the sun shines low and red across the water,
Aspara's excitement washes over her like a summer tide, wild and warmer than she expected it to be. Part of her can almost imagine all the ancient words of the forest rushing through her too. She wonders what the mountain would make of them then. Would their bones would turn into root and sink deep, deep, deep into the center of the stone? “Are the stories as sad here?” She asks as she slows enough to brush her nose against a tall pine. The bark scratches at her and she begs it to say something, say anything. But around her the forest is quiet with the night-hush and she can hear only the wind, the bits of earth following her like hounds, and the whisper of their young hooves on dirt and root.
So she runs ahead and tries not to feel the way the trees press in the moment she runs by them, reaching as they always do for her sister. But when the roots trip her sister, like the rugs and the garden and everything else at home, Avesta slows and turns back towards the forest creeping in. All at once she is angry, and vicious, and so like a storm sea. Avesta wants to roar at the forest and tell it to wake up only to bury it deep in some black silence. She wants to yell that - is - enough to the world that is so eager to share stories it cares nothing for the flesh and bone it must break to be heard. But she says none of those things and only stomps at a root as her sister gathers herself back up to stand.
And that is when Avesta knows she'll never love the mountain like she loves the ocean. She inhales and it tastes like crisp forest air instead of brine and salt and freedom. Her young, wild heart aches with more longing than she has ever known.
The stone and the rose smack at her ankles, like roots, and she almost kicks at those bits of living mountain too. But then her sister is telling her that there are children dying somewhere deep in the black her her heart roars at the injustice of it all. So she starts to run again, but this time her hooves are harder against the roots (a warning) and her magic is wild (another warning). Rocks and dead-leaves and shed flowers are following along behind them like a third sister born of the stone instead of the sea.
On and on she runs and each step is more feral and more graceful than the last. Her body is learning the way of the night and the way of flesh, bone and blood. The new lungs in her chest are aching and screaming at her and still she runs in the way her mother has told her to run. Like the world is burning, like you are a ghost, like you are nothing but a unicorn full of fierce magic., her mother would sing to her, that is how you race the wind.
Avesta races the wind all the way to the top of the mountain where the trees have led them.
There is blood on the wind, or at least she thinks it is blood, sharp and metallic. It stings her aching lungs and her young body shivers with some ancient instinct that has been bred true into her. She wants to turn away, and run back to the sea, or the forest, or any place but this mountain stone and ice that hasn't learned to melt. All around the world smells like death, and she pauses only until she can feel her sister's shoulder brush against hers.
Her hooves carry her closer, although later she won't recall when she made the choice to keep going. The cave looms dark and endless ahead of them, yawning open like the great maw of a beast. “Is this where the mountain is telling you to go?” She asks just as all the bits of forest that followed them fall dead, and sleeping to the earth.
Avesta does not even notice the sound beneath the fierce, wild roaring of her ocean heart.
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