Her body feels so heavy. It feels heavy as a stone tied to her bird-hollow wings. It feels like a sea tied to the sky of her, dragging each lingering cloud of her lost hope down, down, down past the horizon. She feels like the moon carved out into sickles, a star carved out into darkness, a comet tossed into the atmosphere to crash through a forest. And when she looks at the mare, and feels the touch of her nose like another stone kiss tied to a cluster of her feathers, Warset wonders if anything in this world feels light as a will-o-the-wisp.
Warset tilts her head at the mare and there is no ‘horse’ in the look, no mortal, no thing that knows the taste of the sea. Although she thinks (perhaps between one blink and the next) of the brined taste of a black knot between her lips when she plucked seaweed from it-- but can cannot imagine such a thing stealing a single thing from a star.
The sea, Warset thinks, is only a thing to spit out and swim in. Tides are for watching and she cannot imagine a world but this one, as full as it is with heavy things, in which a pegasus might be unable to shake the salt from her wings and fly from any cage the dark-waters might create. “Perhaps then,” she speaks as steps close enough to drop down to tilt an ear to the mare’s heart beating in her chest, “you should take the heart from the sea to replace the one that you lost.”
Because she wonders, when she lifts her head back up once the mare’s heartbeat is ringing in her ears like a sea caught in the cage of a pegasus, how anything can live without a heart. They are not stars, she thinks, and so these frail and mortal forms need hearts to fill the hole fire has left behind.
“I have lost everything that made me not weak. There is nothing of this that I would miss if it was gone.” And when she lifts her wings, wide enough that the sun halos around them as she blots out the light, even those prayers of light seem so frail and fragile a thing. This flight, her look says, is the flight of clouds with stones in their mist bellies.
It is no flight, no freedom, to regret the loss of.
@
