little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.
the Indian's axed your scalp.
It is (of course it is) her first instinct to disagree with him - why, oh why, couldn’t any answers be easy? It had all seemed simple enough in her foalhood - but instead she only smiles, a fleeting little crescent moon. It is much like his, from moments ago, and like it, hers vanishes unnoticed.
Maybe the real trick was to stop asking those questions. Again she thinks of being a child, and the word Why always tripping off her tongue, and how her parents finally grew impatient with it. The answers went from truths to guesses to chastisements to nothing at all, until she finally stopped asking, and now she wonders - why shouldn’t it be the same way with the universe, with her own god?
Why does this island exist?
Why does it feel like danger and beauty both?
Why was Raum allowed to take over, to starve the people of the desert, to slaughter their queen?
Why was he allowed to win?
Why, why, why?
No answer, unless you could find one in starlight and frogsong. Maybe Ipomoea could. Elif can’t. And sometimes she feels so tired of trying.
But they are here, and there is magic, and it’s enough for now to just be. Her newfound companion says over there and she turns her sharp-angled head to look, peering through the almost-darkness, making nothing out but a thicker black beyond the blue-lined leaves.
“Patience has never been my strong suit,” she says, already following after him, eager and apprehensive at once. She keeps her wings in tight, asks the wind around them to hush so they might hear and see and know whatever stirs the leaves is not the breeze.
There is something almost reverent in the appaloosa and she tries to echo it, keeping quiet, careful of each placement of hoof, green eyes wide and roving.
And she swallows her questions, all those that start with what and why and how, even when a rasping, raking, rumbling sound rises up out of the darkness ahead of them.
@Ipomoea lil shorty for ya
