The horned mare is as interested in me as I am in her, and that suits me just fine. In all truth, her attitude of ignorance to my presence is fitting of how I expect her to act, how all others who wore horns throughout my life responded to my presence. She had not been spoken to. She would not speak.

My lips are smiling politely in return to the one winged mare, a pretty mask for my pity that still gnaws at me whenever I look at the remnants of her wing, my eyes cold as ice that gleams beneath a low hanging arctic sun. It’s become so normal for me to feel so devoid of anything other than disregard and hatred, disappointment and spurn, that I barely even notice it anymore.

This is me, and my heart. We have become stone and glass so that we do not destroy the only thing we have left to be proud of.

Our will.

The painted land walker asks if I have lied, to which my lip twitches upward in a swift quirk that is only a rippling after affect of my self constraint, the inward, split second battle that I fight again and again from which my soul is strewn with scars. They will not see this struggle, just as I do not see the good humor hidden in her smile while so overwhelmed by my own body as I am now. They will find me ruthless and sharp as obsidian flake. I do not care, really.

The other queen alongside me is kind enough for the both of us to recover my lack of grace for the betterment of the conversation, though my eyes still bore into the flesh of the painted damsel with hopes that she will spontaneously rupture into a million pieces by the force of my desire. I don’t imagine much, anymore, and even if I did, I am not mad. How thoughtless of her to lay salt into my wounds and daggers deep into my pride, with that snarky little grin on her face and that hideous blight sprouting from her face.

The bell is drowning out even the sound of my heart, the vocals of the grey and seemingly flightless pegasus a sweet and sad note that struggles against the black currents of my thoughts. She is saying we should go, but I find that I cannot move for fear that even the smallest tremble will send me leaping like a rabid hound for the unicorn’s throat. Perhaps my eyes are overly wide, or the center of their blue expanse broadens and slims as if to the rhythm of some silent drum.

It is all over in a moment, but the moment feels like eternity. By the time I am able to follow the conversation well enough through the foggy lenses of the bloodlust within my memory, the question is already asked, and it already contains us.

I almost laugh; a crazed, exhausted, and wary sort of sound it would have been. Instead, I turn my eyes toward the south and the caverns, withholding my gaze from the pair of them and quietly deciding to walk with them back.

I can always just take to the heavens and leave the land bound in the realm of prey.
”It’s safest to travel together," perhaps. So long as the horned wench doesn’t insult me again all will be well; they are strangers, but I am a changed woman, and my past is so covered in ash and blood. I will help them, if I can; it may be that such acts can regain the light of the soul that our own decisions and those of others have covered in smut, as it is said in some of the old tales. It may mean nothing at all.

It is most likely that it will only ease my own loathing of this creature my mother has made me become.

It is on this path that I will meet my sisters again, a golden halo growing about my head.

Perhaps I am only dreaming, like a child, but the dreams are pleasant. I will lie in them a while longer.