life's but a walking shadow
The silence that follows the rockslide is a terrible thing.
Almost in slow motion Indra whirls, her golden eyes tracking the enormous pile of rubble as it crashes down to close off access to the meeting grounds. The air is hollow and roaring in her ears, the world around her plumed with dust. In the span of a breath her body has gone tense, expectant, disbelieving, and all around her she can read only identical expressions of horror on the faces of the watching herd.
A cold fist closes around Indra’s heart. Her pulse is a slow, dreadful drip, the lone sound she can hear against the silence. She knows very little of these courts, with their gods and their sovereigns and their regimes. She knows very few of the people trapped behind that wall of rock.
But she knows one.
Then there is a scream, raw and clear and reverberating with fury, and a black streak surges up the slope of boulders and shale. Indra recognizes the unicorn from around the Dusk Court—recognizes, too, the red stallion who issues a rallying cry in her wake.
Her body reacts before her mind catches up, her hindquarters heaving her forward alongside a handful of other strangers desperate to offer what little help they can. What use, after all, are hooves and horn against the formless fists of the gods? What use such rudimentary telekinesis, in the face of beings who could level a mountain with less than a thought?
Still, Indra shoulders her way in among the rubble, shoving slabs of rock, pulling at roots with her teeth, sweeping the loose scree aside with a mental effort of will. And slowly, so slowly, her mind circles in on what it knows to be truth.
There was a battle, long ago and yet not so long ago—and in that battle a filly died, a tiny winged thing with a mane full of purple flowers. Indra saw her, lying motionless and cold in the gore and the mud. And yet somehow that filly returned, and lived, and grew into a young mare, and became the queen of Terrastella.
On a different day, in a different world, Indra might have walked away from this scene—might have shrugged her shoulders at the gods, and the courts, and their petty conflicts, and turned her back on all of it. It was not, after all, her sort of fight. But not today; not this world.
She would run a god through the heart, to keep Florentine from death again.
So the unicorn lowers her head, and drags the iron blade of her horn against a jagged rock, and the dark whine of its whetting rings out like a promise.
i n d r a
