species; unicorn
breed; appaloosa
eyes; moon silver
coat; bay roan
scent; dirt and rain
Sometimes, if I think about it, I wonder what they thought of their willowy, graceful daughter. Sometimes, I wonder if she was jealous. Sometimes, I wonder if I reminded them of the things they had lost, or perhaps never had. Perhaps that is why they tried so hard to forget that I existed.
Oh, in another life I might have been able to believe I was beautiful. Maybe, if love were something different to me, I would understand what it's like to love myself. My long, dancer's legs. My lithe, lean muscled body. My delicate cheekbones. Maybe I could love it, if I were someone else. If I were someone else, maybe I could be loved.
My coat is like an autumn fallen to winter. A deep bay so roaned I am almost silver. So roaned I am frosted to my knees, my hocks, my cheeks. There, I am brown like the earth, like the autumn trees that bare their branches and drop their brilliant leaves. My horn is white, with a pearlized effect like ice, though it is neither ice nor pearl, and my cloven hooves are slate blue, such as the color a lake might be when frozen.
My hair is thick, and cut straight, and tied off in multiple strands by simple blue-grey pieces of cloth. It is darker at the roots than at the ends, shifting from a deep mahogany to a warm russet. Covering my hips, narrowing down to my stomach, a blanket of white spiderwebs like melting snow.
Nothing much outside of me changed, after. I have the scar on my temple, though it hides beneath my hair, thought it is faded. But my eyes. They have always been silver as the moon, yes. Silver as the stars, even. Silver as the world on a deep winter, bright light night. But after, they never came back fully to the world with me. My pupils maintain a faded, clouded look, though they work just fine.
They are not the only part of me that could not let go of death, however.
When I died, nobody cared enough to look inside of me. All of my life, nobody has cared enough to look inside of me. As though I am nothing more than what they see; nothing but what I can offer to the world. As though I am nothing. But if you carved me open, cracked my rib cage wide, what would you find?
Love, to start. But a love with teeth, and claws, for holding fast and never letting go. A love so desperate it will go anywhere and attach itself to anyone. A love that does not know what love even is, except to need, and need, and need.
You will find something strange and without a name. A thing that sometimes swallows everything that I am, and leaves something else in its place. I think it’s the little bit of death that could not be cleaved from my soul. It is that little bit of death that is fascinated with the ugliness of the world, with its macabre underbelly.
Sometimes, you will find nothing. Sometimes I am empty, and drifting. Sometimes everything inside of me is only looking for something. Purpose, companionship, family, meaning. I am not certain if I will ever find it.
If you were to look deep enough, you would find the good. The parts of me that still believe in good things, and see the world as beautiful. The parts of me that laugh in the dark and dance in the sunshine. Somewhere inside of me is a girl, who remembers what it is to be young in a wild world.
I remember falling. Like floating. Like forgetting what is up, and what is down, and what it’s like to know solid ground beneath my feet. Like the wind in my hair, desperately, and in my ears screaming, and trying, trying, trying, to lift my body. Like fear, and euphoria, and maybe consent.
I think I was dead, before I stopped falling.
I didn’t fall very far, though I couldn’t tell you. Two stories, perhaps, from the flat roof of our small home on the edges of Solterra proper. We almost lived right up against the wall. Someone was screaming, but it was not me. They came, and dragged me into the hospital, dirtied, covered in sand, though I could not tell you.
I might have been burned, if I hadn’t woken. I might have burned, if I hadn’t been woken.
I would not have burned with anyone there to witness my last rite from life to death, I imagine.
Here is what I do remember, from before:
I was the youngest of two, but my older brother was often ill, and so as I grew it fell upon me to look after him. Our parents did not care for me, much, if at all. I worked, I cleaned, I tended. I was not loved. But I would have done anything for my brother. He is the only one I have ever truly loved, I think.
My brother could not go to school because of his sickness, so a tutor came to the house in order to make sure he still learned everything he needed to learn. I was not allowed to school, because I had too much work to do. It was my job to work off the debt to the tutor.
I listened closely, during his lessons, and the lessons the tutor taught in their own home while I was there, cleaning, and organizing for her. Once, she caught me trying to read a booklet left open on the desk.
She was the first to take pity on me. It is because of her that I have an education. She allowed me to sit in on lessons she was already giving, so long as I still completed all my work that day.
I rarely had a still moment, except for when I slept. And I slept lightly, poorly, because of my brother's coughing and wheezing breath, and our parent's arguments.
They argued about everything. Money, my brother's health, food. Never me. It's as though I simply did not exist.
More often than not, I went without.
But I did not know any different than my empty little world.
Sometimes, I would lie awake at night and dream up worlds like in the books I snuck beneath the loose floorboard. Sometimes, when my brother could not sleep we would talk, and talk, and talk. About the future. I have always wanted the best for him.
I was a year old, when something changed. Father lost his job. I'm not sure that my parents knew that I knew. I don't think they knew how much I paid attention to the things they thought nobody was listening to.
They were desperate. We were poor, and now poorer still. They talked of selling. Only a year, they said, that's all they had to make it. Someone they knew would take care of all the details.
They just wanted the money.
They never wanted me.
I was on the roof when they came to find me, for my chores. I was on the roof, when I told them that I knew what they were planning. I was on the roof, when I said no.
I wouldn't do it.
I had never seen our father so angry, our mother so aghast. I, who rarely said a word, who did as I was told, refusing to do what was best for the family. Refusing to be shipped off, to some land I did not know. To leave behind what little of the world I was familiar with.
I do not think he meant to strike me. I know they did not love me, but they had never hit me, before. He meant to scare me, perhaps, but we were standing too close, on that small roof.
And I was small, am small. My vision burst into a kaleidoscope and then dulled to blackness. I lost my footing against the half wall.
I do not think he meant to hit me, but I do not think they cared that I was dead.
I wake in the hospital, beneath the unbothered, tarnished bronze gaze of a hospital medic. And everything after that? Like one of the stories left in that house I will probably never see again, it still has to be written.
This trinity of peculiar corvids found their bondmate in a small, overgrown and unmarked graveyard on the outskirts of the city, one lonely night. Down a long, narrow, unlit alley, living amongst the graves of lost and forgotten Solterran who were never given their final rite into death. The three would be indistinguishable to strangers, for they all look the typical magpie: mostly deep ash black, with bleached bone-white bellies, scapulars, and inner webs on their primary feathers. The black of their tails and wings are iridescent, with a blue to green sheen, their legs and bills black, and their irises like freshly turned dirt.
Roulette is the eldest, and second largest. She is the by far the leader of the group, the motherly one, and the one most likely to be protective over young Cora. Sometimes, even aggressively so. Delphine, on the other hand is the troublemaker of the group. The smallest and swiftest, she is a collector of many things. Food, materials, treasures. Your precious trinkets are not safe around the youngest magpie. Oh, and Solitaire. The largest of the trio, though younger than Roulette, he is the one most likely to put a smile on young Cora's face. A trickster and an acrobat, Solitaire is often showing off or joking around. They can seem quite strange, at times, all together, but are rarely with ill intentions.