“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
She does not tell her daughter that the fireflies will die and are no more eternal than a falling star. But she thinks of it. She thinks about how it might feel, to watch a mortal heart learn for the first time both the blessings and curses of death. She wonders if it might soothe this restless itch, this violence without aim, that is rolling around in her heart filling all the places were the fire used to live.
Her tongue feels like a stone in her smile and she wants only to spit it out and watch it roll.
Instead she steps into the river and turns to watch the child (easier to this the instead of hers) move as awkwardly as before. The water feels cool as winter and it settles something broken and begging in her heart. “Me and my sisters were born knowing how to dance.” How strange it feels to her, to think of the time before the gods and of her sisters again.
How strange it is to feel nothing at the thought. Nothing at all.
There is only this world for her now. Only this cage she's desperate to break free off.
Another foot falls into the water. The current pulls at her hooves like gravity begging to pull her under and drop her into the bottom of the sea. “No.” She says because she does not know how to be kind, or motherly, or anything but a horse straining to run into the black woods like a wolf. Her ears flick again to the places where the fireflies have not gathered on the grass like flowers instead of living things waiting for death.
Her neck curls and her muscles quiver for the thrill.
“But you can practice more and perhaps you will become almost as good.” There is only one hoof on the shoreline now and a hundred stones waiting heavy on her tongue.
@Maeve
