He forgets her taunts, her jibes and verbal banter.

The stallion’s heart drummed inside his chest, fired with excitement at the prospect of a fight, his sadistic joy soaring higher as he landed blow on leg and chest. A lock of hair is caught between his yellowed teeth, greasy and acrid, tasting unnatural as Histe’s carnivorous tendencies, but Ricochet ignores the foul taste in his mouth. I hope it hurts. Even if it didn’t hurt her, she would fall eventually. It was not a question of if, but when. Here on the battlefield, they were blood waiting to be spilled, bruises about to happen, pretty pelts ready to scar. For all her simpering and smiles, her wicked eyes and the redness of the blood on her mouth, however strong and healthy she may be- she was not him. Histe was not Ricochet, who lived for pain, for battle, for war; she was not beaten by her father till she was bleeding crimson and battered almost beyond repair. She was not the Incendiary, once a colt, now made into a man- by the workings of his father, the loss of his virginity, and the battles he fought.

Unlike novices in battle, the buttermilk boy made fighting into an art, and he had flourished from soldier to veteran in the last few years (at least in his haughty mind.)

Histe slips beneath him, and a smile briefly lightens the shadows of his scarred face. The more he pressed on her, or the more she might back away, the better for his cause- forcing her back was a form of dominance, one she would do well to realize. Just as quick as it appeared, the smile vanishes from his calloused lips, and he presses forward, not letting her get farther away than a few strides. “Giving up so easy Histe?” He calls, his light-hearted tones goading as the vindictive glitter in his teal eyes. “All talk, no action!”

It is then he hears it, not her silent scream, but the rumble of thunder-clouds. Ricochet stops his playful bounding. Fuck. Fuck her, and her acid magic, because sure enough, the first drop that land on him sizzles a warning.

Ricochet is no coward, no craven boy pretending to be a man. The bravery has been carved into him, hiding behind the scars in his coat, the fire in his eyes, the audacity of his reckless words. He does not shy, and he does not quell, no matter how cold the gaze is that meets him. But today, with the thunder whispering its sinister warnings, he is petrified with a fear that cuts to his bones and strokes the warmth of his beating heart with glacial fingers. He is afraid.

The wail of her cougar is a widow’s shriek, a cry that curdles milk and makes the steadfast shiver. “No,” he growls. He is cold steel, prepared to strike. One day, he would die. Chances are he would die covered in blood on the battlefield, but today would not be that day. “I won’t.” He would not give. He would not shy. He would brace himself for the agony sure to come. And it did come. It came in the form of rain, first lovingly light, giving him kisses with a poison mouth, and then like a hungry mare it came harder, hungry to devour him.

Guns is howling, an eerie cacophony that drowns out Merikh’s paralyzing cry. There is rain that lashes at his ears with whips made of flame, the sound of which overrides whatever curses he mutters under his breath. And what he sees is her, through a haze of pain that has him feeling as if he is melting, an agony that makes him afraid to look at his own body, in case he has been reduced to stripped white bones.

Ricochet would make her pay tenfold.
He jerks around, rain rippling in sheets down his spine, dripping off his flanks, and he twists his head beneath his blood-stained hooves, popping his weight on his forehand as he lashes out in a buck at the dark smear that was Histe. There is no power he leaves behind- he puts it all in his two hind hooves, and he asks Nieque to allow him to smash her skull in, to batter her knees until she fell crippled to the ground.

Unseen, Guns is running at the brindled mare, pawprints red with blood.

There is no breath to waste on words, no taunts that form on his tongue. Pain is destroying him. It has set him on fire and there is nothing to do but wait it out.
If he kills her, will the rain, will the torment of each and every nerve on his body, end?