It's not the opening of eyes
It's not the waking, it's the rising
Aster does not yet understand death, or the danger of it lurking always, a wolf with eyes on all of them.
It does not occur to her when the island begins to crumble and the whole world is chaos as she races for the long, sinuous curves of the sand-snake and the relic beyond it. She does not think of how her life might end there like a little match blown out. Even her fear is swallowed up by adrenaline, and the hammer of her heart is not a frightened thing but a hungry one.
And then the world is blurring, and something is pulling on her, an inside-outside kind of gravity like the air is trying to compress her down, down, into a dense bit of gold, into nothing at all. It feels a little like the portal their mother had cut open from nothingness, and vanished into, and Aster has only time to wonder if they are going home -
Then she blinks her eyes open, her mouth parted in a soundless cry, and finds herself standing at the far edge of the island, near the statue of the unicorn. The waves are already lapping at her feet, tasting her with cold salt tongues. And she is alone.
Not alone - there is a herd of horses like a chaotic flock, milling and wheeling and stamping and kicking, crowding one another into the sea, onto the bridge. The noise is worse than the relic, and maybe this is the true world, the one she had yet to be born to; she longs for the silence of the glade with her father and mother and brother and the sun as motionless as a mountain. But her brother is not here.
Now she screams his name. Now panic rises in her throat like a pheasant flushing up in the sky, wings spread wide to catch bullets and the dogs panting below. There is nothing otherworldly about her in this moment; she is only a girl, terrified, searching for her brother. And not finding him, and not finding him.
She should never have told him to go the other way, should never have let an inch open up between their shoulders. Aster must go back -
But she can’t. There is a wall of horses, of chests and legs and hooves, and they force her onward. Anytime she slips around one she’s met with another, and enough notice the filly even in their own fear to nudge her, push her, direct her toward the bridge. Even as she steps onto the slick obsidian it shifts and buckles under her feet, and still she tries to turn, wishing she could stop time, wishing she could fly, wishing Leonidas was there.
The air itself is rippling with noise, with motion. She is five yards out on the bridge, then ten, and the island is heaving and bucking, the waves are eating it, the trees are falling like sticks and every breath sears her lungs.
In the end it is run with the group or be trampled by it, and so with her legs burning and her attention always behind her Aster gives in. She doesn’t know where her brother is. Her only companions now are the acrid taste of fear and the burning beginning of rage - at the island, at the magic, at the other horses, at all the things that have torn Leonidas from her.
@na | poop post
STAFF EDIT***
@Aster has rolled a 3! They have been awarded +300 signos.
