For the light before and
after most indefinitely
after most indefinitely
It is between the milliseconds of a blink that it forms—
It does not presently occur to her that it might never have been there at all, catching the honeyed fall gloam in the fragmentary dusk of its glass bark, refracting it across the golden, shivering grass in splayed dapples of mauves, tangerines, pale pinks and deep blues. It does not cross her mind that its roots may have only just taken purchase in a vacancy of unsettled land. Casting a long, purplish shadow across her breastbone that had not been there before; that, just seconds prior, had opened like wanting hands to the last bit of heat radiating off a low sun. The vermillion flowers, genuflecting this way and that ‒ at once to the sun and then to the pale, nascent shade of the moon at her back ‒ and the quintillion tiny stars, rustling strangely as leaves do in a purl of chilled, preternatural breeze, are not newly bloomed things. They are ancient and venerable, had always been there and always will be.
She shifts, her long, silver-white hair trailing behind her, leaving yellowing speargrass prostrate in her wake.
Had she heard about this? Fabled thing, this numen of creation; of gods and goddess, for whom she has no names, no way to identify, though she can feel them, somehow, proffering this totem of themselves to her. Had she heard murmured tell of an argent groundswell; a sacred sapling made of Time? Certainly, she had not been privy to the nursery rhymes and bedtime stories, for hers were northerly things. Of badger’s blood and pine tar; ice and granite. An elephantine Mother and a leonine Father.
She stops just as her silver hooves meet the margin of gilded grass, clutches of dusky colour brushing the rosy-pink lips.
She feels foreign at this altar, all of a sudden. In a millisecond ‒ blink ‒ she knows once again the tawny meadowgrass that had come before, the idle swath of land not imposed upon by the monument of divinity, unknown. It calls her and repels her at once, for how many gods can she put her faith in? How many of their prayers can she take and settle in her breast like a seed in pink flesh? She exhales, turning her cheek to it, standing in the space between here and there, listening to the way those astral leaves speak.
It does not presently occur to her that it might never have been there at all, catching the honeyed fall gloam in the fragmentary dusk of its glass bark, refracting it across the golden, shivering grass in splayed dapples of mauves, tangerines, pale pinks and deep blues. It does not cross her mind that its roots may have only just taken purchase in a vacancy of unsettled land. Casting a long, purplish shadow across her breastbone that had not been there before; that, just seconds prior, had opened like wanting hands to the last bit of heat radiating off a low sun. The vermillion flowers, genuflecting this way and that ‒ at once to the sun and then to the pale, nascent shade of the moon at her back ‒ and the quintillion tiny stars, rustling strangely as leaves do in a purl of chilled, preternatural breeze, are not newly bloomed things. They are ancient and venerable, had always been there and always will be.
She shifts, her long, silver-white hair trailing behind her, leaving yellowing speargrass prostrate in her wake.
Had she heard about this? Fabled thing, this numen of creation; of gods and goddess, for whom she has no names, no way to identify, though she can feel them, somehow, proffering this totem of themselves to her. Had she heard murmured tell of an argent groundswell; a sacred sapling made of Time? Certainly, she had not been privy to the nursery rhymes and bedtime stories, for hers were northerly things. Of badger’s blood and pine tar; ice and granite. An elephantine Mother and a leonine Father.
She stops just as her silver hooves meet the margin of gilded grass, clutches of dusky colour brushing the rosy-pink lips.
She feels foreign at this altar, all of a sudden. In a millisecond ‒ blink ‒ she knows once again the tawny meadowgrass that had come before, the idle swath of land not imposed upon by the monument of divinity, unknown. It calls her and repels her at once, for how many gods can she put her faith in? How many of their prayers can she take and settle in her breast like a seed in pink flesh? She exhales, turning her cheek to it, standing in the space between here and there, listening to the way those astral leaves speak.
***STAFF EDIT
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