life's but a walking shadow

The world was white, and cruel, and cold.

Indra could not say how long she had been wandering the frozen wastes, her breath steaming in the air before her, her flanks matted with ice. Time slipped and swam around her, swallowing days and weeks and months, stretching minutes into years. Still the pale ghost of the sun never seemed to do more than brush the underside of the horizon, a distant gray brightening that scarcely flared before it faded again to night.

Dimly, the unicorn understood that she could not have been here that long, or she’d be dead.

Or maybe the magic, the malice, of this place would not let her die.

She did not know what she had done to anger the rift—if it was anger at all, and not simply the way of things, savage and unrelenting. When the night rose with a hundred impossible colors, shimmering like silk across the tundra sky, she might have thought it was a dream, or death, if she had not been too weary to think at all.

So she walked on, head bowed against the wind, the dark glint of her horn like a setting star as it pierced the veil.

*

On the other side, it is evening, the air damp and warm against her skin, the breeze heavy with brine. Instead of snow underhoof there is weathered rock, solid and reassuring, and the ghostly greens and violets of the aurora have given way to a spectacular red and gold sunset.

Indra sneezes and blinks into the light, pivoting slowly as she stares out over field and cliff and sea. She has grown too accustomed to the whims of the rift to be surprised by much of anything, anymore, and so she does little more than flick an ear toward the cawing of a gull overhead, and start off along the ragged edge of the bluff.

But the coastline seems almost to waver in her vision, blurred by the contours of a landscape she can not quite fully remember and yet cannot shake from her thoughts. There is something familiar about this place, unnervingly so, and that more than the change of scenery causes the hair to prickle along her spine.

She cuts her way north and east, if for no other reason than that the cliffs do so as well. The sun inches lower, and her shadow unspools at her side, and her mane glistens deep and red.

It is less will than instinct, really, that has her leveling her horn at the sound of hoofbeats up the path, for she has seen destruction enough to know that to hesitate is to be lost. But it is only the silhouette of another horse, and the unicorn checks herself, lifting the iron tip to a more genteel height (if only just).

She should say something, she thinks, in an effort to be friendly, but she can no longer recall the last time she had to bother with social pleasantries, and the words lodge in her throat, thick with disuse. For a long moment she merely eyes the stranger, the face half-glowing in the harsh light of the west, its mirror lost to shadow.

"Hello," she says finally, coolly. "This is... a nice place. Do you live here?"

i n d r a

life’s but a walking shadow

It’s an easy smile that rides the stranger’s lips, a friendly carelessness that colors his voice, and for a moment Indra almost envies the way in which he seems to be of this place, filling it with his presence even as he suggests the stay is temporary. Belonging is a thing she has never seen much use for and seldom thought to miss, but watching this stallion, his effortless way of holding himself, she wishes that she, too, could be relaxed and luminous and unconcerned.

But that would be a fool’s assessment, to blink before Lysander’s light and miss the darkness at his heels. Indra is many things, but not foolish, most of the time, and she has long since learned how to look, how to listen. She knows nothing of Lysander’s past, here or elsewhere, but she feels the edge to the silence that follows his words, like static in the air before a storm. She glances at him sharply, reassessing.


“No,” she says, and the word might be a response to either of his not-quite-questions. Her gaze drifts to the sea churning far below, the white foam glazed red in the sunset, and after a moment she adds, “There are things about this place that seem—familiar to me.” She watches the breakers in their rise and fall against against the rocky shore, the troughs of shine and shadow, and she wonders if it is simply the nature of all oceans, to call to memory and soul.

Then a smile touches the corners of her own mouth, small and wry, and she shakes her mane, revealing the pale leather strip woven close along her nape, studded with tiny pearls—and three thin, curved teeth. “I do not carry the sea in my veins,” she says quietly, “but once, long ago, I knew creatures who did. They are beautiful, and they sing the most beautiful songs, and they bring ruin to those who do not know them for what they are.”

Her gaze returns to the stallion, and she allows herself a moment to admire the fine picture they must make, standing opposite one another, burnished by the sun. There is a curious symmetry to them, gleaming like a pair of coins: one silver, the other copper-gold, and made all the more striking by the green of his eyes, the red of her hair, his antlers spreading before the needle point of her horn.

“But you seem to know what it is you’re looking for,” she says, more mildly. “Have you encountered many dangers in this place?”

i n d r a

life’s but a walking shadow

The wind worries at the red ends of her braid, tugging flyaways loose to lick like flames along her neck. “In some ways,” she concedes; for indeed, how many times can a beach or cliff, a field or sky truly reinvent itself? “But it is often a false likeness.” And oh, she is thinking of the riftlands, too, though she cannot know this golden stranger’s thoughts are such a crooked mirror to her own. Too often, it would seem, the rift could take a reassuring shape to hide the deadly wrongness of it, and for all she knows this place is no exception.

She does not pause to wonder at his word, worlds, or consider whether it is a common thing, for creatures such as themselves to drift across and between them. The riftlands may as well have been a thousand worlds in one; perhaps this place is no different, though she has not seen or felt the shadow of it yet. Could she have guessed, though, at the myriad realms Lysander had walked, playing god and mortal, beast and man, she might have shivered to realize how very little she herself had seen.

And still the familiarity of this landscape hums to her, trembling along her bones. She has been here before, she knows it, certain as she knows her name.

The only question, then, is what wrongness lies in wait for her this time.

His next words startle a laugh from her, low and wry. “Is it a lesson learned,” she asks him, “if you do not heed it?” She sweeps her muzzle toward her right flank, the bare muscle of her neck arching toward him, and the evening light spills across her withers, revealing a trio of delicate white scars reaching up into the root of her mane. “Sometimes the singing,” she continues, turning back to him, “sometimes the teeth, sometimes no more than the glint of an eye. More than once I allowed myself to be drawn... too close, perhaps.”

Strange, to think she had almost forgotten the sound of hoofbeats in the surf, the wild mane tangled with seaweed, those milky eyes shimmering like pearls. There had been a mare, she remembers—a filly, more like, scarcely older than herself, with a voice like the wind through a river canyon and a smile that cut like glass. It feels like a dream, like a different lifetime.

She does not ask what dangers he has met, though she thinks she can guess by the gleam of his green eye that there is a story there, and one she might like to hear some day. But she blinks, and it is nothing more than a final reflection of the sun, slipping swiftly now below the horizon. “We are all dangerous, in our way,” she allows. “Perhaps most of all to ourselves. Would you walk the same path again, knowing how it might end?”

And then it is night, the ocean sighing beneath a last, dwindling smear of violet to the west. “A shame about the song,” she adds after a moment, speaking softly into the dark. “Who knows—maybe they’ll sing one about you one day. What would you do, do you think, to make your name immortal?”

i n d r a

life’s but a walking shadow

Indra dips her head in agreement as the antlered stallion speaks. She, too, can feel the paths of a thousand possible lives unfolding at her hooves, innumerable and wonderful and terrifying. It is hard to imagine not seeking to explore them all, even as she knows that a step in any one direction will erase so many other courses that might have been.

Briefly, silently, she turns her question on herself: Would she change anything, if she could? Would she even have the knowledge or volition to, or would she blindly follow once more the same old path that fate had carved for her? Was that not, in some ways, what she was already doing now—walking a cliffside she had surely walked before, in the dream that tugged her endlessly between Novus and the rift and back again?

The night breeze whispers over her skin, smelling of salt and secrets, and she gives a small shake, turning her thoughts away from time and free will toward more sociable topics. “No real destination,” she replies. “Perhaps toward where the people are. I would be glad for your company,” she adds, and means it, for she has been wandering too many weeks alone, and his is the sort of conversation that she could readily grow used to. She flashes him a smile, ghostly in the dark. “You can show me where it is you make your home.”

She starts again up the cliff-trail, the golden stranger a dim bronze phantom at her side. His pale antlers seem almost to shimmer against the night, and every now and again the round ball of the moon is caught between them, crowning him with an otherworldly glow. “You must tell me a story,” she instructs him, “and a good one, to pass the time. If it is disappointing, I shall feed you to the deep.” Her expression is carefully solemn, only the barest arch of a brow daring him to make her prove it.

And so they walk, on into the lengthening night, the sea a rushing murmur at their heels. Indra, never one for chasing gods, cannot help but feel the touch of one, here—Vespera, perhaps, watching over the sleeping lands of Terrastella.

Or this unlikely stranger, chance encountered on the road.

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