#prydain chronicles

To go with my last post. First day of Autumn vibes. 

Another figure had risen, tall and stately and statuesque, and stood staring at her with eyes the color and temperature of a cloudless winter sky. Her face was finely-chiseled, white and hard and ageless as a marble statue. Long braids of hair, silver as moonlight, were bound around her head like a crown. Several more fell over her shoulders, glittering against her dark robes. Angharad blinked, and blinked again, trying to comprehend what she saw through the haze of magic that, she realized suddenly, emanated from this woman in a miasma. Her stomach churned, and she fought down a wave of nausea.

The woman smiled, a smile like a splinter of ice between her crimson lips.

(she)…then stood up and, with breathtaking form, shot twice, one arrow after another, without time for him to blink in between, into an irregular lump of turf thirty yards away. Even at that distance he could tell they both struck within an inch of each other, and gaped at her as she looked at the bow with obvious newfound respect.

“This is very good,” she said, handing it back to him.

Geraint had felt just a little indignant. “Did you think it wouldn’t work?” 

She had bitten her lip sheepishly. “I wasn’t quite sure. I’ve never seen one so…erm…primitive.”

He laughed in spite of himself. “Bowmaking has been around a long time, and was not always the high craft it is now. What do you think our ancestors did?”

Her expression had changed, irresistibly, into a slow, expectant, silky smile that melted away his indignation like wax in a flame. “I don’t know,” she purred, “what did they do?”

Shots fired. Willingly surrendered, he had composed a story for her on the spot.

“She barely saw them; barely saw the guards who did the same as they rolled open the castle gates for her; her eyes were on the sky and the dark wedge of blue nestled in the green arms of the horizon. Gulls screamed overhead like heralds. Angharad laid her heels in the horse’s flanks, clamped her knees to its sides. The salt air filled her streaming hair as the turf melted away beneath flying hooves.”