Saphira turned away from flames. They were inherently opposite to her being, to everything she was made from and hoped and didn’t hope to return to. They heated the metal which bound her. They destroyed. They meant death. So, it should come as no surprise that she shied away from the bonfire, without knowing exactly what it was for.
She was not one for asking strangers much of anything, but she’d had some wine, and it came to pass that she did ask someone about the bonfire, and she laughed in their face. ”No one is listening,” she cackled, ”and no one ever will be.” But it hurt her to say so, and to think so, as it always did, because she was always hurting, as this was what she believed. Better to be a cynic than to be fooled, she declared, somewhere in silence. Who truly wishes to be miserable but those who invite misery upon themselves?
And so she could not be convinced to step forward and relieve some heavy grief. It could not be freed so simply. She had been cursed - obviously - and from her coat flaked bits of salt, as if she were a walking bit of dried-up sea. Fire had no place being near her, she would shrivel up like a fish on the rocks and die, finally die. And what if - no, no, no. You had your chance and blew it. Try again.
She thought and said all these things, these many many things, but she stood and watched the bonfire anyway, and kept her drink close to her hip. A deep sense of longing pervaded her.
@Katherine || Eldorado || whoever you want || she’s mostly got her summer coat, which is black and should be lit red by the flames, but she’ll be growing in a bit of her winter coat. Her tats are visible too.
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.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
She doesn’t know why she said what she said. It just...slipped out, all hurt and anger and fear. She doesn’t want to be alone. She wants somebody to be listening. Only a few people looked at her, expressions mixed with disappointment and disgust. “So sad,” someone whispered. But then someone else starts talking, and all of Saphira's bitterness is returned in kind. “You know who else isn’t listening? Them. Not to you, anyway. Even though nobody is listening, they’re desperate to believe that someone is.”
The summer-sleek mare can only stare at the girl. Saphira wasn’t like this when she was younger; she still remembered feelings like joy and pleasure. Before her stands a filly. And Saphira is glad to take the stinger of Charlie’s words into her mouth and swallow. “You know, then. That they cry to deaf ears. Because they are weak. Like children,” and she is talking to a child, but she doesn’t say or even think “like you,” because she is desperate, she is clinging to her hatred and it is with this desperation that she asks a child: Do you believe we are alone in this universe?
“You are never too young to realize that no one will pick you up when you fall from your nest. It is more likely that they will clip your wings.” She doesn’t even think about how this girl has wings, doesn’t even see them; she thinks only about being a gull over a churning ocean made of souls. A lone bird might fly over the ocean, circling, circling, and Saphira will watch and say: I know. I know.
The woman looks at Charlie and she feels like they are both being seen, for the first time in a long time. The girl has no trouble standing out, has no trouble getting noticed. She is loud, and curious, and comfortable with strangers. She has made many acquaintances in her years of being alone. But not many friends.
“I know,” she agrees, vermilion eyes taking in the equines around them who toss their papers into the flames. “They hope for their problems to be miraculously fixed, by the gods, probably. By someone. But not by themselves.”
Charlie has heard what the gods can do, what they have done. If anyone is expecting Tempus, or Vespera, or whoever else to make their problems go away, they are going to be disappointed. Why should she hope for something to change between her mother and herself, when it was her mother who took off for months at a time? Then, when she came home she buried herself in bars. Everything and anything else was always more important than her daughter.
She grits her teeth, and can feel Indy nestling closer to her neck as the osprey shares in her discomfort. The girl releases a breath, at last. “You’re right. You are never too young.” Charlie wants to say I wasn’t even a year old, when I was abandoned. Forgotten.
She wants to say that she wasn’t even a year old when her world fell apart and she was left to pick it up piece by piece, all by herself. Nobody has ever been there for her, and a fire isn’t going to fix that now.
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