[P] the world we close our eyes to see

[Samaira]

hold me on your heart as the brave sea holds the foam

It’s the first time she’s been to sea, since a fair, early spring morning where the light had reflected off the water and the low clouds. It is early summer, now, more than year later and the water is deep and beryl and the sun is low and the sky is soft and blue. There is a warmth to the air that does not seem to reach her, though it nestles itself against her skin.

The sea rolls up the beach to kiss at her hooves, still cold to the touch, and she thinks of all the equines she has met and spoken to on these sands. Samaira wonders if the water remembers them as she does, just the way she does.

The doctor remembers when she could have spent endless days beside the sea, or upon the cliffs near the court, listening to the water rush and crash and sing. Now, she spends all of her days in the hospital, beneath the shadow of the swamp’s thick canopy of trees.

Samaira throws herself into her work and does it with great care, but she does it with great force as well.

The busier she is, the less she thinks about it all.

Not her woeful heart, nor her wings which lay against her sides unused.

Alaunus passes above her, his shadow casting over the ground as he glides on a heavy breeze. It plays in her hair and pulls free a petal from the flowers at her crown, carrying it down the shore. Samaira’s moon silver eyes do not leave the sea, as the tide slowly moves further and further in.

She’s not sure how long she’s stood there, when Alaunus’ voice bridges that gap between their minds. “Someone is coming,” are his words, and the pegasus lifts her head and turns to look, but she cannot believe what she is seeing. Surely, she must have fallen asleep there, by the ocean, and now this is all some trick her mind is playing on her.

There, clear as the sunshine, walks a man with twilight skin. Toward her. Samaira barely manages to pull herself away from where she is standing, barely manages to take one step, and then two. She can see the star shine flecked across his back the closer she gets, the night shade of his eyes.

Nothing feels real, when she stops in front of him and says, “Are you a dream?”

take me far away to the hills that hide your home

⚕ | @Asterion ahhhhh