"upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty."
If Caine closed his eyes he knew it would take six or ten paces before the buffalo grass hardened to chalk bluffs, then three or five more before his hooves bore down on nothing but sky and the faint stench of sea. He would drop like a stone, gulls singing in his ear, and just before salt could season his lungs he would open his eyes and remember his wings and catch the updraft at its most unguarded.
In another version he would forget his wings and plummet to the end of the world.
He unsheathed his dagger from his hip and held it up to the sun; the rubies encrusted on the hilt glinted hungrily at him, as if remembering that before they had been jewel they had been blood. And blood still they could become, if only he pressed that sweet blade to flesh.
Instead he slipped it back inside its steel cocoon, as gently as he knew how, before tossing it towards the felled log he had scattered the rest of his belongings over carelessly. The wood was faintly rotten, tiny white death caps spilling out of every other orifice like teeth; a crow pecked doggedly at a worm rooting through the sun-softened bark.
If Caine was more poetic, he might have noticed the metaphor. But a sudden misplaced gale had thrown his mane into his eyes and robbed him of the chance—though impermanently, for he had poet's potential if not awareness, and most importantly he had the grief. By the law of statistics, there would come a day when they would meet in the middle.
But before—
Tangling at the foot of the log lay the limp, watery silk of his cloak, cold as the shadows it ate even as it cooked in the forge of high noon, ten thousand leagues above the sea. He had stripped it off because he had not wished to lose it—his belongings would never leave him behind, not of their own volition, and he returned their loyalty by treating them well.
Silently Caine noted the location of the dead log to the cliff's edge—southwest, twenty paces—and before his tongue could finish the palatal glide in 'twenty', his hooves had skipped off the edge.
He had grown to savor the feeling of falling.
What other feeling, butterflies in the stomach, heart in the mouth, was as easily anticipated and just as easily put away after it had served its time? A pump of blood to the brain, a burst of adrenaline through the arteries. That was all it was. The byproduct of fear, though absent of the emotion itself, was what Caine had learned to love.
A dull pain coursed through his body when he crashed through the surface of the water. Again he had failed to calibrate the exact strength now required by his leftover wings to lift his body—which had never felt so much a burden—and again the updraft had not been caught duly off guard. He spat seawater from his mouth and wiped salt from his eyes, before beginning the long swim to the shore.
When he saw the pegasus on the beach, dark against the white sand, he wondered if she had seen his plummet. It had not been elegant—if Caine had cared, he would have felt a tinge of embarrassment, right in the lining of the stomach.
But he did not, and so when he emerged from the black waters at last he took his time squeezing it from his hair, shaking it from his coat, coughing it from his lungs. On a whim he extracted the dream memory of a crow from his mind, a perfectly normal specimen save for the third eye and four wings and the inconvenience that his illusions all came out red as carnations on fire after he had bled out half of his blood on a white marble slab.
The crow perched unsteadily on his shoulder and pecked at his wet hair. Satisfied, Caine began his walk down the jagged strip of beach, back to the cliffs, where his path would invariably cross with the pegasus.
