stop looking behind you

Lena

and sweetest in the gale is heard
and sore must be the storm

Lena wouldn’t actually know what a ghost would say – though she’d heard plenty of monsters – but she swallowed down some modicum of embarrassed words, handwaving and brushing it aside as the chuckle seemed good-natured and she wasn’t about to be pummeled or decimated. The assurance still left her nervous though, and for half a moment she wondered if she could shift into her bird form – dainty and gone in an instant, retrieve her things later when the coast was clear.

But then her eyes went to the unicorn, and she strived to smile.

The question made her snap her attention back to her injuries, and she shook her head again. “I don’t think so. Probably just my pride,” came on a light, edgy, apprehensive laugh, turning her limbs over to see the skin brushed aside and the blood still pooling, hand lightly ghosting around his, but not reaching all the way. “I can find my bandages somewhere…,” but they were white, and not as stark in the snow. As for the language, she paid it no mind (she’d heard far worse down narrower streets in Stormbreak). “It’s okay."

Crouching, with fingers and palms stinging, she gingerly snagged a few more herbs and put them in her righted basket, with curiosity conforming just as much as the aches in her joints. “Are you tending to that herd?”

that could abash the little bird
that kept so many warm