Falls

I'm doing whatever it is I want to do, he answers, and my blood runs ice cold. I swallow - hard - my mouth gone unbearably dry as his pale lips contorted into a cruel smile. I had no answer for that, although as he claimed that this - whatever this was - was something I wanted, prompted a reply from my mouth before I could rethink it.

"I highly doubt that," I mutter, trying for stubborn and ending somewhere on uenasy as I took another step back. Malice emanated from him like a poisonous fog, and I couldn't shake the sense that something about him was fundamentally different tonight. Something darker. I was still unsure of what exactly it is that he wanted. I knew, in every logical sense, that I stood no chance against such a massive stallion if any of our dispute became physical. He stood well over a foot taller and likely outweighed me by nearly double my weight. Not to mention the scars won from experience that trailed all over his body like some sort of macabre road map, if this became a fight, I would lose. Not might, not likely. I would lose.

A younger me might have considered calling for help, but I had learned the hard way that bystanders did not care. And even though a few interested parties had poked their noses into the Lagoon and tried to wrest me away from my prison... I knew that their goals would only be as self-serving as Garmr's.

And so what prompted what I did next had nothing at all to do with self preservation and everything to do with the fact that I didn't want to see myself as a victim anymore. I didn't want to die groveling at the hooves of a stallion that hadn't ever, really, truly seen me.

And so - I forced my shoulders to square and my teeth to bare for a moment. Forced myself to face him, to lock my knees and inject as much defiance as I had left. "No. Whatever it is, Garmr, no, I don't want it." A fleeting idea raced into my head and though I did not know if it would work, my mind alighted back to the first time I'd met him in person and I clutched at the lifeline, no matter how feeble. It made no sense but I felt like if I could just pull a sliver of the stallion out who had agreed to waste an afternoon with me on the Ruins, I might survive whatever this was.

"Besides, you still owe me an adventure." I snap, ears twisting briefly forward before slamming back. "The ruins didn't count."