little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
She should have been less surprised, less wary - gifts of magic from the gods seemed to be growing less rare, after all. She herself had been born with an affinity for the wind, and could raise it (not much, just a breeze, enough to tug at her hair and stir up the sand in patterns at her feet) with a whisper or a thought. Why should this man and the way he walks like a gardener through the forest be any stranger? Perhaps only because he is unknown.
“Solterra,” she answers, uncharacteristically soft, and the same sadness colors her voice, turning its tone foreign even to her. She feels old, then, older than she should, older than she is.
It passes, when he begins to speak of cacti, and the eagerness of his voice (reminding her of Mateo, in all its earnestness and sincerity, and that alone is almost enough to coax her forward another couple steps) draws a smile from her lips. “I should hope they don’t,” she says, and flicks her ears back and wrinkles her nose, imaging all the plant life (what there was) of her home as hot-headed and fierce as the horses there.
No; it would be a worse world if the plants had the same ambition as the people.
He looks up to the stars and she steals the moment to study him further, the dark glint of his eyes, the red of his skin like rubies in the dark, the slender curve of his throat. And then down, where the vines still reach out as though comforting him (or themselves) with touch, where she at last noticed the wings on his feet. Then Elif is colored again by surprise, for those are the most curious things of all -
But Po is speaking again, and she glances up to catch his eye, not wanting to be rude. (Yet she still wants to ask What are they for? Doesn’t it make you sadder, to have them and still not fly? Or can you fly?) Now it is her turn to look up at the stars, thoughtful, though it isn’t long at all before she’s shrugging a shoulder and looking back at him. “I’m not sure if anywhere does. I used to think answers were easier to come by.”
She wants to ask him what he is looking for, and wants to tell him the same - but something about it feels like wishing on a shooting star, or blowing out a candle at the death of one year and the birth of another. The kind of thing where sharing it might ruin it, or weaken it, or keep it from coming true.
Elif knows it is superstitious nonsense, and shifts her wings against her sides like a self-reprimand. Still, she says nothing of what she hopes to find. It is unlikely, anyway, that Solterra’s salvation could be found on an island that shouldn’t exist.
Instead she steps forward again, light as a cat, until they are nearly face to face and she can make out each petal and vein of leaf in the blue light of the stars. “But there must be some things worth finding,” she says, then nods in the direction Po came from. “Is there anything that way? I haven’t found much in my direction.” The pegasus thinks of what he has said, and of the way even the night-birds and insects seem to be gathering closer to him, now, faintly through the branches and the leaves, as though he is the moon they all orbit. “But maybe I wasn’t looking for the right things,” she adds, and grins at him.
@Ipomoea
