my soul is in the sky
Rae didn’t actively avoid this place, it simply wasn’t home. Home was the sky, and in this, the two mares are alike though they don’t yet know it. Even now, with her feet back on the ground of her birth place, it doesn’t feel like home. She’d been raised, briefly, in the Jungle by a mare that was more sister than mother (though Draconis had tried, and Rae will always be thankful for that). It’s not as if she can return to the Jungle, to the place her mother had loved so dearly. Not that she particularly mourns a place she hardly knew, a place where the trees obscured the sky. No, Rae would be better suited to call a mountain her home, to live touching the sky always and forever, if she were to live anywhere for long.
Instead, she’s simply been lingering in the meadow, where the sky is open and vast and beautiful above her despite the cold. Her coat is long enough to keep her warm, though she calls warmer air to her easily when she finds herself too cold out here in the open elements. The day is clear though, warm enough that all the snow has melted leaving only mud in its wake. It is the type of day where it’s very hard to miss a bird falling out of the air only to land on the ground as a horse.
Yes, she sees. Why? Probably because she pays more attention to the birds around her than the horses. Rae cannot shift, but she can commune with the animals that call the sky their home. Technically, she could control them, though she has never felt the desire nor the need to do so. No, she simply asked, and they came. In the dead of winter though, there are few birds around, and she is keenly aware of the raven that is not really a raven. She knows this before the raven shifts because she cannot feel it as she can feel the other birds around (there are a few that persist through the colder months of Beqanna). So of course she’d been curious, paying attention, when the bird became a mare.
Rae moves toward the mare now, having been a decent distance away (though close enough to have spotted a raven in the tree). As she walks, she calls to the few other birds nearby, reaching out a tendril of magic until she finds a little snow bunting eager to answer. The little bird chirps, taking to the air to wing itself between the two mares for a moment before settling on the top of Rae’s head, nestling into her mane right between her ears. She grins, not having suggested the landing spot but perfectly happy to leave her new friend right there. Perhaps it’s pleasantly warm. “Hello,” she says before coming to a stop near the other mare.
She makes no comment about the whole shifting thing. What would she say? “I saw you were a raven and that’s awesome so here I am because I like sky things too,” sounds absolutely ridiculous. The bird sitting on her head is probably enough of a conversation starter, should the other mare be interested in talking about such things. “I’m Rae,” she says, and nothing more.
rae
Hi I couldn't resist because they seem like they could be friends.