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She would have thought that, with the exception of stumbling across Quilyan’s dead body, it couldn’t have gotten any worse. Yet when she hears the familiar voice ring out over the still waters of the grove, Nasreen realizes that it can, in fact, be so. He is walking toward her, that Bucephalus that she’d once been so enamored with. The one who told her to find home herself.
His words are as gentle as his touch on her shoulder, but she tenses and jerks away. In the face of her helplessness, grief turns to anger, and she snaps at the air between them, teeth clicking in a warning that holds much more danger for her than it does for him. If the girl knew what he could do to her, what he has done in the past, perhaps she would not be so rash. But all she knows is that he has betrayed her, and for reasons that even she cannot fully comprehend, he has left a scar over her heart. A wiser, more introspective mare might have realized it was because that she had once dared to trust him, placed him on a pedestal and worshipped him with shy admiration before he had hooked her with hope and cut the line, but Nasreen’s feelings for the stag had been so secret that they had hardly been known to even herself. “Has someone hurt me?” she repeats in a near scream, voice rising to a frenzied pitch that startles the birds from the nearby trees. A pair of lovebirds takes of in an indignant flurry of wings.
Meanwhile, her own wings flare, and she faces the dark stallion head-on, with the desperation of one who has nothing left to lose. “You.” The accusation is unexpectedly flat after her outburst, cold and steady. “Did you know the whole time?” Here, her voice begins to waver with suppressed emotion. “Did you know when you told me you’d heard of Th’orqui? When you told me to find a way back myself?” With every question, her pitch is rising again, and the tears come streaming harder, but she refuses to look away. “Did you know that it was gone??”
“I did what you said,” she tells him. “And there was nothing for me there.”
@[Bucephalus]
"speech"
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