Falls

The skim of lips across her dark brown cheek, the soft murmur of her companion’s voice. Iris could not recall the last time that she’d woken feeling so warm and safe and happy. And though both the predawn chill and the retreat of her dreams robbed the novitiate Vulcan of that warmth, they could not banish the lightness of both her thoughts and her heart. Relief, she might have explained it if pressed to do so. Relief at Adelheid’s return; at a respite from endless solitude and sorrow. But this went deeper than the end to her grief and loneliness. This was more than the absence of the worries that had plagued her while the other woman was gone. Rising into a stand on slender white legs that were still wooden from sleep, she shook out her sleep-tousled mane and fell into step behind the General. Feeling her the familiar flutter in her belly, and a heat unfurling in the cavity of her chest.

Feeling love that both matched and surpassed anything her heart had ever experienced before.

Adelheid led her down paths that were familiar, paths that the blanketed mare had explored countless times. Yet somehow the soft earth felt different beneath her hooves this time, and the landmarks were as new as the first time that she’d seen them. Following the dark shadow of her companion silently, Iris contemplated the reason for this shift. The Peak had not changed in any significant way— at least, not since the previous day— but it felt different. It felt...friendlier, somehow, less forbidding. It felt like a place where she might truly belong, if not the home that she had ever imagined for herself. But all too soon they had left the mountains behind them, pushing on through the grey gloom of dawn while a pang of sadness squeezed at her heart…

...and then transformed into one of joy at the clearing that greeted them beyond the thinning trees.

For a few moments, the seal-brown woman was held in thrall by the beauty of Adelheid’s place, motionless save the flit of her chocolate gaze. She had visited the Falls that lay further south with her sister, and thought them a wonder. But they were nothing to the radiance of their miniature counterpart, nothing to the beads dew that glittered like stars cast across the glade. This place felt magical somehow, sacred. So much that when the tall black mare stepped forward, Iris inhaled sharply at the way the droplets scattered beneath her hooves. Then the General began to speak, and she forgot everything else— listening so earnestly, so desperately that even a world as beautiful as this one seemed to fade from existence.

The shard of her past that Adelheid shared could not help but to awaken the spotted mare’s own memories, filling her with a bittersweet combination of joy and grief. In the brief youth they’d shared, she and Eve had looked at the world through similar eyes. Eyes that were innocent, eyes that were blind to darkness and saw only beauty. Chest tight, Iris realized that she had not looked at anything the same way since, since… But now there was Adelheid, whom she’d known to be both harsh and gentle, cruel and kind, and she saw only the good in her. And yielding to the gravity of her companion gaze with a couple steps forward of her own, Gnome’s daughter melted into the brush of the other’s skin with a sigh that was half-sob.

“Eve and I, we— we would have loved to have a place like this as children. But there wasn’t much magic to be found in the Prairie, so we made our own.” Her voice faded in volume as she spoke, dropping from murmur to whisper and then into silence. After a moment, however, she picked up where she had left off, speaking softly but audibly. “Like— like you and I, Adelheid. I don’t think either of us even believed in magic anymore, but here we are.”