Falls

It wasn’t so easy, this mess of hiding the brilliance of an ever lightening body, or so it had felt over the years of following her glenna. Her color had been rich and golden as honey with the sun shon through it once, but that was before the shedding out of that downy fluff into the glistening hide she sported now.

Her mother had said she would be beautiful, but always it was to her rolled eyes, the disbelieving not coming from self-loathing or a lack of self-worth -- but instead a true appreciation for nature’s fineness. She had not often bothered to look at herself, did not bother to know if it were true or simply a mother’s instinctual affection, it had not mattered.

She reveled instead in outside beauties; of dandelions that were so determined to shine despite the world’s low regard and the briar roses that hung close to trees and only sparingly deigned to grace the sight of the sun through their boughs.

glenna had left that life behind, though, and had almost left her too, though she did not blame her. A seer was always bound to her instincts, after all, or else why would anyone else believe their tellings?

So the child of honey and moonflower followed, weaned not months before and so sure of the safety of the world that she did not doubt her choice. Glenna, after all, would never turn her away if she were to come running from some beast in the wilds, right?

Now it is two years after; she had grown, she had become the beauty her mother foresaw, and she had spent so much time covering it up that the truth of it had been lost on her all but entirely. Slender legs pick a cautious, quiet path about a half an hour behind her beloved glenna, following sign and following the breeze that blew to her benefit this day. The mud meant to hide the glistening sheen of her coat (when clean of the travel dirt and intentionally applied earth) beginning to itch ever so gently so that she swings that lovely head back to scratch at her jaw with a hind hoof, feathers dancing as she does so.

Then she looks out and on, ahead and forwards as ever glenna wished till this place called her further in, out across a strait and back ashore onto an island.

The rush of a waterfall is what distracts her now, so close to catching up to her ever-beloved. The sound of it bringing a yearning to cleanse the salt and later applied earth for just a little while - forgetting in that moment how light gleamed from her when she was cleaned and uncareful. Truly it was not vanity, only comfort, she sought as she stepped beneath the wall of falling water and shook and shook herself until she was cleared of the awful, necessary, debris.