The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”


Each mile free of walls, and stone, and that mortal army of ants, lightens her step. It feels like home, this wildness, stretching out around them. The mountains rise like spires behind them and the forest and the grasses each whisper in the wind stories that only she remembers. Her steps are light-as-air as she races across the knee high grass.

Here, with freedom as endless as the horizon, Al'Zahra remembers what it is to be air, and ember, and magic.

The child (her child, she has to remember that), races long-legged with an awkwardness that hopefully eases with time. And even when she slows her running to spare Maeve's lungs, there is something immortal in holy in the elegance of her movements. The links in her chains ring like bells over the twilight meadows adding a certain otherness to the roar of the river as they approach.

Music reaches towards them with the wind, and the last feral restlessness in her blood settles like a full-bellied lion. Her muscles coil snakelike and her knees crack and start to remember all the ways in which to dance like a storm instead of a girl. She smiles and the muted light flashes off her teeth, turning them to small stars caught in this mortal flesh of hers.

Al'Zahra starts to dance, and hum, and the night hums with her.

“Fireflies.” She smiles at Maeve as the child races back to her side from wherever it was she had wondered. The way she says fireflies makes it sound like fire flies instead. And they do, landing on their noses and pooling in the creases of their spines like snow. “You do not catch them.” Her hooves whisper on the stone shore as she dances away from the foal and her neck curls almost coquettishly as she dissolves into the darkness speckled with the fallen stars.

The river roars in her ears like a thousand wildcats and the strum of a guitar plucks at her soul like it's nothing more than silver and frayed satin. “They must be wooed.” Al'Zahra dances, forgetting for a moment everything but the thrill of sinew, and darkness, and song.

And on her tongue, beneath her secret smile, the taste of freedom blossoms like an ancient flower.

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”


Between one step and the next, one exhale and the next, she turns her eyes to the forest darkness. Her ears prick towards it and her neck curls and arches like a wolf catching a bit of moon-song. Something in her soul cracks, and bleeds, and races through her in sharp shards of glass. Her soul strains towards the forest and that almost-most song like a desert-horse on the apex of a dune. The next step takes her away from the fireflies, and the music, and this pale mockery of fate. Her chains chime like a bell on the sea in a storm.

She's about to run, to dissolve into the darkness where that moon-song thrives and music is nothing more than a forgotten creation, when her daughter becomes a tangle of legs and too-many-words.“Of course I am sure.” She answers. And there are too many teeth in her smile when she turns her head from the forest and tries not to feel the sobbing ache of her soul.

She swallows her snarl.

“Almost.” Part of her, that straining part, had wanted to sing a denial instead of encouragement. “Move slower.” Her teeth tuck themselves back into her hollow smile as the music steadies and slows to something less jagged than before. Fireflies tuck themselves into her mane and perch on the loops of her chains. She becomes the moonlight and the moon-song the wolf in her is straining for.

The gaze she turns on her daughter is golden with the glow, bright enough to hide the sparks and embers of her bleeding soul. “Try again.” And this time her smile is almost soft, as she steps closer to the river and tells her heart that being chained is not the end.

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”


She does not tell her daughter that the fireflies will die and are no more eternal than a falling star. But she thinks of it. She thinks about how it might feel, to watch a mortal heart learn for the first time both the blessings and curses of death. She wonders if it might soothe this restless itch, this violence without aim, that is rolling around in her heart filling all the places were the fire used to live.

Her tongue feels like a stone in her smile and she wants only to spit it out and watch it roll.

Instead she steps into the river and turns to watch the child (easier to this the instead of hers) move as awkwardly as before. The water feels cool as winter and it settles something broken and begging in her heart. “Me and my sisters were born knowing how to dance.” How strange it feels to her, to think of the time before the gods and of her sisters again.

How strange it is to feel nothing at the thought. Nothing at all.

There is only this world for her now. Only this cage she's desperate to break free off.

Another foot falls into the water. The current pulls at her hooves like gravity begging to pull her under and drop her into the bottom of the sea. “No.” She says because she does not know how to be kind, or motherly, or anything but a horse straining to run into the black woods like a wolf. Her ears flick again to the places where the fireflies have not gathered on the grass like flowers instead of living things waiting for death.

Her neck curls and her muscles quiver for the thrill.

“But you can practice more and perhaps you will become almost as good.” There is only one hoof on the shoreline now and a hundred stones waiting heavy on her tongue.

The Illuminated

“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”


There is a certain thrill in the feel of the hungry river tearing at her knees. It feels like hanging off the edge of a cliff or hanging between the wings of a sparrow and the gap-jaw of a cobra. She feels both dangerous and in-danger as she steps fully into the current. It bellows around her in white-froth and rocks kicked harshly against the fragile bones of her legs. Each note of that fresh-water roar cracks open another wound in her broken, ancient heart.

The wounds scream at the look in her daughter's eyes that shape themselves into chains. Her lungs flutter in her chest like she's drowning and golden lamp walls are rising up around her. She wonders if she'll ever breathe in the taste of freedom again.

Her heart shatters.

Another cage blooms in the wreckage of it and the river promises, as all violent things promise, to wipe it all away until the bars are rust in the bottom of the sea. Al'Zahra hums with the current and her chains make a brassy undercurrent to the fever in the notes of her wordless song. She takes another step into the current, pausing only once to look at the girl standing at the shoreline like a mortal thing waiting to die.

She know they'll all die in the end. But she will not (will not!) go as this dancer trapped in a world full of gods and bated magic. She'll go in the jaws of a lion, a wolf, with a sword to her heart. She'll go and worlds will rattle and dissolve in the wake of her death.

A court guard passes close to them, wondering perhaps at the mare wading too deep in the rabid river. It's to him that her feverish eyes turn, all lion rage and molten gold. She bares her teeth like she's more warrior than dancer, more Morrighan than anything else. “Take her home to Denocte.” And perhaps the soldier agrees because the look in her eyes, these weak mortal eyes, holds more holiness and sick hunger than a mortal mare's eyes should hold.

And this, this passing off her her daughter to anyone (anything) but herself is the kindest thing she can do.

Perhaps it is the kindest thing she has ever done.

But then, suddenly, there is no more kindness to be found. She does not wait for the solider to lead her daughter away (she does not wait for the heartbreak the girl will suffer to soften to anything but abandonment). Al'Zahra does not wait to see what the mortal world, the weak world, will make of her before she starts to run with the current.

The thrill of the current, the froth, the rock slipping out from under her hooves and dragging her into the current, is enough to fill each and every crack in her wild heart. She runs, and runs, and runs, until the current reaches the sea.

And even then, even when the horizon looks like a bound thing in her gaze, she does not stop running.