[AW] take an angel by the wings

[Samaira]

my spirit's veering flight
like swallows under evening skies.

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

[Marisol]

heaven talks
but not to me

When Marisol hears the scream echoing from the heart of the swamp, ringing like a bell, loud as a siren, it does not take her more than a moment to go speeding toward it. 

She has heard a scream like that many times, if not the same. A scream of panic and confusion. A scream of complete lostness. It is a sound she knows very well.

Grinding to a halt on her patrol around the edge of the forest, for a second Mari pauses in bewilderment, heart beating a fiery tattoo against her chest; she wonders if it is a trap, if it is safe to investigate. But even if it isn’t, that is her duty.  She steels herself, regaining consciousness, and digs her heels deep into the soft mud to take off upward into the sky in a flurry of churning muscle and spotted wings. 

Even in the heat of summer, the sky above Terrastella holds a kind of biting chill; it is a comfort to feel the cold wind on her skin like she’s felt a hundred times before, shaking sharp fingers through her short hair,  ruffling the shiny black feathers lying flat against her wings. The ground peels away beneath her, replaced with an ever-rolling wave of wet ground and green trees, rushing and rushing until her deep-gray eyes catch sight of a hole in the foliage, and, below that, a flicker of movement.

She pins her wings to her sides and goes diving down, down, down.

Mari half-lands, half-crashes in the wet mud of the forest. She’s used to it by now - the way the ground can fall away beneath you and the dark shadows covering the trees in the thickest parts of the swamp - but she still stumbles a little on her landing, too much energy retained in her plummet and stored in the broad set of her shoulders. Leaves and mud spatter away from her hooves. Instantly her gaze zeroes in on the stranger and her wings half-fold in; she twitches against the urge to reach for a weapon.

The girl curled against the ground is mottled in brown and white and gold. Marisol thinks the wings held to her ribs might be double layered but can’t quite tell; her hooves are lined in yellow and streaks of silver rip through her dark hair. She doesn’t seem dangerous. But she does seem scared.  Are you hurt? asks Marisol, her voice low and hoarse, gray eyes wide.  Do you know where you are?

credits

[Samaira]

my spirit's veering flight
like swallows under evening skies.

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

[Marisol]

heaven talks
but not to me

You… you fly?

Mari blinks in surprise. Her feathers twitch a little in stupid surprise. You fly? Yes, she wants to say, and with some measure of derision - did the girl not just see her come crashing through the forest soaring on the same wings she holds out at her sides now? - but she bites her tongue and frowns, only. The gray of her eyes shimmers with doubt. Suspicion rides a tidal wave in her chest, but she feels the wet of red-and-white paint on her cheeks and thinks it is her duty into listen, and her world is duty unto death.

A prisoner? Mari’s frown sinks deeper. The spear strapped to her leg beats like it has its own pulse, and the urge to grab for it is so compulsive she almost thinks of it as an itch.

Is that a threat?

Just like that, the commander falls into calculation. Every variable is counted. The absence of a weapon at the girl’s side. The measurement of strides between them. (She feels the ground underneath her feet and thinks hard about how much it would slip if she had to spring forward.) How much the broken wing might hinder the stranger, considering she evidently does not even know how to use the healthy one. If it came down to it, Mari says to herself, she could win in a matter of seconds, and that is the only thing that keeps a full-blown snarl from blossoming on her dark face.

She does not miss the way the girl leans on the tree next to her, how she has to keep the broken wing half-cocked like a flightless bird. And despite it all - the darkness between them and the dim light filtering through the trees and the bullet-bright song of her heartbeat, and, most of all, the iron scent of blood on the air - Marisol has to grin at the notion that her life is something to be spared.If I relied on others to spare my life I would have been dead years ago, she answers, and shifts the head of her spear against her leg.

The questions have come at her so fast she’s not even sure how to answer them. Instead of answering one at a time, Mari says the only thing that she thinks will touch on all of it - flight is not a crime, girl - and furrows her brows.

credits

[Samaira]

my spirit's veering flight
like swallows under evening skies.

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

[Marisol]

heaven talks
but not to me

When the girl goes down, tumbles like a rock down the edge of a fiery slope, it is not concern that forces Mari to dive toward her but an instinct as strong as her need to breathe: save. Save.

The Commander crashes toward the stranger on bended knee, scraping up the dirt floor, layers of mulch and leaves, splintering twigs in half. Her heart picks up speed in her chest. Easy as blinking, Mari slides a shoulder under the wing rent by the arrow and pushes up so that the girl’s strained tendon is, if not lessened in pain, at least supported by laying its weight across Marisol’s spine. Don’t move, she orders bluntly. It’ll only make it worse. 

With a sigh of discontent she slides to rest her weight against the forest floor. The cold does not matter. Nor does the dirt - Mari has found herself covered in much worse, more than once. So she cannot find it in herself to care, not when there are more pressing issues in the world. Overhead, moonlight filters in like water. It flecks their skin like pearl-white foam, washes over the dark of Samaira’s wing-and-blood.

Where am I? Mari’s narrow shoulder is still pressed against Samaira’s. With an air of casualty she glances upward toward the canopy of trees, watches the leaves sway under the gentle touch of wind, back and forth, up and down. Terrastella, she says, and it is both reverent and unfulfilled. The Dusk Court. Where are you from?

Not that it’s accusatory. Surprisingly soft, even, are the words that escape from Marisol’s mouth. They are here together, in the dirt, and there are some things that just bind people enough to make them easy.

credits

[Samaira]

my spirit's veering flight
like swallows under evening skies.

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

[Marisol]

heaven talks
but not to me

In the dark of the swamp, they are almost the same - near-black, and splattered in lacy coils of wet mud, winged in shades of brown and white, and Mari wonders what it would be like to be from anywhere but here, where she knows the ins and outs of the creeks, the swamps, the trees as well as she knows the pattern of her feathers. Irindor - she is not stupid enough to miss the bitterness in Samaira’s voice, and cannot blame her for it.

Well, she says, At least you’re not there anymore. And there are a lot of us here. Pegasi. Her wing shudders a little, like it’s shedding something invisible, or trying to, and pearls of mud go flying back into the swamp in a flurry of dark and wet. It's strange to think of a world outside this, where Marisol's wings are the only things that keep her more useful than the average citizen, save for her sharp tongue and the spear at her side. The Commander’s legs stretch out against the wet grass until a comforting burn runs through her muscles, and then she shifts back to sit more comfortably against Samaira’s side, hoisting the damaged wing across the curve of Mari’s spine.

Crickets go singing in the depth of the forest behind them; it is impossible to tell whether their noise is sorrow or celebration, but it makes Marisol’s heart twist in her chest just a little. Don’t thank me, she says, though not unkindly. It is warm enough to match Samaira’s tone and contrasts steeply against the cold and the dark of the night around them, even the silver webbing of moonlight across their skin. With a little sigh she drops her head closer to her chest. It’s my job here. Saving. And if the little flare of her nostrils says anything, it is only that she takes the title seriously. 

With a brief exhale, Marisol raises her head again. We should get to the Hospital, she says, ignoring the brief run of adrenaline through her bloodstream as she re-realizes the feeling of Samaira’s shoulder against hers. You got lucky. Terastella is a land of healers. Tell me when you can get up, she finishes quietly, trying not to let the concern show in the deep timber of her voice, or apply too much pressure to the situation - it only tends to make things worse.

credits

[Samaira]

my spirit's veering flight
like swallows under evening skies.

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

[Marisol]

heaven talks
but not to me

I am glad to be saved by you - 

Marisol blinks. Her heart jumps in her chest; involuntarily she shudders, whether it’s from the surprise or the cold or her constant suspicion it’s impossible to tell.

It is the only compliment that could make Marisol feel anything. 

Just barely she smiles to herself. 

As Samaira begins to stand, Mari follows; she presses her shoulder against the girl’s, supporting her weight, and moves upward at the same pace to match her. Crickets sing in the deep-dark of the swamp. From overhead streams a soft web of moonlight, patterning their dark skin into cobblestone. And no matter how terrible the thing that brought them here, how terrible the homeland Samaira was thrown from, something like hope still moves in Marisol’s veins so bright it makes the blood hum in her ears.

If either of them notices the other’s unsurety, it goes blissfully unsaid.

Here, she says, and takes the first slow step toward the out-of-sight citadel, hidden behind a row of bristling trees; Marisol knows the path like of the back of her hand, and soon enough Samaira will, too.

credits