[P] the courage of stars;

[Florentine]

FLORENTINE

always one decision away from a totally different life

-- ♕ --


You taught me the courage of stars before you left.

If she closed her eyes, the sound of her broken wing upon the floor was not feather over wood at all, but a brush across a painted canvas. Such a thought, of vibrant colour and graceful lines, made something beautiful from a wing so terribly twisted. Could she dance? Move as if her body were the artist and her wing the brush and the wooden floor the canvas? Could she?
 
She does not know, so she tries. The girl moves to a rhythm of twilight and the chime of evening stars blinking awake to watch a girl move like a comet. Florentine twirls across the floor – and watch how her wing swirls too! Dust lifts from the floor where gilded feathers drift. The lazy grey clouds twine with her dancing feet and rises like up, up, up as glittering stardust. No gravity could pull it down, not when the girl’s good wing reaches, reaches, as if ready to pluck the moon out from the sky.
 
Florentine still has not opened her eyes, for to open them is to see the way her wing does not straighten. To open her eyes is to see the way it hangs, twisted and wrong, like the fall leaves upon the tree. Does her wing also wait to fall like a leaf from the bough of her shoulder? She prays she might keep it.
 
Ah! She presses her eyes tighter still and dances, dances, dances. She begs for a queen who can make anything from nothing. Might then her falling petals (cascading like tears from her mane – for Flora’s eyes have already shed too many tears) turn to glitter and stars? Might they be filled with something other than grief and pain and worry? Might her wing turn straight and right again?
 
There is a music that fills her ears and it is the sound of hooves, the sound of laughter, the sound brushes and trees and twilight winds. The music draws a smile upon her gilded lips and on she dances, through the moonbeams falling from great lattice windows. The dust follows her like a veil and still Flora does not dare open her eyes. Down the hall, down the hall the slender girl dances listening to the walls that sing of her song and whisper of a wing upon wood.



@Lysander 

rallidae