She woke up screaming with the sound of air still rushing past her ears like a haunting memory. But she was not falling, not plummeting toward the earth and the inevitable destruction of her. She woke up in the night, with the moonlight spilling silver pools across the wet ground and shadows growing in closer around her and she could not remember what had happened after the arrow entered her wing. The scream had died off her lips as her chest heaved with breath and her heart still raced as she pushed herself to more of an upright position.

Both of her wings were sprawled out at her sides and as she reflexively moved to press them against her a sharp pang radiated through the right one. Her wing crooked awkwardly—almost lazily—outward, with the arrow still pierced through the elbow joint. Unable to bend it, it was too far from her reach to properly inspect it. The pain was a throbbing sort of ache if she kept it still, but more than that she worried about permanent damage. What if they had managed to take her wings from her without actually removing them? She couldn't imagine which fate was worse, to have them and not be able to use them or not to have them at all.

Samaira turned her attention from the wing with a heavy breath, and got her first good look around. She hadn't a clue where she was or where the guards had gone. Perhaps she'd been abandoned someplace, but would they just leave her here to die? Surely they would not leave her with a chance of escape, regardless of her injury. Maybe, she thought, she was being observed, and her silver eyes warily flickered over the forest around her. Over the years her family had lived in many expansive, remote forests but this swamp was completely unfamiliar. It was humid, and alive with the sound of bugs. Where had she ended up?

A part of her said that she was taking this too well, that there was not enough flight instinct inside her. The pegasus wondered if she was still in shock, and she half expected another arrow to come flying toward her from the shadows. But it all seemed quiet, almost too quiet. Her heart still raced at the memory of being hunted, of being chased down like a criminal. To them she had been. It had been a crime for her to live at all, despite the fact that she had never bothered anyone. For her to simply breathe and walk was a felony.

Samaira remembered the dark look on Cassius' face as he turned her in to the guards searching her home. She had been foolish to let him in, but even still did her heart remember how it had felt for him. Her skin felt flushed, but from fever or emotion she did not know. Then she had a sudden thought: what if he was here, hiding, waiting, just beyond her sight? There was no way she could know what sort of deal he had struck when he went to the Warden about her location. Then she thought she heard a sound, and all of her muscles stiffened. "Who is there?" she asked to the trees, more bravely than she felt.

ooc things

Wary, Samaira slowly pushed herself to standing. There was no answer to her query but she dared not let her guard down. It could have just been an animal, there was no telling what creatures called this unfamiliar place ome. Her heart had almost returned to its normal pace when suddenly someone crashed through the canopy above, hitting the ground with such force she felt it vibrate through her bones.

Her heart immediately kicked back into high gear, beating ferociously in her chest. Samaira stepped back, her muscles bunching, preparing to run. Or fight, if she had to, though she didn’t know how. Then, oh but then Samaira saw them. In her shock she hadn’t thought about it, how they had arrived from the sky. But this stranger, whoever they were, had wings.

The other equine,  a woman, spoke and Samaira took a cautious step closer. “You… you fly?” She couldn’t believe it. Her mind simply couldn’t comprehend that someone else out there was like her. “Are you a prisoner? I… I can’t believe that you’re alive! That you still have your wings.” Her heart seemed to beat more quickly, her breath coming more rapidly. Her whole life she’d been completely alone, and now?

Suddenly, Samaira felt a little like she wasn’t quite here, her vision darkening at the edges, her breathing becoming quick and shallow. She braced herself against a tree and tried to settle her racing heart. She had never met another pegasus, not truly, even as she thought of Cassius and his wings made of smoke and forbidden magic. The more she thought about it, the less she believed it. This was all too good to be true.

Another pegasus out of nowhere, here to rescue her? “Did they bribe you somehow? Did they tell you that they would spare your life if you lured others like you to them?” Samaira pushed away from the tree, ignoring the questions that the other woman asked her. She cocked her good wing defensively into the air, her damaged one still sitting awkwardly at her side. “Well?” Something just wasn’t right here.

@Marisol

The other mare does not say yes but she does not have to. Yes, she thinks, Yes, she flies. Yes, yes, yes. And Samaira cannot think, cannot breathe, and her lungs are not getting enough oxygen and her vision is strange, in the night. Darker, blurrier. She thinks… she thinks she might pass out, as she stands there in the shadows and the moonlight and looks at a flying pegasus through silver eyes. In her shocked panic, the earthen woman stretches her wings without thinking, that they might prevent her from falling, and she wrenches on the wing with the arrow stuck through it, grinding wood to bone.

A cry escapes her lips, and she feels herself crumbling, down, down to her knees on the slippery swamp floor. Samaira tucks her nose to her chest and breathes. In, out, in out, over and over again, her head swimming, her heart beating, drowning, drowning, drowning in black.

How long does she stay there, curled up against truth that sits just outside her reach, against the shadow pain ricocheting through her, against the lingering fear she has, like a rabbit running for its life. She is not in her homeland anymore. Somehow… somehow she was shot out of the sky and landed in a place completely different from that which she should have landed on, where she should have been imprisoned and most likely put to death.

She should be dead, right now.

But she is not.

Slowly, Samaira unfurls like her wings might on a breeze. She shudders still, a constant shivering over the surface of her skin, but she controls her breathing and manages to prevent the vignette of darkness on the edges of her vision from closing in. She does not stand, and she knows she must be covered in foul, thick mud, but instead she just lifts her head and looks at the woman in front of her, who is sharp edges and eyes like the blade of a knife, and she only has one thing to ask.

“Where am I?” and her voice is a quivering, whispery thing on her tongue and her lips, and she is both afraid of what the answer might be and hoping that it is true. That she is here, and here is not the place where she would be hunted and killed.

@Marisol

There is a pressure at her side, a presence, a warmth, and the other woman is there. Their shoulders touch, Samaira’s hinged wing laying haphazardly across the stranger’s back. She is covered in mud. They are covered in mud, it clings to their legs and their sides, splattered across their wings, their hair. Samaira continues to breathe slowly, listening to the other woman speak as the dark washes over them, the moon dappling them with soft light.

She is both here and not here, grounded by rough voice of the woman at her side but feeling like she is floating, floating high above them, looking on through eyes that are both hers but not. She feels otherworldly, lightheaded, strange. Her skin shakes and shudders and her heart quivers and she breathes and breathes and breathes. The woman glances up and Samaira follows, afraid to see herself there, looking down on them. But of course she is not; there is only the canopy and the dark sky above with the stars and the moon.

“Terrastella,” and she feels the world out, the way it tastes on her tongue and the shape it makes of her lips. Samaira thinks land of stars and she likes it, beautiful but simple. She thinks and hopes and wonders, already, if this place will be more simple for her. More peaceful. And when the woman asks where she is from her eyes fall do the muddied ground, as though she might find answers there that are nicer than the truth.

“A place that has no love for our kind,” she says after a moment’s pause, the feathers of her damaged wing rustling in the breeze. “Irindor,” and it is a sourness in her mouth, a heaviness in her heart. The world falls to silence between them, cradled by the night sounds filtering through the swamp. At some point the tremors lessen, her breathing comes easier. Samaira shifts her weight on the ground and glances at the woman with storm grey eyes. The word she utters then are soft and blanket the space around them with a genuine warmth, ”Thank you.”

@Marisol love Mari <3

It is a strange comfort, the feeling of the other woman's skin against her own. For so long Samaira has been on her own that her body seems to both celebrate such contact as if it has been far too long, but that it too is quite unsure of such a foreign phenomenon. And then she thinks how this woman so readily laid down at her side and took the weight of her wing across her back and wonders if she could ever be so comfortable. Is this what it is like, to be unafraid? Her heart, perhaps, beats a little quicker but for what she cannot say.

That heart, oh how it sings at the words spoken by the steel eyed mare. ‘A lot of us,’ and if that isn't music, joyful and bright and growing, to her ears. She is an us, a part, no longer different or outcast. Samaira can't tell if the wrenching in her chest, the freewheeling butterflies in her stomach, are joy or sadness. Both, perhaps. Mourning the girl who lived so many years wanting nothing more than to have peace, while celebrating the one who might at last find it.

“I am glad, then,” she says, the smokey accented tones of her voice velvet in the night, “to be saved by you.” To be saved at all. To be gifted with and worthy of saving. All Samaira can see when she thinks of the alternative is what she learned in the pages of history books about the war that caused the pegasi to lose their lives and their wings. A shiver dances across her skin, but that fate is not hers. Not anymore.

She breathes in deeply and looks at her companion's eyes, only a few shades darker than her own, and then up toward the sky. How far it reached, how she longed to follow it without fear. After a moment she speaks. “I can stand,” and she braces her legs beneath her and rises slowly from the mud and muck. Her heart beats quickly and her breath sharpens against the twinge of her wing, but still draped across the other woman's back there is less strain on it. “Show me where to go and I will follow you,” her eyes shine like the moon, wide and bright.

And though everything in her feels unsteady and strange and new, they will disappear into the darkness of the swamp, perhaps side by side, perhaps with the feathers of Samaira's wings quivering beneath the weight of all her emotions. With crickets singing to them among the sound of a breeze in the trees, and the light of the eye of the moon above shining down on them, dappling their backs between swaying leaves.

@Marisol