elif
When she is this high, nothing can touch her.
She drifts above the clouds like any bird of prey, the Solterran sun warm on her back and her wings despite the bite in the air at this altitude. The desert she loves is a foreign landscape, endlessly remade according to the clouds, shifting faster than the golden dunes ever could. There are canyons of cumulonimbus and wide sweeps of stratus and she explores them all, the spaces between her feathers drinking in the wind like the Day Court’s bitter coffee.
Only when she is numb down to her hooves, only when her throat feels tight with frost, does she dip below the cloud-cover, graceful as a dancer with the slightest tilt of her wings.
And then - oh! she plummets to earth like a falling star, sunlight flashing on her wings like a comet come to ground.
There are few things that Elif knows how to do slowly; landing is not among them. With her forehooves extended before her and her wings folded like a falcon at her back she lets the wind whip her until tears sting her eyes, until it seems certain that she will crash into the sand with a cry and a great splintering of bone.
She waits for the pounding of her heart to reach its highest crescendo before she brakes, flaring out those red-shouldered wings, willing the air to bear her up. Elif hits the ground at a gallop and her laughter strikes like sparks across the desert, rough with the cold and the adrenaline of her descent.
If she’d had a mane to speak of, it would be well disheveled; as it is her feathers are askew, ruffled by the wind, and her sparse dark tail a wild tangle. She is no smooth-skinned sun-daughter now; she is a desert bramble, a thing small and half-feral, and there is no one left to tell her to be otherwise.
It’s a thought Elif holds in her heart, sweet with happiness and heavy with sorrow, as she bends her head to drink at the muddy shore of the oasis.
