“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Between one step and the next, one exhale and the next, she turns her eyes to the forest darkness. Her ears prick towards it and her neck curls and arches like a wolf catching a bit of moon-song. Something in her soul cracks, and bleeds, and races through her in sharp shards of glass. Her soul strains towards the forest and that almost-most song like a desert-horse on the apex of a dune. The next step takes her away from the fireflies, and the music, and this pale mockery of fate. Her chains chime like a bell on the sea in a storm.
She's about to run, to dissolve into the darkness where that moon-song thrives and music is nothing more than a forgotten creation, when her daughter becomes a tangle of legs and too-many-words.“Of course I am sure.” She answers. And there are too many teeth in her smile when she turns her head from the forest and tries not to feel the sobbing ache of her soul.
She swallows her snarl.
“Almost.” Part of her, that straining part, had wanted to sing a denial instead of encouragement. “Move slower.” Her teeth tuck themselves back into her hollow smile as the music steadies and slows to something less jagged than before. Fireflies tuck themselves into her mane and perch on the loops of her chains. She becomes the moonlight and the moon-song the wolf in her is straining for.
The gaze she turns on her daughter is golden with the glow, bright enough to hide the sparks and embers of her bleeding soul. “Try again.” And this time her smile is almost soft, as she steps closer to the river and tells her heart that being chained is not the end.
@Maeve
