them, visiting on their journey back north. The wind shifts, bringing with it the smells of greenery and fresh water, and as she gathers her legs beneath her and rises to all fours, the red dirt of the Desert all but disappears beneath a medley of green and yellow and white.

Spring has graced Titania's arid abode with its presence, awakening the landscape. It teems with life; it overflows with it, drunk on sweet nectar and Saguaro blooms, flaunting its effervescent youth and beauty like sparkling morning dew. She marvels at the audacity of it, the juxtaposition of life and death so briefly intermingled, and smiles, bowing her head in quiet reverence.

She remains there for a moment, coming up when she can no longer ignore her thirst. One dark ear turns over her shoulder, the slit of her eye following suit. Death lingers in her periphery. It will not follow her: it found its final resting place, settled there, and has not moved an inch. Much as she hates to leave it, hates whenever she cannot see it, she will carry it with her in the form of its ghostly aura, in the shadows that cling to her like so many tiny grains of sand.

"Be back soon," she promises, and strides off in the direction of the nearest watering hole, moving away from her place aside Rougaru's rotted corpse.