Posted by: Elena - 12-19-2020, 08:20 PM - Forum: Archives
- No Replies
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
She is tired.
She is so, so tired –
Fatigue has carved its way into every tender muscle, every weary bone – she is exhausted and thoroughly spent, with her spirit, her heart, and her body falling apart at the seams.
How can she be so tired in a dream?
Being courageous is not as easy as the stories she grew up with made it seem. (Valerio and Cazador, Legado and Dead Reckoning, Ichiro and Rhaego—did any of them tremble like she does now as now she slumbers?)
She keeps dreaming of Valerio. He comes to her with a wicked smile on his face. This is not the godfather she knew—knows. He places a crown upon her head. Sometimes her crown is fire, sometimes ice. Sometimes thorns. Elena cringes with the weight of it, with the sting. He places another, tonight, and she finally finds the resolve to fly herself forward, teeth bared. Her eyes are wide with panic, pulse thumping wildly in her neck. But she collides with nothing, feels nothing. Elena stands there, breathing heavily.
She is somewhere else entirely, but she cannot quite place it. Paraiso? Hyaline? Windskeep?
Another time too, past, future? It feels achingly familiar and yet entirely different from anything she has experienced.
The emerald carpet below her feet is painted with frost glimmering like diamonds in the early sunshine. Leaves fall around her like colored raindrops; red and yellow, they settle in the small of her golden back, and she wonders if eventually they’ll bury her alive if she is still for long enough. If it were possible she might lean into her fate, she might, on a whim of superstition, hold her breath for fear that the ebb and flow of her ribs would destroy it. Because in the veins of these leaves she sees the roads she could have taken when instead she stood still. Because in the colors of these leaves, red and yellow, she sees sunsets instead. And then she senses emotions that are not her own. It tells her one thing.
She is not alone, not tonight.
There is mercy in this great, wide world yet.
“Dune,” she says, breathless when she sees him here, through all the leaves and worlds that collect in this dream land. The palomino moves towards him, and she is grateful, so grateful he is here with her. “Would you have the time to go on a walk with me?”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
he keeps growing, and yet her heart remains feather soft. Maybe it is this lightness that allows her to steal across the ocean in the middle of the night. Pitter and patter and titter and tatter, as if she walks across the wooden planks of a pirate’s ship rather than dancing over waves. If she were not an artist, Elliana would be a dancer. Though maybe the two are not so different. One paints with a brush, another with their body. They still form pictures and tell stories all the same.
It is a child’s face she sees first, as dark as obsidian, his eyes close as if in concentration. Next there is one of ivory, mouth poised in such a way that tells Elli that those lungs once held laughter instead of stone. She finds two flowers, tucks one behind each of their ears. Their lips twitch with words of warning, but Elli can only kiss their cheeks before departing. She has to go further, and further. More and more statues open up before her. Elliana has seen gardens before, those in Dawn, those in Dusk, those in Night and Day. They remind her of a garden, but this is not the kind of garden that belongs to little girls, this is a garden for the gods.
Go, go, go, her brain murmurs.
Come, come, come, the voices call.
She can hear them. They want for her to come closer echoes inside her head, in the marrow of her bones.
It is the beginning and end of time, the moving things’ want.
And who would she be to deny them?
She goes so willingly. Lovingly. She surrenders to them. She belongs to them.
How ecstatic she is to belong to anything at all. Finally.
She is a figment of their imagination. She has come home.
And the statues begin to move before her. No, not the statues, their spirits, they appear before her one by one, rising from the stoney faces that litter the land. An army of darkness. Their shapes warped by the peculiar lighting that settles over this land. So dark that they appear purple. Or some shade of some color she’s never seen before. They are grinning shark-tooth smiles at her. Ink-black mouths. Freakish yellow eyes.
A sigh steals across her lips as she watches them. The fluttering of her heart settles into a calm cadence as if accepting of her fate. Her gaze, bright blue and silver watches, unable to look away as she speaks. “There are so many that are dead, no matter where you go.”
“Mama! Mom! Watch this one!” And the tiny red creature launched herself into the air, twisting wildly, kicking her legs out behind her.
Her mother laughed. “Well, you certainly have the spirit. But I think a little practice will help.”
”Practice? It was perfect. Watch again!”
She took in a deep breath, a breath that stretched her lungs and filled them full to the point of bursting, before slowly exhaling. She did this two more times, letting her eyes close, black lashes touching gently to her red cheeks. Anyone watching might mistake the ritual as one to calm her nerves, but that was not the reality. She was excited and that feeling burned inside her, needing to be settled before she could find the calm needed for her first performance.
Finally, like clouds pulling away from the sun, she opened her golden eyes. They smiled from her face, large and bright, welcoming in anyone who happened to catch their gaze. Slowly, with an exaggerated slinking of her hips, she stepped forward, and the bells within her hair fell into a rhythm, one that she maintained with a rolling of her head that made the delicately carved muscles of her neck flex and dance.
She added a deeper beat next, with the hard stomping of a foot on the cobblestones. It echoed through the streets, falling into a pattern with the higher pitched ringing. Only then did she smile, those upturned lips parting to add the sultry rumble of her voice. It was an old song, one taught to her by her mother, and it seemed fitting for this place she was already growing so fond of.
“The maiden fair, the maiden sweet Oh, allie allie lou The maiden made of sun and heat Oh, allie allie lou Place your love on the grass at dawn Oh, allie allie lou In the night you find it gone Oh, allie allie lou Perhaps you will see her there Yellow ribbons in her hair But if you did, what would you do? Oh, allie allie lou. Allie allie lou”
Her voice trailed off on a sweet lift, body becoming still. The music she had been creating fell silent though the air around still hummed with energy. Some had passed by in the market, either too busy or too jaded to pause and listen to the words of a song, but those that had stopped stomped and made noise, causing her to break into a stunning grin as she dipped into a graceful bow. The bells twinkled again as her curls fells forward over her neck and so did her laughter. It was almost impossible to tell those two sounds apart.
“Thank you. Thank you all.” she said in a breathy way, blushing from the excitement of the moment. A few called out for more, an encore, but she shook her head and the market street slowly settled back into its normal routine. She turned to leave, feeling like that had at least earned herself a drink at the closest bar, when she felt a tug on her tail.
Dearest found herself looking at a child, still fuzzy with baby hair. They had huge blue eyes, and were looking up at her with awe. “Hello there, darling.” She said in soft motherly way, bringing herself down to the level of the little one so that she wasn’t looming above.
The child just giggled, seemingly shy, tucking a tiny white flower into the space between the girl’s black tipped ear and small horn before running away down the stone road.
This gesture, to Dearest, was better than all the praise in Novus.
Roselin still isn't accustomed to being up so early.
The shadows were still lingering outside her room, in this place that was supposed to be home but was not. The sky was still waiting for the sun to wake and it was greeted by Roselin instead who looked guardedly out a paned window at the still-sleeping world. Had she been back in Taiga, she would just be falling asleep now. She'd wrap herself in the pale colors of the coming day and wake up to a blaze, to the sun warming her back and the sunlight dappling through the leaves.
But as she stares about the long shadows of the unfamiliar hall that she walks, she is reminded that this is not home.
There are others who call this little cottage home. Faces that Rosey supposes she will come to know in time. She knows nothing about the souls who dwell behind the closed doors that live with her Aunt Elena. (She knows something of them. Roselin can hear her mother telling her again of the golden aunt and the cousin that she would meet. The ones she would come to know, and as Lilliana assured her, would come to love as well.)
She paces the hall, not trying to creep but she doesn't want to wake up the others. The cliffs outside are not ones she knows but Roselin thinks that they can't be so different than the crags of her birthland; in her youthful naivete, she assumes that one coast must look like all the others. They are just edges of the world, places where the earth fell apart and crumbled into the sea. They are just places waiting to be reunited with all the other lost things that got misplaced somewhere along the horizon.
The boards beneath her hooves creak and groan much like the Redwoods did in a storm. Roselin takes a deliberate step to the side as to not make any more noise but the little cottage seems intent on announcing her presence through the dimly-lit corridor. The silver-black filly lifts her head as if that might help distribute her weight better and takes a lighter step and then another. She had been a girl raised among brothers and this self-awareness is new to her. Roselin had always just charged headlong in the antics of her siblings without a thought or care to the way her body bent or curved or angled.
There it is again. That longing and Roselin aches for all the things she has left behind: her father and mother, her twin Oren, her older brothers Nashua and Yanhua. But what she could learn here could help the North. She knows that this place - this Terrastella - with its knowledge of healing and hospitals (and even better, flower gardens) could help her still-scarred home.
It's an upside world for Roselin and so she moves quietly through the cottage, craving the fresh salt air and the wide view of a still-gray dawn. The dwelling is still mostly unknown to her and the pale-maned girl brushes up against the edge of a table and eyes the hanging herbs that surround her. Out, she thinks and Roselin is nearly as quick out the front door as the flooding relief she feels. There is no need to be careful or silent in the waiting wilds and the yearling is drawn to the cliffs, to the sweeping views that are waiting for her. The path she takes is well-worn and Rose doesn't spend much time contemplating the other wanderers who might have come this way.
It doesn't occur to Roselin that she will see her out on these sharp cliffs; not her soft aunt. What was she doing out here? (She never heard the story of cliffdancer, windwalker Elena, a lover of ledges.) The girl stops but all those careless days in Taiga don't prevent her from kicking up the gravel, preventing a hushed escape from the palomino mare, and it doesn't stop the healer from looking her way. Terrastella and the cliffs and the cottage are so foreign to Roselin but the blue eyes that peer towards her are not. They are a shade of blue she has known her entire life; they are the exact shade of her mother's eyes.
"Oh," she murmurs softly, looking down to the ground as if she might find an apology there. "I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't realize that anybody else would be here."
@Elena | speaks let me know if i need to change anything <3
am careful with my arrival back home. A big spectacle in an arrival is something that is more suited to Hagar or Adonai than myself. I don't want my siblings to see me until I appear before them. Each believing I greet them first, before the rest. My siblings like to be the first. Despite my plan though, I am careful of who I actually approach first. I know Pilate is the safest bet, the others I can soothe, tell them Pilate caught me when I was on my way to greet them. But Pilate’s grudge would be too deep pacify.
“Mistress mary quite contrary
How does your garden grow?”
I hum the song quietly below my breath. Only the ‘sss’ manage to hiss through my teeth, but should anyone hear they may better think snake than girl. The servants have taken the bags to my room. I give them each a gift that I have collected while on tour, no two gifts the same. One a strange gold coin, another a strong from my recital costume, and still another a scale that someone told me belonged to a dragon. They were my own presents once, from admirers of the ballet and my role, but I have little room for such petty things. I slip the scale inside his pocket and ask: “Where is Pilate?” With a smile that would look like blood if it were not so camouflaged beneath the red of my skin. “Breakfast, in the dining room.” I blink emerald eyes. “And the rest of my siblings?” His eyes widen. “Their rooms I believe, Ruth collecting medicine, and Hagar in the gardens.” My cheek presses against his own, a silent thank you before going to the dining room. I could use a bit of toast, perhaps a cup of tea. Mama had told me once that a cup of hot tea is one of the best things for a hot day.
Tea, yes I would like a cup of tea, I think.
“Pilate!” I say charmingly as the servant opens the door for me to enter. I race towards him, all vigor and youth that my age permits me to harvest and allows me to display without consequence. I collapse against him for a moment in an embrace that little sisters give their brothers. “Your face is the first I wanted to see, I have missed you most of all, big brother,” I say when I pull away. I kiss his left cheek and then his right before smiling sweetly.
“The heat out there is absolutely dreadful,” I say taking a seat beside him. “I could do with a cup of tea,” I say and as if on cue (because it is so on cue) a servant arrives with cups and the kettle. He pours me a cup, is about to move away before I am able to pause him with just a flick of emerald eyes. “Won’t you indulge me and have a cup as well?” I ask him, peering up from underneath long lashes in a way that makes me look so very small beside him. “Please, you are much better company than my dolls for a tea party,” I say as the cup is poured. I add a just a bit of sugar and stir, all while keeping my gaze directly upon Pilate. “Did you know I no longer take any milk in my tea,” I say looking down at the tea that still swirls. I wait for it to settle. “I learned while away you truly can get by with just a dash of sugar.”
{ @Pilate Delilah "speaks" notes: wow, I hate her :) }
“Why?” Her mother said with a sigh, “Why do you always go looking for trouble?”
“I wasn’t looking for trouble!” The young girl protested, “I was just bored.”
The red woman stared, out across the ocean, letting her mind wander. The sound of the waves lapping at the shore reminded her of home. Having her freedom was turning out to be a bittersweet thing. She missed the sound of her mother’s voice, and the soft ringing of bells and laughter that always seemed to float around the camp at night. Dearest could almost hear them if she closed her eyes, the beating of a drum and the rhythmic words of some ancient song. It was right there, teasing, at the tip of her ears but still out of reach.
“Ye’ gonna go to the island?” A stranger said, and she jumped slightly, not realizing anyone had approached. This made the old man chuckle, “Settle down there, lass. Yer pretty but I doubt ye’ cook as good as m’wife.”
Oddly enough, this did put her at ease, and she offered him a smile. “Find me again in a few years and I might be able to prove you wrong.” Dearest joked, and she was rewarded with a hearty laugh.
“Hope’ly be retired by then,” He said, gesturing to the fish he carried, “Ol’ back ain’t what it use to be. Been try’na find someone t’ enchant this ol’ thing.”
He must have seen the sympathy that crossed her face as he spoke, because he quickly made a rejection noise from deep in his throat, “Don’t chu worry bout me, lass. Been at it f’years. Now how bout that island, eh?”
She gave a small shrug, but her eyes were bright with curiosity as looked back at that hazy spot where the calm ocean meets sky, “I didn’t know there was an island.” and for some reason, this made the merchant laugh just as loud as her joke had.
“Ahhh, yer new here, aintcha?” And his features softened, making him look younger, “Makes an ol’ man think about the past, all ye’ youngins. Go on, go find it. Seen them all walkin’ on water m’self.” He finished his sentence with a wink, and started to amble off through the sand.
“Wait!” She called out, and he turned slightly, pausing mid-step, “On the water?”
He gave her a sly grin, “Get use t’oddish things round these parts, lass. On the water. If yer brave enough.” And she watched him leave before turning back to the shoreline, letting the words play over again in her head.
“On the water...” She whispered to herself, still staring, as if the waves themselves were going to respond. Of course, there was only silence. Just the constant lapping, like a heartbeat, steady and constant. A small breeze that came off the water tugged at her black curls, but it was not enough to give relief from the sun overhead, glaring down on her. Dearest had always been an impulsive creature and it didn’t take much longer for her to come to a decision.
She stepped forward, gently, dancing to the white foam as it rolled in and out. It kissed at her feet in what seemed like a normal way, causing the thought to flit through her mind that the old man may have been teasing her. Making a quick mental note to never purchase a single thing from him should that be the case, she took a literal leap of faith. It... was not graceful. She had expected to sink, despite what she had been told, and her knees buckled slightly as they touched to a solid surface. She had to fight to regain her balance, quickly looking around to see if anyone had been watching. A seagull was the only witness, perched on a rock nearby, and she huffed at the bird who simply kept staring.
“What are you looking at, feather-head!?” she said in annoyance, but the gull had no reply except to pick at one of his wings. Dearest accepted this as a battle won in a naïve fashion and started making her way out towards the horizon, slowly at first, gaze cast down to see what lurks under the glasslike ceiling of the Terminus sea. It was beautiful in an eerie way that made her feel like there were bugs crawling in her stomach. She should be down there, under the waves, tangled in the kelp with her lungs screaming for air. But she was not. No, she was a goddess in this moment, immortal for a few mere seconds as she stared at statues whose fate she didn’t share. Fish darted around and through the stone bodies in flashes of color and it is all just so surreal that she found herself lost in watching the entire scene as she strides above. This trance is why she did not notice the island as it starts to rise into view.
She hears it first. Drums. Whispers. They cause her to pause as she is still looking down, making a pang go off within her chest. She knows that voice. She knows that voice deep inside her soul, and her delicate form shudders as a chill slides its way down her spine. Golden eyes are lifted from the wonders at her feet, a sharp inhale taken as she sees, no, feels the island for the first time. It looks like home, with the silky emerald grass and the rolling hills. Dearest hadn’t realized she was moving closer until things started to become even clearer. The whispers grew louder and her pace quickened. There was a form she could see, one that made her heart sing, and she called out in a child-like way, ”Mom?”
The figure didn’t move, but the voice grew louder, and she could make out it saying her name. Any questions the singed red mare may have had were pushed aside by her excitement. She called out again, louder this time, “Mom!”
But then, as she went even faster with the bells ringing chaotically in her hair, she realized. That was another statue. And it was like a plug had been pulled. The air instantly settled in a quiet that was deafening, leaving her feeling empty and wondering if she had imagined it after all. Her pace slowed and a confused frown tugged down the corner of her black lips. The transition from walking on the water to the shore was a seamless one. Golden eyes, wary but curious, stayed trained on the statue that was her mother, delicate and smaller than Dearest, but strong in her stance with her face tipped towards the sun like a flower.
She was close enough to touch it now but in a moment that was uncharacteristic for her, she found herself scared. Why was it here? She finally asked herself this, unsure of the answer. She simply could not bring herself to reach out. The land was still silent, the grass moving like the ripples on a lake from the soft breeze, and she took a deep breath as she considered her options.
She’d inspect it further, she decided. Maybe. After she stood here for a few more minutes...
In many ways he felt relieved that it was over. The pacing, the waiting, the nameless feeling licking his heels like a maddened bitch.
Worst of all the godawful insomnia that had spilled his teeth into his skin leaving two-dozen wounds he could only partly hide from Yamuna. If he hears that nail-on-chalk laugh one more time, he knows it will be her last.
After all, this was her fault. Her grandson. Her blind naivety. Apparently it didn't matter that he had called for her audience twice in two days (a frighteningly unusual occurrence) nor that she had been too-goddamn-high in both meetings to even remotely digest the warnings he wished to deliver. For a split second he had considered ramming that wretched opium pipe down her fat bloated gullet and watching her choke. Perhaps he might have gone through with it if her son hadn't been there.
Yusef was always there. Unmarried and unnaturally attached to Yamuna, Yusef was perhaps an even larger thorn in Raziel's side than his detestable mother. He tries to be reasonable: would they not say the same about he and Raoul, if indeed his brother had lived? Raziel sneers as he walks: he does not want to be reasonable, not after last night.
Sometimes he wonders how different things would be if he hadn't renounced his birthright that cold October morning, mere days after the revolution. Would they still be a prominent family in the circuit of aristocratic Solterra? Would they be wealthier? Would he have exiled his intolerable family and retained Saudager for himself alone?
What if -- a fruitless phrase, his mother had always said. It still surprised him how many things she'd gotten right.
--------
Watching Gahenna trotting in front, nose to the ground (tracking, tracking, tracking) as she swings keenly across the prairie, Raziel replays the events of last night over in his head for what must be the sixtieth time. I won't translate the painstaking detail in which he has catalogued the incident: they are irrelevant to anyone but himself. What matters is this:
The sound of his hound's war-cry. How violently he woke from that gingerly-stolen sleep. The clattering of heirlooms as they fell from hungry, startled hands. The look of defeat-come-horror on the thief's face as man and hound loomed in the doorway of his brother's bedchamber. Afterward, Raziel thinks, fleetingly, of how young and slat-ribbed thin the boy had been. Even as a stranger, he'd recognised those eyes: he had seen them before. In the gladiator corrals, at the slave auctions, in Saudagar's kitchen. Hollow, desperate. He has other thoughts too, many in fact, and none of them are kind.
Now he can think only of Raoul's spyglass. Taken from him just as his brother had been. Untouched for five years, it had lain on the breast of Raoul's pillow as though he had but gone for a walk and forgotten to bring it along. Such dreamfulness is ugly and distorted and as dangerous as it is untrue: for the second twin of Saudagar was never seen without that gold glinting thing. Until he died.
Gahenna whines from the pith of her chest as at last they breach the fringes of Denocte's capitol. The earth seems to quiver under their feet, feeling for what they have come; it has drank enough blood of innocents and felons alike to know, in the end, the both taste the same.
I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail yes I would, if I could, I surely would, I'd rather be a hammer than a nail yes I would, if I only could, I surely would. Away, I'd rather sail away like a swan that's here and gone. A man gets tied up to the ground, he gives the world its saddest sound, its saddest sound
A
s a young lieutenant, I stood on a beach just like this one and stared at the carnage of my first battle. I had heard of tertiary care at the Academy; they had taught it as one teaches science, or mathematics, or a simple principle of astrology. The most severely wounded, those that could not be saved without extraordinary measures, were left where they lay as the salvageable were dragged to medical tents and cared for. Medical interns ran from body to body, tying ribbons to their horns.
Black meant dead.
Yellow meant severe, but could be saved with care.
Blue meant they needed immediate attention, but they would survive. They were severely injured, but savable.
Green meant they needed care, but could wait for.
Red meant they were dying. They might be saved, if there were time and limitless resources. But they were dying, and there was never enough time to save the severely injured and the dying. The lost causes. In the academy, we joked that a red ribbon meant a gold star or Medal of Honor. We joked a red ribbon would immortalize us.
I remembering, standing on that beach just like this one, the way it felt as if I stood on the edge of a vast cliff; because the battlefield had not been littered with strangers, but with friends and brothers in arms. The man dying at my feet, a red ribbon tied to his horn, had been my classmate for the last four years. We had shared stories and laughter and sparred on the practice field.
When I raised my eyes from his gasping body—because he was simply that, a body, a body barely living—it was to stare at a field of bodies, ribbons blowing from their horns. Black, yellow, blue, green, red—they caught the light as it flit through the clouds, and snapped sharply in the wind.
Now I do not even remember his name.
Now, the beach before me stretches emptily away.
The black sand must have belonged to some volcanic eruption when Tempus was a child. The water licks starkly against the surface; bright blue, beneath a brighter blue sky. The black absorbs. The black seems lightless and I walk the line between shore and sand, where the surf chases up the line of beach to strike cooly against my hooves. Clear, and sharp, and bright—the ambience of the day seems the epitome of a knife or other blade. The air, so crisp to breathe, it stings.
I should feel alive, here. I should feel alive. And I do, with a prickling of awareness; an involuntary wiring between myself and my surroundings. This has become perpetual. A constant state of heightened awareness as I, a predator, listen for prey or for threat or for both. The birds overhead careen away when they spot my roving shadow; and the crabs scurry into the water. I am not here to hunt, and yet—
I want to.
I want to, and I hate myself for the wanting.
I raise my face toward that too-bright sun, and close my eyes. I inhale the salt and brine and think how once, as a young man, I would have found it beautiful. The sun never shone in Oresziah as it does here. But the moment of appreciation, the moment where I decide, is inconsequential and brief.
Perhaps I should have spent more time.
But the scent is in the air, and I follow it; the meandering walk becomes a trot, and I follow the sharp curve of the beach into a quieter cove. Here, the water seems serene. The ocean rushes in at the mouth but turns still and quiet through the maze of jagged rocks. Before me, their weaves a trail of prints in the sand.
My father taught me, as a boy, that a wolf walks in a singular line; the hind leg follows the foreleg, and so their pads step only where they have already stepped. It makes for quieter walking. The same for lions. The same for most predators.
An anatomical impossibility for an equine, but not for us. Not for the lithe, the fluid; the Changed. Not for those less flesh and more water. Not for those who are halfway to animal already. Not for he and I.
I find him in the quiet, shaded cove. The far side of the inlet is hidden by redwoods so steep we are cast into shadow. The sea seems subdued. The sea seems to hold her breath.
er name is a hand me down of a hand me down. Lilliana, and before even that, Lilianna. Lilianna’s mother, Mae, found her one night, bleeding from that half heart that was ripped open, her body still twisted from throwing herself headfirst into a belief that death could bring an end to her heartache. “Are you named after my baby?” Mae asked her. “Who is your baby?” Elli asked back. “Lilianna.” Mae responded, longingly. “Then I guess I am,” Elli responded back. And though they read the same page, they have opened different books.
The sun is bleak and waning and the pastel colors of the sunset were still streaked across the sky. Her heart thrums for adventure, for stories, for stardust dreams, for shadows. She walks the street of Night Court, her parents having permitted her to go into the city to get an after dinner treat. It was not often she was allowed this sort of freedom to be on her own, and when she was, she was not to wander far. There are eyes watching her here, those who know her parents, who would alert them if she were to find trouble. Jack rests on her shoulders, whispering how if they were quick, they could make a getaway. Elli smiles over her shoulder at him, but she knows they cannot. Now is not the time or the place.
A songbird watches the the girl, sings a few notes and then grows silent.
Elli, in return, her wild mouth twitches into a smile before she taps into some internal resources, calling upon a supernatural endurance that only children posses, and flattens out, tail streaming behind her as she runs though the streets, over cobblestones. Dodging shopkeepers, pedestrians, and the occasional Night Court cart. Her sound track is parents’ laughter, ‘slow down’s,’ and the the clipping sound of hooves moving to the side. This was life, she thought, the speed causing tears to spring to her eyes. This was exactly what living was supposed to feel like. Jack clings to her mane and sits low against her, his only defense against her speed.
She does not stop until she reaches the grand keep and stares up at it, the lights flickering as the sun’s own light continues to die. The voices grow restless in its shadows. (From the corner of her eye, she sees the shape of someone walking, but it disappears at it enters the remaining light of the day.) “Elli,” Jack chatters on her shoulders. “Let’s go,” he insists. “Not yet,” she says back to him, moving towards one of the shadows that sits there, breathing, she can tell by the rise and fall in a way so different to the firelight.
A face, so close she can see the ice curled around his eyelashes. His hazel eyes are haunting and his smile is wicked and wolfish. She can feel the cold on his breath, the wind from his wings as he leaps at her. ‘Bring me back!’ He yells, reaching towards her as Elli tips backwards with a scream.
“Light came from the east,
bright guarantee of God, and the waves went quiet; I could see headlands
and buffeted cliffs. Often, for undaunted courage,
fate spares the man it has not already marked.”
Marisol dreams herself awake.
When she hits the ground, her body crumples like an accordion; it tears at the seams like a wet piece of paper.
When she hits the ground, she hears the noise it makes—a wet crunch—and if the blinding pain weren’t enough to knock her out, the sickening sound of it is, and her head goes perfect black.
Marisol dreams herself awake. Her soul rises from her body. She watches this from a place even higher in the sky, so high that she is looking down on both parts of her, and finds herself surprised—embarrassed?—by the insubstantiality of her own spirit, which from here looks like nothing more than a plume of breath in cold air. A silver ribbon dancing in the breeze.
I am not dead, she reminds herself, though it feels like it. Her head buzzes like radio static as she tries to rationalize her aliveness. Vultures would be upon her already, their long beaks buried in between her ribs. I am not dead. The dull ache of pain, the insistent brag of her weak heart, says otherwise. No matter how much she wishes she were already asleep forever.
It’s impossible to know whether the sensation comes from her body or her soul whatever part of her that is watching all this unfold, but suddenly, Marisol feels the bright, sharp cold of a breeze against her cheek. It smells like rain; up-turned dirt; and the cool heaviness of the clouds coming down. The shock of it—how real the feeling is—startles her into sudden wakefulness. A shiver ripples through her. From a mile above, Marisol watches the dark brown statue of her body shiver, then fall still again.
She sees now that her wing is bent at a terrible, crooked, unnatural angle. At the place it’s meant to bend, it has turned in on itself; a needle-thin white bone sticks straight out from a clump of dark feathers that has matted together with blood. Mari feels her stomach sink so fast and so deep that it makes her sick. And it is that sickness that sends her into another fainting spell, a dreamless sleep that will not last as long as it’s meant to.
Marisol dreams herself awake.
When she opens her gray eyes, the haze of the world comes half into focus. She sees that somehow—against all odds—she has made it to Terrastella’s hospital. The edges of her vision turn a foggy black; Marisol only manages to stand for a moment before her body gives out, and she falls to her knees in the dirt.
It is impossible to know whether the sight of the girl that comes toward her is real or a fever dream.
Roselin still isn't accustomed to being up so early. 
