[P] o'er his heart a shadow fell [festival]

[Charlotte]

titanium and wildfire

The cliff-top is lined with bonfires, one after the other after the other. So many that Charlie can feel the heat even from a distance. So many that it lights the sky even from the sea. She wanders past several of the fires, each one seemingly more crowded than the last, until finally the lined up equines seem to become more of a lingering presence.

The young pegasus stops before the dancing flames of the quieter bonfire, her bonded perched upon her croup. Their fire eyes stare into the blaze, turning them red and orange in the light. Charlie doesn’t carry a slip of paper nor a letter in her grasp. To be honest, she felt silly sitting down at a desk and writing out her problems just to watch them burn up in a fire.

A fire is not going to bring back her missing father, nor fix her relationship with her absentee mother. A fire is not going to magically make her less alone in the world, after practically fending for herself since the moment she was weaned. Now, the blue roan girl is a season and a half shy of two years old and preparing to move into the Halcyon’s barracks.

It’s the only place she’s ever felt like she belongs, other than in the sky.

Other than on the sea.

As she watches, the smoke and the flames seem to take a familiar shape. The faded puncture wounds about her neck begin to itch and burn, despite them being long healed over. She has to be imagining this, surely. But the shifting form of curling horns, sharpened teeth and blood-red eyes has been on her mind almost every day since that encounter nearly a year ago.

She had been just a girl then. Hopeful, wild-hearted, eager, still learning how to land without stumbling. She hadn’t yet realized the hard truth of the way things were. That the way she lived her life wasn’t normal, typical. That most foals don’t grow up wild without any direction or guidance. But Charlie remembers when she’d been pulled into the sea by that wave, and how that woman, with her sharp, sharp teeth (sharp like Marisol’s, though she tries to hide them. Sharp like Anandi’s, who doesn’t) had dragged her from the current and helped her back to the surface.

A part of her had wanted to stay. Even then.

And now?

A flash of black and red catches Charlie’s attention and she turns away from the face in the flames and the smoke. Her heart skips a beat, her pulse jumping in equal parts apprehension and hopefulness. But the woman she finds standing there has eyes blue like the sea and hair white like salt. The pegasus finds herself more disappointed than she’d care to admit.

“You know who else isn’t listening?” she says, looking at the woman, who upon closer inspection, seems to be marked all over with tattoos. “Them,” Charlie gestures vaguely to the equines gathered around all the bonfires, “Not to you, anyway. Even though nobody is listening, they’re desperate to believe that someone is.”

She glances back once, at the flames, but the shapes are all gone. The bitterness is sharp and black on her tongue, and sounds too harsh coming from someone still so young. Yet, there is maybe a small part of her that wishes someone were. That perhaps, writing her problems on a slip of paper and releasing it into a fire would fix all of her troubles.

@Saphira rip my girl

☸