Juniper
what does her kingship accomplish?
Juniper is gun-smoke on the land, soft and silver and ethereal. There one minute, gone the next. Dove grey wings spread wide and fall, up and down, a cloud-dance through the endless blue that turns dark, dark, dark as night too quick. Even the stars cannot hold her, cannot pin the girl-goddess to the ground with their spearing needles of light. They might try and reach out, to embrace her, but she's lived in shadowed canopies too long to belong to any one brightness or any one darkness.
Green, green, pickadilly green eyes trace shapes and forms on the cliffside. They dip into crevices and great curves, fall softly like snowflakes on the whispers of bodies out for an evening stroll. Biting winds do not seem to bother moonlighting couples, so why should they bother the girl in the sky who rides them like a wild thing?
Her shadow is only a speck upon the land, her body is a silk ribbon teetering among the heavens, dancing in and out of cumulonimbus shadows like she's a girl just playing tag with the moon. Perhaps she is, in those moments of tinkling laughter that shakes like the stars. Or perhaps she is just a vision of her past an future selves - both there and not, something other and something real.
At last the night nips her nose, kisses eyelids that flutter down for but a moment. Striped mouth tips up and then down. Tightly her wings tuck, quickly her heart beats, and the girl plummets down, down, down. She is a rocket streaming in reverse, spinning and moving faster and faster so that her breath is the wind and her stomach is left somewhere up above.
The cliffs rise like a beast, hulking and large, corded with rock muscles that would tear her to pieces in an instant. But Juniper has never hit the ground since she learned to fly, never let it shred her wings or devour her skin. She left that to the earthlings, to mortals bound to the ground with weights upon their bones like the weights upon their brows.
At the last moment, she dives over the cliffside and settles gently to the sand, to the edge of the sea that makes her quake and shake at its vastness, at everything about it that is unknown to the girl of the swamps. Now, she does not look to the dark waters that go on until they curve at the edge of the world. No, the Priestess stares instead to the crevice that held the message pointing her South. Southward to an island with a riddle and a secret. So many mortal lives were full of secrets now, and she wonders if her swamps and fallen temples could swallow them all for an eternity.
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