ANGHARAD DAVID BRIAR
SOMEDAY I AM GOING TO WALK
OUT OF HERE FREE
There is no easy way to be brave in a new world. Or if there is, no one has taught it to Angharad.
She wakes up covered in cold sweat, panting, teary-eyed, heart racing in her chest, and the mid-gloaming sky overhead is the only part of the universe she recognizes. Everything else is foreign and terrifying, turning Angharad’s blood cold. A sea of twisting grass stretches out for miles and miles on every side. A mountain rises in the far distance but its peaks and crags are strange and unfamiliar; Angharad does not recognize the taste of the air, the salt on her lips, or the dull, pulsating ache in her head. It is disembodied, alien. It makes her want to cry.
But Una’s voice rings in her head and there is nothing she can do to silence it but complete the task it asks of her. Muscles aching, joints cracking and reshifting, Angharad rolls to her side and scrapes together just enough energy to stand up straight, woozy though she is, black though her vision goes; she grits her teeth and shakes the smear of cotton from her head and hikes in a deep breath of cool air, so cold it burns against the inside of her newborn lungs. A shiver smashes through the vertebrae in her spine.
But that, at least, wakes her up.
The world is strange and unknown and there is only one way to know it, and Angharad scrapes herself together and starts to walk across the plains. Clouds gather overhead, never dropping rain. Wind rustles the grasses until they make a moving sea of green and gold and bronze. The gold circlets on her horns clink together lightly, like a toast being made, like a song just barely being started, and it is the only noise for miles around until one of her swiveling ears catches the end of a word - a name?
She digs her heels into the dirt. Comes to a sharp stop, raises her white-streaked head to look over the grass until she sees that figure, slightly shorter than her, slightly darker than her, silhouetted in light glowing purple against the endlessly dimming horizon. She thinks she sees a horn, too, and a patch of black grass at the girls’ feet (and then she looks down at her own hooves and tries not to notice how they grow little moons of rot into the grass she places her weight on), and though apprehension tightens a knot in her chest Angharad continues forward with less than a pause.
Hello? she calls out into the cool air, and slows her pace until she is at more of a crawl than a walk. Wind tangles her dark-and-gold hair until it makes a maelstrom against her neck, and still Angharad walks, blue eyes bright and watchful.
@thana
