KAHLUA

Ophelia. The muted queen repeated the name in her head several times, trying to remember it. Usually names were so easy for her, but distractions in her head made the process frustrating. Ophelia, Ophelia, she repeated again, trying to drown the clawed thoughts that scraped within her skull, but a new distraction provided much better relief. A different name- funny how often it was coming up as of late. “Mirage,” she repeated almost distantly, ears flickering at the thought of the midnight dragoness. Kahlua rued the day that Mirage would return to reclaim her throne, and yet… Yet now she thought she might almost welcome her back. Was she really meant to be a queen?

“Well welcome, please, come on in,” she said with a toss of her head, trying to draw herself back to reality. She always thought it rather rude to leave strangers standing awkwardly across some invisible barrier. The shattered remains of her wall were left crumbled on the ground for a reason. Horses, Kahlua most of all, were not meant to live behind walls; as for friends, they were not meant to stand outside of them.

The dragons seemed equally friendly with one another, she noted, as the elder one fell to the game. A moment later, however, her brain was flooded with unadulterated excitement that was certainly not of her own design. Turning her head rather sharply, she spotted her little blue circling excitedly around a new path of frost upon one of the conifers. Opening his mouth, Khan himself attempted to mimic Tinek’s actions, though try as he might he could expel nothing but air from his lungs. Frustration drove him to chase the silver then, as though catching Tinek might cause him to reveal the method behind this magic.

It was Ophelia’s tinkling voice that finally caused the queen to look away from the dragons. Stepping back to allow Ophelia a better look into the basket and its contents, she found happiness of her own as her things were admired. “The sentinels and the scorpion were made by one in the same,” she helpfully informed the Forsaken, having learned this information herself from Illynx some time ago. “But I made the rock,” she said, and then absently began digging into the ground, purposefully avoiding the question about how the glowing got there. Kahlua was last on the list of horses that understood the inner workings of magic.

When she found a rock that she liked under snow and frozen dirt, she picked it up and nosed it towards the queen. Watching it for a moment, feeling a familiar warmth well up within her, the rock slowly began to glow- dull at first, but then growing more insistent, this new rock glowed even brighter than the one she had kept for herself. The forest around them was lighted further, to about 10 meters around this second rock. “I don’t really know how it works…” she admitted unhelpfully, then. “But you can have it, if you want it.”

@[Ophelia]

the sunshower