I wish I could remember better how it all went down. How exactly the chill mountain air felt in my lungs. What exactly it felt like, magic in my bones like too much soul for one body to bear. The exact words the mountain said to me. What I remember keenly is how I felt after. All the magic wrung from my blood. A terrible sense of loss.
If I did not have my sister and the wolf pups to distract me, I might have cried. Instead there was just a dull ache in my mind and something akin to the itch of a phantom limb. Magic was a greedy thing and it always, always wanted more of me.
When Aspara leaned into me with a whimper, I became angry. I hated that magic could use us like this. I hated that anything could hurt us. I wanted to turn my broken heart into a weapon but all it did was tear at the inside of my chest. All I could do was be there, as I always was. As we would always be, through everything.
“They will eat mice and cats and hares. When they’re older, elk and deer and demons. Angels too, probably.” I don’t know how I knew but I did, I did, I did. I felt it in the way my warmth seeped into the cold flesh of the pup nestled against me. I read it in the thick, wavy down of his fur. I knew it as sure as I knew the back of my eyelids, and how the sun shone an angry red-orange through them.
It was magic that we did tonight. It was real magic, nothing at all like the games we played.
It was so much better.
I settled into the growing warmth of sister and Furfur-- I don’t remember if I knew, then, that was his name, or if it came to me upon waking-- and Foras, and as the smell of death warmed to the smell of life, I fell into the deep, dreamless sleep of the bone-tired.
@Avesta
