Everything's washed out. It's a world of gray, perpetual twilight; shafts of moonlight dancing fractured on the quick-moving obsidian river, clouded silver glinting on slicks of ice, pools of nefarious jet shadow gathered beneath each frost-crusted thistle. And yet even in this world, all greasy shades of gray and bleached out color, there is the faintest hue of saturation, a sullen, sickly crimson which permeates the very soil.

The footing is treacherous. It's damp soil that bubbles with water every time she steps down, cold wet that presses on her frogs and chills her dainty toes.
It's hued, faintly, with glowing maroon.

Nymeria hesitates, dithering on the edge of the open ground. Cardinal retinas rove over the contours of the earth; the air tastes like iron and decay, salt and the same sickly magic which trailed her mother. Instinct screamed, cried out, for her to turn her back, to leap into frantic action, pound back to the safety which awaited her beneath her mum's teats, nestled between Confutatis' shapely pillars. No. No, no, and no. It wouldn't do to turn back now; instead, sharp curves soften, her neck lowering, nostrils cusping wide. With a feigned casualness that does not deceive herself, the tiny spider slips towards safety. It is a number of low bushes, scrub growing up, gnarled and twisted branches, which offer suitable disguise so she might assess; the cover is cast in auspicious shadow, wrought in ink, beneath a grand oak with rustling branches and creaking bark.

Unknown to her, water drifts up from the soil, beads of silver which flash and glitter in sparkling starlight, droplets of moisture which hover, float, trail behind her a couple inches from her heels, elevated a foot or so above the ground. An unconscious reflex of her magic (undiscovered and untested); she seeks comfort, contentment, in the midst of danger and adventure, and water, quiet and cool, has always been a source of consolation to her. So it follows her.

Behind the tree. In the bushes. Thorns rake thin, trembly legs.
Eyes remain piously wide. Ears flick, twist, uncertainly. For a long moment she presses her forehead against the tree, so big and vast and ancient; it's solid. Comforting. The scent of sap washes away the reek of metal, of death.

And then, with a quivering exhale, she peers out from behind the tree, a slow, terribly cautious movement. Nymeria sees darkness, cruelty shaped and sculpted into thick edges and knotty, swarthy muscle. The subtleties of silver dapples and pale mottling are lost in the vague, sweeping bends and curls of draft-like anatomy, sturdy legs and a heavy, carelessly made profile. It; it's very presence is barbaric. Black, black, black, a configuration of shadow on shadow; the only light is a pale sliver of ivory on a curling thing poking up from a hefty brow. Still... it (rendered genderless by starlight) doesn't seem like it would run her through, if she decided to step out.

Nymeria lets her gaze drift away from the unknown, roaming over the scene. It's washed in red, syrupy crimson, but to a girl so fresh to the world, that in itself is of little value to her. She doesn't recognize the more nefarious meanings behind it, nor the dreadful connotations which might be dredged up had she only pondered it a moment longer... no, what captivates her attention (apart from the figure, so capriciously dominating, in the center of the stage) is the shapely shadow stretched across mud and spring earth.

It doesn't move.
Perhaps, were she older, smarter, wiser, she would've recognized it for bloody murder.
She does not.

Audits creak back, catching the sound of rain pattering on earth. For an odd, suspended moment in time, she is impossibly confused, for there is no wet lashing at her from above, and then she recognizes for what it is, a stream of urine being lavished upon blood-soaked soil. It comes from it, a fountain of palest yellow, and mentally she affixes it's gender. Him. He pees like Volterra, after all, not like mama and herself. Lips wrinkle into a scowl, ears pinning back to her pretty skull in clear distaste; ugh. Did he really have to piss all over the place?

In quiet she watches, a lurking observer hidden behind the curtains.
And then she steps out, draws free, little spider spinning silk, gossamer mane (tufty, short) lifted by the slightest of stirring breezes. Delicate as a flower, as bending petals in the rain, she sweeps forward, chin up, eyes commanding, daring and dashing and audacious. "Why here red?" And with that, the haughty darling gestures towards the smears and streaks of scarlet, oblivious to the body.

The silence stretches out unerringly, a spool of thread which is pulled and pressed taut over an underlying tension of which deepens with each passing moment. She is not deterred by the chthonian quiet, nor the unerring edge of his grey gaze. There was... something tediously plain about those stony retinas, a lackluster gloom which does not match up to the vivid brightness of Volterra's stare. Disappointing, to say the least—he was just an ordinary fatality folded into the planes of a rigid face, at odds with the ripe scent of blooming destruction around them. In her mind's eye she had expected more than a boy whose balls have barely dropped, something more unearthly and more queer than a rigid countenance and a dullard's quiet; confronted with solid fact and un-romanticized reality she is forlorn.

His sigh is syrupy and far too thick, overdone to ears always listening for the faintest exhale of her mother's disapproval, practised audits knowing the signs preceding destruction. Tiny nares widen in furthered chagrin as haunches swing to her; she doesn't move. She's familiar with agony, torment, and above all pain, at least of the physical type. Callouses have long since been burned onto her mind, nerve endings hardened to the blows of her mother's metaphorical whip.

It's an overplayed song, a lament of bruises and lacerations of tender cinereal skin, and she could move. Flee. And yet she doesn't.
Face your punishments. Mother had always drilled that into her skull, with each blow, with each brutal hit; and she didn't even get the worst of it. As a daughter, Confutatis raised her carefully. Never along her face—it wouldn't do to mar that marking. Always along the shoulders, hips. Not the ribs—not enough padding. And scars, oh, the World Eater hated them. It wouldn't do for her darling daughter to bear the scars; that went to her twin. Volterra, who faced the brunt of the pain for her, whom she wept for despite Confutatis' chastisings.
She HATED seeing him hurt, more than anything.

A pale and startled deer in the headlights, she does not twitch but merely braces herself as his hooves strike out across her, cracking into the forefront of her left flank. Nymeria staggers, stumbling slightly to her right; head lowers, teeth champ. Submission. Ears soften, flex, and tail presses in a little tighter to her hindquarters. Greasy lids slide shut over bright eyes, brows creasing. He had hit her hard; the sort of hard that meant she had made a grave mistake, like saying Africa was leader of the Basin instead of Ophelia. Strange to think how easily she messed them up, two vastly different political figures—yet she did, all the time. It was so easy to think Ophelia was supposed to be the good guy, and Africa the bad. How was she supposed to keep them apart when she had never met them?

He's not supposed to hit her on the ribs.
That, more than anything, convinces her this isn't right.

Head cocks; ruby eyes gaze upwards from between narrowed lashes. "You're wrong." Echoed words, a soft question woven between each syllable. This isn't right. It rings, numb, through a complacent mind.

The man boy's eyes are so cold; numbing, chilling, orbs of silver, glassy like a fish's, and there's something in them that makes her feel soft and vulnerable in all the wrong, horrible ways—makes her weak, as if her bones softened to putty and her muscles to liquefied jelly. Nym can't bear to look at him in the eye, to see the utter uncaring, can't handle the frigid, predatory stare—so she watches the ground, the curves of his body, ill with wanting to get away, sicked by her own childish decrepitude. Stay. This is what she was supposed to do: take it, swallow it, let it sit and taste her own flaws reflected onto her.

At his voice she cringes, flinches away, flexing sinuously in an arc of longing to flee the scene. It grates across her ears, chords across her heartstrings like a dull knife against calloused flesh, a gross and sickly sonata mirrored in the darkness of the night. It would be fitting that the moon winks out of existence then; that the world morphs from a place of adventure to one of danger hidden in every wrinkle, fold, of a child's beloved blanket. If she had the sense—lacked the self-discipline—or, perhaps, was a wiser woman, she would've fled then, taken to the creases which could happily hide her away from lethal creatures.
She didn't have it.

And his question snaps, cracks through the air, the lancing cat-o'-nine-tails headed towards her, a lick of deadly power planning to subjugate her to pain, agony, torture, humbling sensations of cruel and savage nature. Mother. Memories spring to the forefront of her cranium, illusive sensations and indescribable feelings, an incoherent swarm of confused recollections.

Milk, creamy, on her tongue; a hoof cracking against her shoulder; a nip on the spine; a kiss good-night; a low-sung lullaby, a chant for war; and Nymeria reels back, staggering away from the titanic keratins aimed towards her. They catch, collide, against her minuscule shoulders, a rain of unfair agony, and she whimpers, a plea, a moan, for mercy and forgivance. Whatever she has done wrong—whatever she has fucked up so thoroughly—she doesn't understand; and how can she? The concept of abuse merely to further one's own plans was yet foreign to her malleable mind, and the fact that her existence was the root of the conflict was far, far from her thoughts.

I don't want to tell you.
This stone-faced soldier was a mistake, a blot of ink hiding out important words in part of a story. It didn't make sense. He was—incompatible—with her limited view of the world. Whatever his need for her mother's name she was instinctively pitted against, prematurely disposed towards tight lips and a closed mouth. Confutatis had warned of the inevitable outcomes of the discovery of Nymeria as her daughter; had warned her of terrible things, the least being kidnap.

And so what she says in response is only: "Why?"