the sun shines low and red across the water,
Foras notices the girl running down the restless shore long before Avesta does. He watches her steps, her wings, and something in his dark, feral heart screams deer. If the sea wasn't nipping at the tracks she's leaving in the sand, Foras thinks that maybe he would have given chase (if only to see how fast, how fleet, how quickly she might run). He's too distracted with the thoughts and the blood rushing winter quick through his young belly, to warn his unicorn that something other than the storm is rushing towards her.
Avesta is too distracted wit the way the white-crests of the waves look like shooting stars racing across the bottom of the dark cloud. She's wishing upon each one just before it dissolves back into the sea. And it's not until she reaches her seventh, wild, youthful wish that she notices the bone and gold girl. She inhales and it's sharp and cold, and her eyes sting to see all that white after seeing nothing more than flashes of it across the black.
The shore sighs beneath her hooves as she turns towards her. Their prints on the sand look a little like a moon-chart-- sickle to wishing moons, to bloating moons, and back to sickle before the sea eats them. Avesta's horn paints a black arrow through what the sea leaves behind. It's long and sharp and looks like it wants to fly away from her delicate brow to another world. “Sometimes my mother tells me it did.” She whispers and it's like another distant storm falling from her lips, all wave on sand, and sand on shell. It feels like a secret on her tongue that she's not supposed to understand yet.
Avesta almost wants to say, sometimes I think it's calling me back. But she doesn't know which words to give to this ache in her that blooms each time the water dashes itself to death on the dark, gray planes of her cheeks. Instead she only steps closer, brushes her nose against the girl's cheek and whispers, “You look like a flower that decided it needed no roots and only wind.” And when she pulls away the space between them doesn't feel like it fits between two girls anymore. It feels more like that place between the end of the sea and the beginnings of the sky.
She decides she doesn't enjoy the feeling of it, the weight, the way it makes her forget how much her soul loves the lightning, and the thunder, and the wave-wishes drowning in the water. The silk and pearls flutter against her neck, like butterflies caught in her mane, although they do not flutter in quite the same way the wind is howling. The touch of it makes her pulls away and look back to the sea.
Another bolt of lighting sizzles through the black clouds, hot and bright and Avesta tells herself not to blink against the sting of it. “Who are you?” And this time she does not look back at the bone-white girl stained in golden (like molten fire caught on skin). Avesta looks only at the sea with a hunger in her gaze that was not there a moment before.
Foras, up on the cliff, has the same look in his arctic eyes.
@Aster
