your oldest fears
are the worst ones
are the worst ones
At the edge of the sea there rumbles something like promise, cold and wet and dark.
And Marisol’s white-and-shadow wings are freckled with saltwater, her short hair tousled by the wind, tail tangled against her legs, but she does not seem to mind; in the chill and the dusk she trudges toward the shore with her head ducked low and gray eyes brightly watchful, casting moonlight on the grass beneath her feet. Behind her, Denocte’s inner city glimmers with warm light. But it is almost completely obscured by the distance she’s put between herself and the township, and the fact that she is careful to keep her eyes ahead of her, on the grass-and-gravel path and not the civilization at her back.
She does not think - or tries not to - of the ghost of Isra’s kiss on her cheek, dirty and sweet. She does not listen - or tries not to - to the low, glacé whine of music from the citadel, still following after her, like a ghost. And she especially does not feel (or tries not to) the way her heart dances, rough and criminal, against the inside of her chest, thrashing and biting like a wild thing.
At the edge of the cliff, Marisol comes to a short stop. She flares her wings out a little against the sea breeze. Hundreds of feet below her, past the sharp-steep drop of the cliff crumbling away at her hooves, the ocean roils and churns in a foaming mass, spitting up bits of salt and seaweed high into the air. Mari peers down at it and wonders if she is already living in a world in which violence equals power, and then wonders, a moment after, if she is destined to live in a world like that anyway.
Absent-mindedly, she knocks the butt of her spear against her leg, like a drumbeat.
@amaroq