"Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt hollow and empty and aching.”
If there is a roof to this world, if there is a place where it all started molecule by molecule, I feel like I am standing it on. There are a hundred different pathways running out from my hooves like rivers fat with whitewater. Each races towards the horizon, and the sea, and I cannot tell where each ends and where the nothing beyond does. And yet, as I feel like I'm standing on the roof of the world, there is nothing of fear rolling around in the walls of my soul.
There is only purpose, and war, and fury.
I wonder when I started feeling less like a mother and more like a god. I wonder--
The sounds of Illu's voice shakes me loose from my wondering. The firelight makes my eyes sting when I realize I had been staring at it too long, I'm always looking at fire now and wondering, wondering, wondering if the world is a phoenix or a bit of dried, ancient wood. “Illu.” Her name sounds the same way it always has on my tongue, like home, like survival, like a promise I suddenly want to give her.
I remember the way she was brought her. I remember the worry in that stallion's voice, the way he talked about his world being torn apart. I remember feeling sorrow, and pity, and want. Even in the middle of a war I remember it all.
Will she want me to take her world too, will she want to go home when she learns what terrible thing I'm going to do?
The floors turns to marble around me without me ever making the conscious choice to change it. The magic in my blood is always doing that now, changing the world, remaking it like I'm a god that cannot help this vicious need to creature. Oh I hope the word is a phoenix.
I look at her and my eyes and heart ache like I'm dying instead of resting in a fake serenity by the fire.“Join me.” And for the first time, the very first time, my words to her are not lifted into the softness of a request.
This time I'm not asking.
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