Meadow

Echidna was not interested in company. Her world was self-centered. It came with the price of getting older, though in truth, it had always been this way. It was how they groomed her into the soldier they needed. Of course those days were long gone and only scars were left behind now, both mental and physical.

It was not like her to bumble around, crashing into others. She had once been considered near feline. Her movements quiet. An assassin to the throne, it had been her job and Echidna had taken the role seriously. Her teeth had tasted blood, her eyes seen horrors beyond anything most others could fathom in their darkest dreams.

But it was another lifetime. Echidna is pulled from her thoughts by the shriek of another, barely able to side-step away from his striking foreleg. Her own ears pin back, neck stretching viper quick towards the stallion showing him her own set of dirty teeth.

He says something to her and Echidna lifts her blocky head. She was never a winner of any sort of beauty contest, never a face stallions wanted to collect into their herds. The small mare gives him a short little squeal, tail whipping angrily at her gold and white sides.

“You could kill somebody with that ugly face just popping out of the shadows like that,” she says to him. Echidna huffed noisily at him. “Maybe try not to stand so still next time.”

She is smaller than him but it doesn’t matter. It has never mattered. Echidna did not care to make friends.