Warset had finally discovered the danger of the dark.
A week ago she had woken up in the grave of a fallen star. There had been miles of sand around and eons of stars above her head winking down a cool farewell. She had opened her wings to return to them, to say in the way of stardust and flight-feathers, I am not gone. But she had only claws that dung into the cooling sand and fur lifting in a ridge down her spine as the fear grew, and grew, and grew inside her bones. It grew until she consumed her, until she had run to the nest of a sand viper.
It stopped growing when her wildcat belly was full of blood and muscle.
Sleep had taken her then, the sleep of a predator comfortable in its violence. But it had been the sleep of a heartbroken star who no longer cared what became of the magic in her silver blood.
Now, walking beneath the sun that warms her skin, that has always known only the cold, moonlight spaces between stars and constellations, she cannot help but think there is a beauty in the dangers of the dark. That there is something to be said for the violence of her form when it's by way of tooth, claw, and pride that she can fill the gnawing hungry beast in her belly. Here she doesn't have the waters of the cosmos to slake her thirst.
Here, beneath the judgmental sun, she has only the quickness of her teeth and the cleverness of her feathers. Already an apple is sitting in her stomach, heavier with guilt instead of substance. She carries her wings close to her sides, trying to hide away the shine of her skin that suggests star-dust instead of sweat. There is the way she blinks long and slow, like she's deep in thought instead of fighting a war of fear in the space behind her eyes. Everything about her screams 'other', but Solterra is too full of life and sunlight to notice a star in their midst who looks at the sky too often and too long (as if she can see something behind the clouds that no one else can).
But when there is a step behind her at the same time a merchant yells too loudly, the feel of being overwhelmed sends her spinning around quick as a leopard. And there is in her gaze, silver and moonlit, a thing looking beyond the shadow of her wings that is not wholly horse, or cat, or sane.
Because a week ago the stars did not answer her back.
