|
The twilight, with its bruise-blue black and rose-gold light, has always made her feel like she is not alone in her own skin. It starts with the shimmer of the north star in the corner of her gaze, a flickering wish she has never been brave enough to hold between her teeth (not even at this hour when the wish is pale and weak against the dying light). Her not-alone skin starts to hum, and yearn, and carry her towards the roaring thunder of the fall.
She always returns to the fall, to the thunder of water, where the silence cannot live. Here there is something other than sorrow to fill the cracks of her skin and something other than hunger to pull at the stay threads of her heart like worn-out silk.
The thunder makes her eyes close and her lips start to vibrate with the humming notes of a song who has long since lost meaning, and word, and purpose. And she is so lost in the forgotten hum, that she does not hear the steady beat of his hooves (like stones tossed at a wall in a hurricane). But he is there, in the twilight, like a golden-eyed god, suddenly.
Some buried part of her knows she should startle away like a doe before a lion den. She has watched the other mares here gather around together and bare their teeth like mouths full of swords instead of teeth. She has heard them whisper, come away, come away, to the lost and the innocent.
She knows she should not wander closer. The mortal part of her, the wild part, knows that this is not the way to fill the cracks of her soul. This is not the way braid those strands of broken silk back together.
She knows.
But she moves closer anyway.
Aridela had not been brave enough to grab a wish between her teeth when the twilight first started to settle. And yet, when she stops beside him (shoulder to shoulder, rib-cage to rib-cage) there is still a hum hanging on her lips like shadow-water.
She tries to nicker. She tries to sound like a mare, like another thing made of flesh, and bone, and sorrow, trying to remember how to be real.
All the comes out in the low huff of a wolf seeing the first full moon of the year.
* * * * *
nothing can breathe in this space
|
|
