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As she dozed in the sunshine, Sheba’s thoughts turned inward. What would life have been like, she wondered, if she had never gotten mixed up with this so-called god of the sun and his promises of magic? This curse had consumed the better part of her time in Helovia, and nearly the entirety of her past two years had been spent coming to terms with the reality of her predicament. The world would have belonged to her, she mused with a disgruntled sigh. The world had always belonged to the young and the beautiful, and it had been in the palm of her hand. Yet she had made the same mistake over and over, chasing the power that others could offer when it had been in front of her all along. She had never needed magic, she realized now. She had only wanted it. But wanting never had been and never would be enough. It was a lesson she had learned long ago, and she had been a fool not to see her desire for what it had been.
Warmed by the light of the Birdsong sun, a tiny portion of her shriveled heart cringed in protest. Winning love and winning magic aren’t the same, it murmured. There’s a price to be paid for magic, but love is— No, her mind interrupted. There is a price to be paid for both, and gods knew that she had narrowly avoided one only to waltz right into the other. Sheba was no better than the rest of them. It was her fatal flaw, her Achilles’ heel, to want that which she would never have, yet she stubbornly stumbled onward with the rest of the masses, chasing the shadows of dreams that would never come to fruition. Magic, power: they were the same, each only fleeting at best. And love, that was the worst of them all. For she could at least see the temporary usefulness of magic and power, but love—she spat the single syllable in her mind derisively, as if it were a dirty word—love only took, never gave. Perhaps then, she comforted herself, she had learned the easiest lesson long ago.
Thoughts having grown unexpectedly dark, the sound of hooves was for once a welcome distraction. At the signal of another’s approach the long grey lashes fluttered, cloudy eyes opened, and for a moment, it was like gazing into a mirror. The ivory mare before her had also seen better days, her tattered coat and milky eyes strikingly similar to Sheba’s own. The resemblance was decidedly uncanny, and at first Sheba wondered if she had fallen asleep once more and slipped into a nightmare. Was that really what she looked like now?
However, her saving grace lay in the few differences. Sheba lacked the broken horns and the jagged facial scars—a fact she delighted in as soon as she noticed. “Hello!” she cried warmly, nearly laughing in joy: this mare was uglier than she was!
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[P] Stormy-eyed and daily discontented.
