life's but a walking shadow
It is a strange thing, to once again walk a landscape that does not twist and churn and invert itself in no more than the blink of an eye. Indra cannot help but feel constantly ready for it—braced against the moment when the magic of the rift will yawn back up to snatch the ground from beneath her hooves, transforming this soft, late-summer world around her into something violent and unnatural.
But the seaside cliffs fade gradually into rolling fields, and their tall, waving grasses are so gentle, so golden, so ordinary that Indra’s heart almost breaks for the beauty of it. Autumn is still but a kiss on the breeze, a pale sheen of frost on the grass at dawn. If the rift lurks here, waiting, the only change that it wreaks is to turn the leaves from green to scarlet and bronze.
Indra is surprised, and not surprised, when she stumbles upon the little celebration nestled in the shadow of the woods. The Dawn festival had been a sprawling, lively thing, attended by far more horses than she had seen in one place for quite some time, and she has been half-waiting to discover where the people of Terrastella must make their home. Quietly she slips in among those present, listening absently to their conversations, keeping an (unoptimistic) eye out for any signs of the Ilati.
And then she sees someone she knows, and the shock of it has her going rigid where she stands, her neck straightening, her nostrils flaring in disbelief.
A cream-colored pegasus might be a common enough sight, but it is the spill of amethyst flowers over the young mare’s neck and shoulders, the slender dagger glinting at her chest—
“You were a child,” Indra says, and the words are cold, cold, cold. If Florentine is here, in Terrastella—if this place is just another trick of the rift—
Indra’s golden eyes narrow, and she stalks toward the other woman, and each iron footfall is a step across worlds. Her breath is coming slow, and deep, and steady, and she feels such a terrible calm as she lowers her head, the iron tip of her horn coming to rest against the pegasus’s milky-golden cheek.
She does not know that Florentine is a queen, here; she does not know that she herself might well be flayed alive for simply drawing so near to this ruler of Dusk, much less for laying a weapon against her skin. She knows only that she saw this girl of flowers lying small and broken in the winter mud.
The barest twitch of a muscle, and Indra could open the sovereign’s cheek, but the unicorn is still, so still. Her golden eyes find Florentine’s, and they are as violet as she remembers, impossibly deep. “I watched you die.”
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