“Hear those bells ringing deep in the soul.”
When did we start to find salvation in living as the wild things live?
My steps blend in with the doe's steps, my howl with the wraith wolves' howl, my rage with the snow griffin's driven deep into the barren mountains by the festivals of the mortals. I run with them as another shadow, another thing of flesh and bone driven by a hunger that nothing seems to soothe. All the things running in my blood (magic, salt-water, and motherhood) have made me as implacable as the moonlight when it's full on a clear night.
When did I start to settle into this world beyond civilization where I am the only thing that knows how brittle and frail poetry has become? Is it the aftereffects of the war, or the way that I don't know how to bend my thoughts and love into the shape of peace? Is it something deeper, something wrong with all the pieces that have melded together to create me?
Hurry. Fable's bellowing worry (a bugle roar to everyone else but me) cuts through the thoughts of my mind. I come to at the touch of his mind, discovering myself running with a family as mountain lions at the heels of a stag. The ground turns to diamonds around us as fear (fear of myself, my magic, the way the sea has made a monster of me) runs through my body quicker than the air pulling in and out of my lungs. I stumble as I often do now, the rocks echoing down the mountain side as I follow Fable's shadow towards whatever it is that is making his heart stutter in worry and ocean water start to drip from his jaw like a twisted form of tears. I do not ask him what it is.
He is one of the last things left in this world that I trust.
The stallion at first, is nothing more than a jagged spot of gold in a sea of white. He reminds me of a starfish caught in a tidal wave with no hope of finding stand or stone. He reminds me of Acton, of Lysander, of El Toro with the bloody art painted around his hooves and smeared like runes across the trees.
I close my eyes.
I inhale.
One. I am watching my first friend in this world bleed out upon my throat.
I exhale.
Two. I am telling a story to a stallion that I could have loved in another live. I am watching him leave.
My heart stutters in my chest.
Three. Counting does nothing for me now. When did that happen? When did I forget?
“Stop.” I can hear the hush, hush, hush of the sea in my voice as I approach him. It's impossible now but I try to gentle my steps, bank the war in my gaze, tuck the scars of my body into the shadows were the snow-brightness will not turn them stark and grotesques. I try to become doe instead of wolf, blackbird instead of eagle.
I try to be soft. “Moving so much will only quicken your way to death.” If my horn is glimmering in the light like a sword I try not to notice the silver-sheen of it reflecting across the hollow planes of my face. I smile and it feels so strange to turn the dead leaves and the dead plants beneath the snow to healing blossoms as I follow him?
When did I start living as a wild thing instead of a empathetic heart struggling not to become the monster she must become to save the world from the darkest of the other monsters?
@August
