my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
Sort of like the way snow sucks or ice slips, but utterly different, so unlike anything she has ever tried to move through before. It is not thick, tarry sand like on the shores of a beach but fine and dry, patterned by snake bellies and the small prints of paws and birds.
It had seemed like forever. The strange patterns on the ground, molded by wind, drew her in circles and straight lines and for a hour or so she strays entirely, following the queerest little rodent she has ever seen. Jumping like a cricket and then zipping away much faster than she could ever manage to keep up. She watches gazelles feed on impossibly tough roughage and thinks they must be distantly related to her whitetails, until something searing hot tugs at her mane and she turns to march on.
Sweat lathers her pale neck and aches for a breeze across the damp. She stops, squinting up at the sky. Empty and without the frills and jagged tips of trees, it seems more vast here than in the Meadow or the Forest—the sun is lowering, finally. The sky ringed with a mauve and soft pink, the palest imprints of stars beginning to show in the gathering dark. The ground at her hooves once shivered with hypnotic waves of heat (like water rippling through the air), but now the dunes are marked in purplish shadows, biting each one down the middle of their spines starkly.
What an odd and beautiful place.
The girl never met a crook in the land she did not find some charm in.
Not yet.
Endlessness, she knows, is not concept kept by nature, though sometimes it had seemed as she had been sucked into an arid loop in time. She glances behind her at the trail of hoofprints kept preserved by the stillness of the air. They will be filled in with soft sandstorms and she will find the end of this glittering wasteland—or maybe the middle. The exact spot where she father might be is the biggest missing piece of her puzzle but she knows to follow the scent of horse accrued over many, many years.
When, in the distance, she sees green against the reddening sand she knows she has found it. Found something.
She smells the gurgle of water and the sweetness of vegetation and follows it eagerly, shedding any pretense of decorum she had countless times reminded herself to keep as a visitor to a kingdom. She scrambles across the sand like a newborn, through the verdant patch she does not know holds something sacred (though, maybe a shiver runs down her spine like a friendly finger when she crosses the oak).
She drinks from the pool, sweeter than any water she has ever tasted. It runs down her throat and chin.
and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.
@[Vanquish]
also @[Tarnished] perhaps