The forest sounds to her like it’s singing. The branches shake their leaves in beat with her own heart, and the wind whistles a song that speaks of sunlight and rain and green things. She can’t help but dance along to its rhythm, twisting and weaving through the wood along a path she did not know. Her hooves leave small, crescent shaped prints in the earth in her wake, the only sign of her passing.

She almost doesn’t notice the way the light around her seems to bend, the way the beams breaking through the canopy seem to twist in midair just so they can alight upon her skin. A smile blossoms across her face at the sun’s touch, leaning into its embrace even as she skips away. A scattering of ice follows her like a trail of fairy dust.

Her imagination runs rampant, there in the forest that closes in around her. Every break of the sun through the canopy is a spotlight, and she twists through it in a beautiful dance that the leaves applaud and the wind cheers her on with a whistle. Every step, every pirouette and leap is exquisite, as if the world itself will not allow her to make a single faulty move; she is a master, dancing only to the beat of her own heart, wild and irregular though it may be.

With every step that wild thing inside of her beats faster, and her body twists more quickly through the trees in kind. On and on and on it goes, until her heart feels as though it is about to burst from the effort - and even then she dares to press on, trusting the soft cloud of her imagination to catch her when she falls.

But until then, she runs.

She runs like the shadows are chasing her.

She dances like all the world is watching.

She leaps over fallen trees and upraised roots like she’s flinging herself over mountains.

She runs, she dances, she leaps -

- Until the forest ends as abruptly as it began, and rock rises up around her in place of trees.

Her little chest heaves with each gasping breath, her hair floating in disarray to either side of her face. Twigs and leaves and mud bespeckle her coat, and if it weren’t for the tiny pristine horseshoes and the gold wrapped around her neck that betray her as a nobleman’s daughter, she might have looked like a wild thing borne of the forest. But oh, she certainly feels like a wild thing, as she gazes up and up at the mountains.

A small part of her whispers that she should turn around, that she’s wandered too far from the Court and her parents. But another part, a louder part, can’t help but ask: what lies beyond the forest?

She takes the first step out onto the rocks, and her heart leaps painfully high in her throat.

She takes her second step and thoughts of home are already fading, excitement taking the place of trepidation.

By the third step she’s back to skipping, and her laughter is loud and joyous as it echoes off of the slate.

She doesn’t see the great cavern that opens like a mouth in the mountainside, not until the boy with his dark wings and golden antlers steps out of it. Maret slides to a stop, and watches the way the sunlight plays across the prongs of his antlers in the same way that it played across her father’s wings. ”Are you an adventurous kind of girl?”



Oh, maybe if she were older she would have questioned this boy who seemed to come from the darkness. But she is young and naive and her heart yearns to explore the unknown; so she lifts her head up and puffs her chest in the way she’s seen boys back home do. “Yes,” she says defiantly, and her voice is haughty and matter-of-factly. “Yes I am.”

She’s already stepping forward into the cave, her golden horseshoes clicking against the stone floor. Her small ears prick forward with interest, peering curiously into the shadows. She thinks she can hear the sound of water, dripping off rock somewhere in the distance.

“I can keep your secrets,” she tells him, and she already trusts that he would keep hers. “I’ll bet this cave has more secrets than stars in the sky. Shall we look for them together?”

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