THIS IS A POEM FOR MONSTER GIRLS WHO HAVE NO STARS IN THEIR SKIN ONLY FIRE AND IRON AND SCALES, FOR THE GIRLS WHO WALKED ALONE INTO FORESTS AND INTO NIGHTS DEEP AND DARK AND ENDLESS IN THEIR EVERLASTING LONELINESS, FOR THE GIRLS WHO DIDN’T EMERGE WITH A CROWN OF GOLD OR A PRINCE INSTEAD REMAINED AMIDST THE TREES AND REFORGED THEMSELVES ANEW
It is so unfair, that from a distance, she looked like him.
It must have had something to do with the clouds and their dishonest light, reflecting from the sea, thin and weak. It must have had something to do with the sea itself, as it delighted mercilessly in its own tricks. Whatever the reason, from a distance, she looked like him. As soon as Boudika saw the small horse in the large sea, there was something off, something misleading—but Boudika kept the warnings at bay, too elated by the possibility that she had found him. They were the same colour of grey, and far off, with the glare of the waves, her stripes could have been dapples. They could have been, in the same way the glancing light off the waves created streaks of light across surfaces. The stranger’s head was dark enough, and sharp enough, to be his. The mane lashed in the wind, white in reality and off-white from Boudika’s hopeful perception.
And the horse was in the water of the shore where she had lost him. How could it not be him? Especially after she had travelled so far to find him? Boudika had been hesitant to travel back to Solterra, where she had first awoken on Novus. There was an ongoing war, after all, with a crazed dictator—or so she had heard. Although it was not enough to make her afraid—how could a tyrant be worse than a war with creatures imperceivable, brilliant, brazen, horrific?—but it was enough to make her cautious. If Boudika were being honest, however, half her hesitation came from her fear that she would not find him; it came from the fear of knowing.
But she had come. And she had come very far, travelling for quite some time. Boudika had run most of the distance, until her muscles ached and her throat ached and her lungs ached. Perhaps she was driven by the need not only to find him, but something deeper—that she believed, somehow, by finding him, she could redeem herself. That is the sensation that welled in Boudika when she saw the mare, mistaking her for someone else. Boudika had found redemption; the promised comfort of her entire life surmounted in one individual, an individual capable of removing her condemnation and replacing it with forgiveness. He had forgiven her. Boudika had known that; he had said as much. But that forgiveness seemed only to exist as he existed; without Orestes’, the weight of her deeds was too much to bear.
Then, of course, there was the tantalising potential to… to be Made. Boudika felt fear at broaching the topic—what would he think, if she were to ask to join him?
That is why she ran, when she saw the mare. That is why she descended the dunes with the elation of a small child, bounding atop the sand to strike at the shoreline with powerful hooves and a streamlined body. Within her rhythmic movements the power of a cavalry charge existed, as though Boudika were the point of said charge, as though all that force, that energy, was now directed forward—
It’s him! It’s him! Boudika had last seen him when she thought she was drowning. When she believed she was dead. And it had been then, and only then, with life escaping her grasp and the darkness closing in, that she had realised how deeply she loved him, how intimately she craved him. It was only after months of separation that she realised her existence, her self, was connected irrevocably to his—
“Orestes—!”
Boudika’s yell cut off abruptly and she came to a stumbling, haphazard stop some thirty yards away.
Boudika was ashamed to admit it was not at first the mare’s appearance that betrayed her identity, but the circling vulture. Vultures were not of the sea—and the stark wrongness of it, the out-of-place nature of the avian… it at once made so much sense, and none at all. Boudika was sent reeling—and immediately an abrasive voice rose within her, are you really so much of a fool? In what storybook would she have found Orestes washed up upon the same shore she had lost him at? In what optimistic, bright, forgiving world? Not this one.
She cleared her throat awkwardly, attempting to disguise the blatant and raw emotion that had been so evident in her voice, her posture, her expression. “I thought you were someone else.” Boudika did not attempt to disguise her disappointment, and allowed the words to fall into a heavy silence afterward, broken only by the waves.
Then:
“Don’t you know, the water is dangerous?” Boudika said it like one would an insult. “There are water horses out there that will sweep you away in a song and eat you alive.”
Boudika herself barely touched the water and at her own words, she stepped out of it, onto the wet sand that sucked at her hooves. Her eyes flicked distrustfully toward the sea.
It had already betrayed her once today. But was that not its nature?
FOR THE GIRLS WHO HID IN THEIR BEDS AFRAID FOR THE MONSTERS LURKING NEAR WHO DREAMED OF SLAYING THE DRAGON ONLY TO FIND THAT THE DRAGON LIVES WITHIN, FOR THE GIRLS WHO AREN’T YOUR PRINCESSES THE GIRLS WHO WON’T BE ANYONE’S QUEEN WHO WILL NEVER HAVE A CROWN OR THRONE AND NOBODY TO WRITE THEIR STORIES DOWN, THIS IS FOR THE GIRLS YOU DON’T KNOW AND FOR ALL THE GIRLS YOU WILL KNOW WHO LEARN TO BREATHE FIRE OVER MIST
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