Warset knows better than to stray too close to the silken tents of shed-stars with their gazes heavy with a religion they know far, far too little of. In their eyes, she knows, they’ll see the truth of it and some (she’s learned the hard way) will seek to drink that magic straight from her heart. And so she rolls past them like a stone, her eyes tucked behind the protective shroud of hair and curled forward wings.
She tries not to feel the gazes that linger on her like knives instead of looks (and she tries not to tremble in both fear and a vicious sort of hate).
Onward she rolls, head tucked low, until the meadow opens up into the song and the joyous laughter of children painting themselves in a mess of colors. Warset tries to see the stories in their art, she tries to turn color and shape into something more like a mockery of star song. All she can see is the brittle chaos of mortality and the joy of a thing she does not know how to be.
But she wants to learn, desperately so.
Her eyes unfold from the darkness of lock and wing. They shine far from the vicious gazes of stars shed instead of lost. Each of her steps is less hesitant than the last as she walks towards the music and colors caught in buckets instead of rainbows. And when she pauses before the stallion singing a ballad her head tilts like a leopard at a hare snarling instead of rearing.
Teach me, every inch of her lost heart cries in between the silence of sonnets.
Her hoof dips into a bucket of blood-red paint (of course she’s chosen the color of mortal blood). And when she draws lines of red across the grass she does not understand the strange look the children give her as she stumbles through this mockery of living, and healing, and looking up to see sun instead of cave-wall and winter frost.
Warset does not join the stallion in song even when her brittle and broken heart laments against the silence in her soul.
@Azrael
