little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
She is following a trail of flowers and vines, thick and blooming and scenting the air although it is night and the air is cool and there is only starlight to coax out the petals and leaves. The scent of another horse - of Novus - is faint below all these new smells, so different - almost overwhelming - from simple sand and wind and sweat and stone. Earlier, as she wandered alone, she had begun trying to count all the things utterly new to her, but she lost count around one hundred. It is difficult not to feel overwhelmed, cowed by awe.
Elif only finds it a little easier, in the night. The forest is dense and close, though lit will all manner of unnatural things; fungus and leaves that glow unearthly blue, and the shine of eyes that prickle like burrs along her skin and make her tuck her wings closer to her sides, and the calls out of the darkness of things hungry, or lonely, or glad.
The mare is not sure how to feel. She can’t quite manage fear, not after the last long weeks in Solterra, where the threat of violence hung thicker than smells of tumeric and paprika in the marketplace. But she is lonely, and entirely out of her depth, and when she whispers to the wind only the smallest streams of breezes comes to find her, to sing through her feathers, to cool her skin where such foreign humidity makes her sweat. Gladly she leans into its touch, and lets her eyes drift closed, and lifts her chin to the canopy -
where she finds the stars, and gasps. It almost makes her dizzy to look at, those maps of constellations printed on the leaves. Now she wanders more slowly, gaze up as though she walks below a mural in a chapel, stumbling over every other step. There is no hope for her to be secretive here, and so transfixed is she that she doesn’t realize there’s another figure ahead until it speaks.
Her first instinct is to freeze, to think of the whip coiled like a vine against her hip; but as her gaze falls to him it softens.
“It’s amazing,” she answers, and her voice, too, is hushed with childish wonder. “If a little disorienting. I -” she cuts off abruptly, as something dark twines around the man’s pale legs; it takes her a moment, particularly with the brief distraction of finding wings there, to see that they are flowers. Unaware of his magic, she takes a step back, falling again into shadow, feeling flighty and nervous as a fledgling bird.
“I think the island has a hold of you,” she says, and casts her green gaze pointedly to his legs.
@Ipomoea
