VaLkA

mare / six / chestnut pangare / yakut / 13.0 hh

Anyone can change, skjaldmær... but the sea is still the sea.

Like a ray of sunlight penetrating the grey shroud of storm-clouds, Bacardi’s answer found its way into the swirling chaos of the small mare’s thoughts… and brought hope with it. Feeling her heart lift with the wings the stallion’s words had given it, Valka could only stand unmoving; confounded when he continued. Make a purpose of your needs. Desperation and fear had driven the Bay’s ruler to ask her Hersir for help, but the last thing she would’ve expected from him was understanding. It was a gift even Solomon— whose nature was the same beneath the crown he wore and the kindness he had learned— could not have offered her. And more than words could begin to touch, Valka was grateful to the bay tobiano for it. For the blessing to be herself, even if it meant that Bacardi might risk losing her.

“I— I did not expect you to understand,” the Yakutian mare responded, a glimpse of her truer and more vulnerable self visible between the walls she’d erected around her heart. Her voice and expression yielding fragments of the emotions that would normally be buried; hidden. Twisting her head around again, she watched the skewbald male nip tug playfully on Kesja’s tail, watched the girl turn and headbutt him in indignant response. And wondered whether the true cost of her loss had escaped him. “Bacardi,” she began, the syllables of his name leaving her lips more softly and comfortably than she’d ever spoken them. “If battle claims me, then I—” Her dark eyes flick from his gold to the dark shadow of her daughter, and then back again.

“I know that you would protect her. But I would ask more of you, Bacardi. If I die, take her as yours. Raise her as your daughter. You would make a worthy sire. Solomon, he—” —would hate her, she knew, if she were to throw her life away. And he had already proven himself to be both uncompromising and impulsive in his struggles to overcome life's trials. For the purpose of preserving the small piece of herself that Valka would leave behind in death, he would shackle their daughter to his side. Just as he’d already made the skjaldmær feel like a prisoner in the cage of his heart. “—he is King, and cannot always be there for her.” As he had not been for the past season— though the chestnut mare harbored no ill will toward him for that.

Instead, Solomon seemed strangely distant in this moment— a pleasant dream that had no place amidst the harsh realities of her world.