little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
She waits for the water to change her, to better her, to make her like the little phoenixes that trailed their bright sparks.
Elif should have expected that the water would be warm, with all that heat and color, but she is still surprised when it coats her throat like tea. And yet other than a warmer belly and a ticklish sort of feeling she notices no changes, though she waits and waits.
But Elif is nothing if not impatient and at last she shakes herself and looks up - and there down the bank is a stallion, a stranger watching her.
The girl opens her mouth and closes it again, and then she huffs a snort. At once she is suspicious (even as the water pools golden in her belly, warming her, changing her at last?), because even with the gold of the water thrown back on him he looks black black black to her and she is hunting a black pegasus still.
Yet her mistrust cannot last long. Despite the forward way he stares at her, the unbidden interest, he cannot be the one she seeks. He is too…too…
Happy? Short? Complimentary?
Elif smiles back at him. She settles her wings along her lean ribs and narrow hips and steps toward him, and the alajah around her throat does not feel so choking-tight as it sometimes does but only like a comfort, familiar. “I have what?” she asks him, because she is unused to open compliments and anyway when she thinks of summer she thinks of gold. But she is intrigued, and a little flattered (maybe it is the water, maybe it is like mead), and she closes the distance between them without taking her gaze from him. It roves him, his coat and his feathers and his long long tail, but keeps coming back to his crinkling eyes (green, too) and his mouth and his wings that tilt as though already riding a breeze.
“I don’t know,” she says, and for once the mystery doesn’t bother her. “Did it change you?”
Now she is curious, spreading her wings to examine them, glancing at her feet as though a sock might have vanished, snapping her sparse dark tail to see if it trails sparks, too.
When it does not she is disappointed - but not as much as she might have been, if she were alone.
@Mateo
