Juniper
“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.”
The world, she knows, is full of beautiful creatures and beautiful things, beautiful people who dance and smile and are ever so dazzling with their airs of mysteries hanging about them like fireflies on the horizon when dusk rolls around. She is a collector of these people, these places, these memories that sit in moving frames within her head, always twirling and dancing and writhing gaily as the woman who wears white like a morning gown dances over the skies.
She tumbles through them as a storm, rolling with the breeze, diving with the sparrows, floating as the clouds that pass overhead.
It is her home, expansive and unsullied, the last of the world left so unexplored. For the sea holds the kelpies and the earth claims those bound to it. Ah, but Juniper... She is one so fortunate to have her wings, dove-grey and lovely, to swoop and swirl, to dream upon and bask in the noontime light with. She is never meant to be bound to one thing, one person, one place. No, she looks at all with curved eyes, slanted in a coy smile that echoes down her skinny nose and on her broad lips. A perfect picture of freedom encased in an almost porcelain body of a woman who still looks, still acts, just like a girl.
She can no more deny herself the feel of the heavens than she can the water she drinks every day. Every body has needs, and hers craves the touch of another as much as it longs for the arms of her swamps and her brothers and sisters that would spiral about her, a den of vipers coiled tightly into a single entity until there was no beginning nor end, there simply was one. Vespera's priestess looks down unto the ocean that scares her, that turns her stomach leaden and her heart cold, that reigns ice upon her blood like acid from the sky. Today, it is restless like her hands that seek out another to touch, to hold, to whisper sweet nothings to over and over until they are lulled into her arms night after night.
Spiraling down, a predator landing, a sky snake at last on solid ground once more, the goddess-girl hears on the last vestiges of the wind, the voice of an angel fallen from her home. In a heap of blue and seaweed, upon the shoreline a distraught woman rises. Is she from the sea ? This father, whoever he is, is gone, and she is all that is left; just as when a hermit crab finds a new home, she is the empty shell that is a reminder of what was.
Juniper wonders at her origin, her beauty, but she wonders more of the woman herself. Her skin is slick with water, her eyes are wet with unshed tears. The priestess moves closer, careful to avoid the water's reaching grasp. "Vespera brought you here," the Pegasus whispers when close enough, long lashes fluttering down, half-lidded eyes hiding, and a smile on her lips. "She's chosen a beautiful one again - who are you, blue, crying waif? Speak to me, I shall not harm you, I will harm none whom Vespera has chosen."
