"I have always loved the wind, for it comes to me so boldly, touches my skin. In coldness it rouses me to wakefulness, an alertness that lets me savour the moments in dryness and rain just the same. In soft breezes it is finer than silk, smoother than water. In the gales it sings through the trees, sending loose leaves on a dancing funfair ride, hypnotic, beautiful. In the summertime wind is cooling, allowing the warmth to gently enter muscle and bone while my skin feels so at ease with the world. Today is almost still and I find myself in joyful anticipation, absorbing the bright colours of the new foliage and buds, taking a moment to watch a dragonfly pass by, its back a brilliant electric blue"
They are all she knows, the Halcyon unit and those priestesses who took care of her.
Juniper, unlike many children, was not given the chance to know who her sire and dam were. Perhaps she was birthed out of wedlock or shame or simply unwanted. Perhaps the stars did not align and her parents were too young, too green, not yet ready for a bouncing baby girl. Perhaps so many things could have gone wrong, things she does not dwell on and neither should you.
Instead, her earliest memories are of
them. The priestesses of Vespera, the Women of Dusk with hearts as murky and beautiful and mysterious as their matron goddess. From misty mornings they rose in those swampy temples, bright eyes nearly reflective upon surfaces of water, surfaces of stone, in every light they seemed to see. Bright robes of sunsets and sunrises were often heavy upon their shoulders - always cloaked, always mysterious. Oh, but it is these women - never a man was seen in the temple where Juniper was trained - who picked up a young Pegasus girl and rocked her in their moonstone cradles. Gentle hands would brush her hair in the morning and braid it back, feed her when she was too young and too naïve to know what, or
how to survive on her own.
Hooded figures of women tall and devout lurk through misty halls in her mind, phantoms rising up to remind her where her roots lie, where she first was taught to live. It is their star-flecked lips that pressed to her brow time and again, careful ministrations putting bandages on scraped knees and pulling debris from nearby trees from her wings, wise words always guiding her towards acceptance, towards love.
Juniper remembers how they listened to her tails of the wind whispering each day. Every night, when the world would settle and the stars would not yet awaken to sparkle and flirt from the sky, when the crickets chirp and day-walkers settle in, she would
rise. Not purely from her bed, no. Through the temple Juniper raced, faster and faster until she was a mere blur, a streak of silver on marble floors that zoomed through archways set in triplets about their home, and at last she would break free from a final air-viewing gallery into the surrounding swampland. Pale wings took her high into the woodland canopies, ancient trees and their spirits staring down upon her to shed far too much wisdom than they could ever (and will ever) voice to any mortal in their midst. It is the wind that kisses concrete the same as her skin, that blessed her so greatly, that soothed the song of unrest and unease and confusion in her blood, that truly captivated her. How sweet that voice which whispered no matter the day or night!
'
Vespera favors you, for not all can decipher the secret of the breeze,' is what Sinafay would tell her, crooning gently in the morning when once more Juniper would fall into a heap of down pillows and silken blankets from sheer exhaustion. For it was the skies that would hold her all night, the stars her sole companion, and the storms soon were an old friend that she learned to brave, to weather and dance among when they came calling.
When you ask, Juniper will not tell you of her parents, but of the Priestesses of Vespera who live in the swamps of Terrastella. She will hold you close as she kisses your brow, paints a picture of praise and beauty of her goddess whom she was taught to love so faithfully, as faithfully as she loves the skies. Then, when you find her truly settled, simply dreaming and remembering and merely existing, it is then that she will whisper the tale of Halcyon to you.
Halcyon, the man tasked to save a life, and in doing so gave his own.
Halcyon, a young Pegasus in the army meant to kill, but united two nations so that war would not plague their lands.
Halcyon who is the psalm upon her lips when she first kisses the night skies awake, breathing stardust into the heavens until even the moon cannot help but smile upon her.
It is he who, like many others, drew her in to the center of Terrastella, to the sprawling city where so many dwell. Where sweltering heat is simply the taste of salt upon one's tongue, the drip of sweat so mundane that none seem to mind, nor worry, of the nearness in the crowds with bodies pressing closer and closer. The soldier pulled Juniper from her temple in the swamps, but a young thing still untried in the world of
men and
others. All she knew was her goddess and the priestesses, having been trained to take up the mantle there before Halcyon and his brave-heart drew her away. He brought her to the army, to the air-flight unit who took her with little more than an unimpressed glance to harden soft curves, to shape her life to be a muse, an inspiration, and to make use of her where she might make a difference and save even a single life one day (no matter how many she should take). So Juniper went, as many young, spirited things do, into the arms of the awaiting aerial unit and immersed herself within their family, their wings and
sameness both a comfort and oddity. For her robed priestesses had no wings nor horns, they wore bones and bark and berries and gems, but they were of the earth, of the swamp.
Juniper has always been of two worlds: the earth and the sky where gravity does not quite know how to hold her in its arms and the sky cannot find a place so easily to place her in the heavens. So she soars between the two, a messenger seen only in pale flashes above, so quickly that you aren't sure if you simply hallucinated that streaking creature or if she were truly there. Like her parents, she is a phantom left for bedtime stories to all but her unit.