Here comes the rub.

Ru jumped into the unknown. The move was rash and sudden, the pain made her breaths tighten and shallow against its brilliant appearance. But once her feet let loose of the dirt, there was hardly a way to control her path – she’d committed whole-heartedly into ramming herself against his body. To inflict something, anything to shake that residing smirk off her periphery.

Her gambit takes an unexpected turn. The opponent makes a deft pause in his motion, and her soaring spirit is rebuked to follow through with no purchase to bear. There is a hollow snap that rattles in her mouth, when there is no flesh to tear from the offending body. The stallion has risen ahead of her, while she crashes into depths unknown between the briny waves.

The frigid waters are ignored when she touches down. Stifling a cry instead, from the cut that has tangled with her muscles. Sending an electrifying reminder that causes Ru to stumble forwards into the waters. Her right fore is nearly impaired by the pain, and can’t take the weight of her body she’d sent moments ago into the air. She stands, just barely, as her hind legs catch the weight behind her. But she is kneeling on her right fore; her left – straining as she shifts her weight into her haunches.

The ebb of the waves is soothing, even if it comes with an additional burn on her submerged foreleg. Rocks, hidden beneath the sand have bruised the right foreleg along its lower front. The coolness aids itself, but not for long as she struggles to face her opponent head on.

You will never be ready, are her wicked thoughts.

Doe-eyed as she lifts herself to face the gilded stranger. By then he was already approaching her. With a grimace she eyes the stallion with a muted gaze. She has not swallowed defeat just yet, even as she propels herself only a few strides to greet his thrusting shoulder – the one brandished with bronze, to the cut that oozes and burns.

She grits her teeth. Intending to collide right shoulder to his left – thankfully the pain and the force are dispersed across a larger surface area. It gives her something else to think about, than the wicked stabbing that digs deep versus the initial smack of his shoulder. Adding a bruise to the bloody mural, smudged and rusting in the cool air.

Ru is not idle however. She ushers her forward motion, with his drive to aid her pivot and swing her rump around, so that she might swing nearly side by side with him. Looking to recoil and sheer away from the power that drives his legs. A test of strength she does no believe she can win.

Grasping the uneasy surface of sand, and water. While there are teeth that snap for the neck; it is hard not to avoid them when she makes to sidle herself beside him. Ru intends to peel away from him however from his left side, and as she does the teeth scrape along the fringes of white, soft feathers. Plucking them off with a sharp, bruising kiss. A protesting wing makes to strike with the edges of its wrist at his face, or eyes.

The mare darts sharply to the right then – and bears the pain in her shoulder to buck in the area of his left ribcage, or belly. Departing from his lunging form, and whipping her tail out from the unease in her movements; constantly reminded of the thorn’s breach into her shoulder. It adds a small limp to her movements. The water has thus, made her ankles numb as she exits the ocean – breath heavy, gaze scalding as his voice lilts effortlessly into the wind.

He echoes the doubts in her mind; they feed off his taunts like wicked vultures.

Just keep moving.

She shifts in the dry sands, simmering, frustrated. She is fumbling and he has yet to bear any mark from her. He has maneuvered the sands better than she, and his strength appears to be just out of her grasp.

There is a brief pause of inactivity from the mare; at least enough that hopefully allows some room between them.

But she cannot stop – she will not stop.

She picks up her feet once more, her voice merely rumbling forth in a gruff hum as her eyes pinned his slithering form. Despite her wounds, and the carelessness of the waves – they still fill her with a wanting determination. She approaches from the right at a canter, and stops suddenly to swoop her left wing down – intending to shower his gaze with that of sand and grit.

While she stands ajar. Her rump to the ocean and her head pointing to the forests.

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