He didn’t mind the corpses. They were dead, after all; for their swollen limbs and rotted eyes, bloated chests, snapped wings, and broken horns, they could not touch him. Their hearts had long stopped beating inside their putrid chests, their lungs no longer breathing. What worried him was the mud. The sickly brown water, covered with a film of greasy black, chewed ravenously at the shore with teeth made out of little lapping waves, turning the grasses brittle, yellow and dead. It turned good earth into seeping black mud, which sucked ceaselessly at his hooves, holding him even as he tore himself away. Sticky globs of brown splattered his chest, his legs, even matted in his tail; and it was not by any means a good conductor of his magic. There was no dust here.

Everything here was damp and frigid, the kind of impenetrable cold that even the Tallsun heat couldn’t warm- but now it was autumn, and the wet cold cut to the very bone. The Incendiary did not want to imagine this rotting cesspit when caught between the worst of winter’s fangs.

Ricochet lashed his tail in a futile attempt to get rid of the mud clinging to the long strands of black hair, flicked his hooves before he stepped down with them, but his efforts were foiled again and again. At last succumbing to the inevitable mud that devoured his buttermilk skin with voracious appetite, the stallion ventured deeper into this eerie world of skeletal trees and stagnant waters. Not far ahead of him, Guns moved, more subdued than usual. He moved with his head low and tail down, enjoying the marsh no more than his master.

“By Nieque’s beard,” the stallion muttered, quickening forwards, teal eyes glancing upwards. Ahead, beyond a veil of silver mist, he can see a figure dark and lean and small, a wraith.

With any luck, it was some sort of black-hearted villain or zombie, and he could kill it. But it was not; it was a mare, with wings bleeding crimson and white, eyes dark as night, an obsidian horn curling proud from her forehead. She was the worst of the worst, the spawn produced by the unholy union of unicorn and pegasus. Whenever he crossed paths with one of them- a hybrid so hideously twisted and wrong- he couldn’t help but wonder if they were sent for deliverance from the blasphemous mistakes of their parents. As far as Ricochet knew, Cinnoru and Sepagus upheld the racial laws for each of their own species (they were still not near as powerful as Nieque, however) and so a hybrid was not only unnatural, but born only out of oath-breakers and traitors to their own kind.

He halts, brow furrowing, lips curling into a crude sneer, the scarred side of his face cast into long shadow. At his forehooves his collie stops, cocking his head at an eerie angle.

“Wouldn’t you look at this…” Ricochet mutters, beneath his breath. In all honesty, he wasn’t really sure of what witty insult that he could call a hybrid that wouldn’t sound weak. Skyrat, hornheads, birdbones, featherbrains… he knew names for them all, cruel names, funny names, insults and taunts and curses.

But he didn’t know what to call this black mare, this, this, something that didn’t have a name. “Freak,” he says louder, teal eyes flicking upwards to meet her onyx ones. “Such a fucking mutant.”