THEN I FEEL THE STORM AND AM VIBRANT LIKE THE SEA
This is how she imagines a god must sound:
The scrambling of hooves against glass that yearns to shadow; the yawning maw of a bear; the sound of the wind dusting across flower petals so, so lightly. Yes. His laughter must be the infectious, riotous noise of pandemonium, of souls striving at their fullest toward an unreachable end.
It is the asking in the feverish pounding of her heart:
Is this not the most alive you have ever been?
Boudika runs forever. From her peripherals she sees the shifting reflection of her copper-and-ebony body. She sees the disembodied way her legs and head appear to float above the black of her barrel, her chest, her haunches. She is running into infinity, and beyond. She is running, and running, and running, and what she hears is the striving of her heart, her ravenous yearning, what favour would you ask a god until at last the relic is there, bright and like the sun. Time for her seems still, stiller even then when the sun had held disobediently in the sky and the world froze. Boudika watches the relic as though through some great and terrible tunnel, as though running headlong toward oblivion, and she watches it until at last nothing blooms into something, a something as red as blood, and she watches transfixed as the first petal falls—
Boudika is there. She is standing in front of the relic, or nearly so. A line of flower petals that surround the relic and they lay there, brighter and more rich than arterial blood. To Boudika, they nearly pulse, as though each petal is its own small heart, beating, beating, as her own heart beats. She watches them for a moment, transfixed—and she does not know whether to press forward, or to watch.
In her peripherals, again, she sees she is not alone. Of course Boudika would not be the only equine to make it through the fray and choose to run across the endless plain of black glass. There is something writhing in her stomach and she wonders briefly, terribly, if this is what it would feel like to shed her skin and become something else.
She does not step forward. Not yet.
Boudika chooses option two if this isn't too late... it's 12:34 o:
