The snow had leeched through the red boughs tousling overhead, blanketing the fallen leaves (burgundy or brown, deep, deep, as if dried blood smattered the earth in pools and waves), and hiding a veneer of ice across it all that cracks beneath even her small steps. Occasionally, the ice thickens, and does not break, but steady is her gait, and the surprise slickness beneath her surprises, but does not capsize.
She trails winter’s smoke from her nostrils, occasionally her lips as she blurts forth a loud guffaw or hymnal; her breath hot on the chilly autumn air, her legs slender and ever moving as she approaches the Falls, and its ruby pool, the demoness pauses, as she had the day she had met the Golden Mouse. This time, though, the water cannot deceive her with its trickery; she knows it’s not what it seems, now.
The seemingly bloody water nearest the cascade is shuddering and unfrozen, yielding to stillness only when its downward drop of water decides to be, too, but the banks are rimmed in ice, various layers of it, that taper to fragile, cutout shapes on the edges, where frost becomes a pond. With one hoof she extends her weight forward, leaning, her eyes cast downward and her neck sloping in such a way, too, the other foreleg tucking to her bodice as she reaches out to tap the lip of ice.
A crack reaches her ears before she manages. Swiftly recoiled, her forelimb lifts her body in unison with its brethren, sends her pivoting about so that her white mane dances and flies upwards about her as she spins. Wary of another Mouse and its tricks, the white one narrows her eyes at the faintly wobbling tree line several yards away as her ears knit back into the her pale hair. Her cackling silenced, she prowls forward, her nose nudging aside the boughs with a fear of nothing, only an annoyance that, as the last she’d been here, spies (bad ones) interrupt her peace.
“Come, come, we…” will not harm you, she croons, silenced by the sudden visage of the espionage unit which had so harassed her, “…what?”
Her whisper is rife with suspicious greed. Having lived in magical realms for the majority of her existence, Beloved had seen enough “magic” to pick it out of, say, a shrub, as it was in now. With a curious touch of her pale lips upon the equally pale shell, she traces the cracks which are formed across its surface, like a crackling glaze had been smeared across it, but, even the barest caress of her wicked mouth splits aside these fragile wholes. Revealed within is white fur, white like snow, or bloodless flesh, and though she recoils as the first pieces tumble away from the shell, it is too late.
Eyes meet hers. Small, pale blue, and struck through the center with vertical pupils as if already demonic though new and wet, the creature mewls at her.
With a disgusted snort and high pitched declaration of contempt for this new creation of Helovia, the demoness tosses her head upwards, following its direction at a prance, away from the newborn whatever it is. She makes it several steps before the mew calls her eyes back again, to where the kitten (that is what they are called, she remembers, her eyes narrowing on it contemptuously) has wobbled out of its shell remnants, and had proceeded to follow after her, its tail erect, and small eyes innocently wide, and searching.
Frowning the deepest frown a woman might wear, Beloved stares down the creature, who, upon finally making it to her (its steps some many dozen to her few), pauses, its ears falling back warily. Trying to sit, it instead nearly falls over, and mews loudly, as it had as it had trailed in her wake. Wondering why no female cat has come to take this nuisance back, and why it had been in an egg (some mother, thinks Beloved), she stares for some time at the kitten, which stares back.
It is too much of a bore for a young cat, however, and with an eager wiggle of its suddenly skyward haunches, it propels itself at the mare’s foreleg. Though, at first, Beloved’s instinct is to smash it, and her hoof certainly lifts to do so, the collision of the soft, white body against her limb, and the sensation of its weak, useless legs and tiny teeth so violently clamoring against her flesh in the wild abandon of a kitten’s play, is… endearing. So her hoof slowly settles to the earth, and her horn rises from where it had suddenly lowered to skewer the attacking fluff ball, and, within moments, the demoness finds herself wondering what she’ll call it, if she doesn’t smash it, after all…
[ OOC: Open to any! ]
go on, believe
that life's some kind of masterwork
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