take my hand. feel my heart.
tell me what's wrong with it.

he had no idea if he had gotten her message or not.

Maret was not sure that she had even sent it to the right place (and she had decidedly less faith in the carrier dove she had managed to rent being able to find him, at any rate.) And even if the tightly rolled piece of paper had found him, small chance though it was, she was even less certain Leonidas would know what to do with it. It had been hard for her to not write a whole letter, knowing well enough that he would likely be unable to read it; even still, she was not sure her abruptly written “meet me by our cave lake, saturday at dusk” signed with her usual sunflowers and annotated with a sun setting over a mountaintop had sufficed. 

She had realized belatedly that her picture of a sun setting might look the exact same as a sun rising, or just a sun overtop a mountain during the day.

So she had come early. Just in case.

Her hooves click against the cavern floor, each tap of gold against stone sending echoes racing along ahead and behind her. It feels strange — it has been so long since Maret had felt anything besides sand beneath her hooves, the stone floor feels almost unstable in comparison.

The last time she had been here she had not had her horseshoes. She had not had her golden hair clasps, either — at least not these ones that she had gotten specifically for the last solterran party she had attended. The hairstyle she wore with them was also new; hair swept back from her face, glossed and braided in the tight plaits that were so common in the Day Court. And where once she would have let her hair grow long — now the ends of it were bluntly cut and short (she had learned quickly that long hair felt more stifling in the desert, and as much as she had agonized over the idea of cutting her hair, in the end she had grown rather fond of the new style. It made her feel more… sophisticated. And as if she better belonged in her new home.)

It all feels unfamiliar now, though, as she waits for him beside their lake. She had not realized before how much she had grown — although change was like that, she supposed. Creeping in more often with steps instead of leaps, so that the depth of it did not become apparent until finally she turned and looked over her shoulder to see how far the beginning of it truly was. Until she awoke one morning and no longer felt quite like herself, and there was no single event to explain why.

It was why she had come back. She had almost gone home, instead — only home no longer felt like home. So, feeling as though she did not recognize herself in the mirror, she had gone to a lake that had always seemed to her like a mirror of its own.

She can hear the echo of a stone falling somewhere across the lake, the ripple of it sending streaks across the glassy surface of the water. It makes the lights reflected there from the glowing leaves hanging from the cavern ceiling dance. For a long while she lies there alone by the lake, the water lapping at her front hooves, chin resting on her knees. Her journal — filled with scraps of unfinished poetry, and stories, and notes on her latest articles — lies forgotten by her side as she stares out in the shadows across the lake. 

The sound of another set of hooves echoing in the cavern pulls her from her daydreams. She stands quickly, dusting the sand from herself as she turns to face him. Even in the dark, features lit only by the bioluminescence of the plants growing along the lake — she would recognize him always. 

"Hi." She smiles at him, stepping forward almost uncertainly. "I wasn’t sure you would come."

{ @Leonidas "speaks" notes: text }