Tinuvel has infected her with a delicious shiver.
The cold seeps deep in her bones, stirring an inner heat she had not realized she possessed until the external burn of the sun was removed and she’d been forced —no, challenged— to keep herself alive. Ak Burun feels more alive than she has in years. Her energy is evident as she trots smoothly through the shallow snow coating the fields on the Crossing. It is not like sand, she thinks as she flows gracefully toward one of the streams that offshoots from the main falls. Snow is wet and can be heavy but it does not slide and shift underfoot like the dunes nor is is packed hard and unforgiving like the desert. It gives, and it dissipates. She kills it with every step.
There is a horse slaking their thirst at the stream. Ak Burun jogs to a stop at the edge of the low bank, far enough away to respond to any potential threat but not so far that she cannot see the unnaturally numerous scars lacing the mare’s body. The Akhal-Teke is about to lower her own muzzle to the water’s cold kiss when the black mare nearby lifts her head.
She is grotesque.
"Iğrenç," Ak Burun mutters as her ears tip back, her dark eyes holding a faint expression of disgust as they rove over the hairless face and neck of the other. There is no untapped potential of a seductress in this mare, only evidence of a violent, strange life. Not at all her usual interest. And yet, she finds herself fascinated in a morbid way by this other’s appearance. One or the other would be strange enough by itself, but the combination is an absolute puzzle. Ak Burun can’t resist.
"What wars have birthed you?" she hails the mare, thinking that even in her homeland where war has stretched for generations she’s never seen a horse so scarred. Even the fiercest warriors carried minimal marks of their efforts— or they were dead from inevitably mortal wounds. She can’t yet imagine a violence that surpasses the bloodbaths her family engineered in that faraway desert, but she’s beginning to get an inkling from this mare. |