[P] to hear you call me companion

[Marisol]

live by the sword
die by the sword

The outer darkness turns to light. Marisol does not follow suit.

Against the bright snow and the piercing blue, it is wonderfully impossible for her to be unseen. She is umber and coal, perfectly dark, woefully strong, and the bristle of her close-cropped hair makes a kind of smile against the cloudless sky; lean and toughly built, it is not with trepidation or fear that she picks her way across the slopes but a hard, overwhelming determination, even as the wind scrapes its blunt teeth over her skin. It is a relief to feel the sharp aliveness of brittle-cold breeze building in her lungs.

She could not be sure, until now, that the past few weeks were even real.

In her head, all the tumultuous recent past is one soft, steel-colored blur, marked in some places by blood, or deep night, or loving bites; even then the waypoints rush past and slip through her memory like water; but here the air is clear and bright and cold, and it stings in her nostrils just enough to shake her to wakefulness, and for the first time in a long time the world is dreadfully, beautifully silent but for the crunch of Marisol’s narrow hooves in the crystal snow and the high, sweet song of birds overhead.

They dip and twist in the air without a worry. Their little wings flutter against the clouds with furious speed until it is impossible to tell where they are trying to go,  only that they are cavorting not in fear, but in joy. Head tilted to the sky, throat-open, Marisol watches and envies. The jealous crashing in her chest is not a stranger. Her own wings itch and shudder, as if asking to be let free - but she is no more than a body made of wings, terrifying at best, crippled at worst, and to let them go would be to die.

Or to fail. They are equally enticing. Which is to say, not at all.

This particular cliffside is unfamiliar to her. Marisol does not much leave Terrastella, and when she does it is with some amount of trepidation, but she is not stupid enough to leave Denocte unwatched in a time like this. Her years of clambering across the cliffs in Prastigia give her a little bit of confidence, at least. It is with long, nimble legs and weight balanced with aching carefulness over her hips that she climbs and climbs and climbs the cliffside, testing little crags and drop-offs against her weight, sloughing through the still-damp snow and the howling breeze.

It is the breeze, then, that alerts her to the stranger’s presence.

At first Marisol thinks it is a trick of the wind or the winter, that the snow is trying to turn her away from the very top of the mountain. She thinks that her brain has finally deceived her. That it has cracked under the unwholesome pressure of crisis. But no, the scream continues. It even grows louder as the Commander forces her stride to continue, and it is as she passes the hurdle of a particularly obtrusive boulder that she realizes the sound is not a what but a who. 

She slows, then stops.

Her skin shudders unconsciously against the cold that sets in as her blood starts to slow.

The girl on the cliff is howling with rage. It is a feral sound that makes the already-sharp bristle of Marisol’s mane stand up straighter, a rabid, snarling kind of scream so perfect and so pure she wonders if it will ever learn how to stop. She is so startled by it she does not even have the good sense to ready the spear at her side. But something - something more than surprise, even - holds her in place a few yards away, utterly still and totally in awe.

Marisol is hearing the scream she has held in for years.

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