It is impossible, in this moment, not to remember the first time. She had been alone with the night, so small and insignificant beneath the stars, scared and with something dangerously close to regret bubbling beneath her skin. She had not regretted the children, never Bright and Woolf, but the details, the how, the bits and pieces hurt like glass buried in her chest. And when they had turned to look on at her with cold, apathetic eyes, she had felt her heart blister and burn away. They had never needed her the way she had needed them, never, and it hurt in a way that didn’t make any sense at all. Even now she flinches with the memory, even now with sweat dampening her trembling flank.
But the air changes and the wind carries to her the scent of sand and sun and something that soothes her fraying nerves like a balm. Shahrizai. Her Shah. Through the tension and nerves, all those wild worries she feels like stones in her chest, she realizes it will be different this time. Even if this child doesn’t love her just as the twins hadn’t, with cold steel in their eyes and ice in their smiles, it would be okay. It would be okay.
She had family now.
By the time the sun had sunk low enough in the sky to hang like coin on the horizon, there were not two silhouettes curled together in the dying light, but three. The first was a colt, small and dark like his mother but for the pair of black and white wings hanging loosely around the curve of his ribs. She reached out instinctively, tracing her lips up his damp neck and along the impossibly delicate curve of his jaw. He turned his face to her then and his expression was soft and curious with no sign of anything cold glinting in the bottoms of his emerald eyes. Green, just like Ilka’s mother. She felt her heart stutter in her chest. The second was a filly, smaller than the colt but the same beautiful blue of her father. Ilka could feel the flutter of wings beneath her skin when she reached out to trace quiet kisses along the curve of her cheek.
With a quiet groan Ilka stood, sand clinging to the sweat-dampened places along her neck and flank. As soon as her legs had steadied beneath her she shifted closer to the two small shapes still curled in the sand and brittle grass at her feet. Reaching down to the girl again, that impossibly perfect creature she and Shah had created together, she traced her lips gently along the soft ridge of her spine. “My little Heartfire.” She whispered in a voice soaked through with affection as she reached over to push aside the corn-silk wisps of her forelock away to one side of her small blue forehead. “My beautiful girl.”
But the colt drew her attention as he struggled to get his long, spindle legs beneath him. Two, three, four times he tumbled back into the sand and Ilka felt something protective tightening in her chest. The next time he tried to stand she was beside him immediately, the soft of her dark nose tucked to his belly until at last he was able to straighten those legs beneath him. His ribs heaved with exhaustion and she tucked him possessively against her side, touching the point of his hip with gentle, whiskered lips.
Her heart had wings in her chest as she looked between the twins. They were perfect, so perfect. The colt shifted against her side, rubbing the side of his impossibly small face against the curve of her shoulder and she responded instantly, stroking his neck, his wings, until he had quieted beside her with eyes that glowed brighter than emeralds. “Illum,” she breathed, naming him for the way he brighten her strange world, “my perfect boy.”
It was then that she shifted, turning her head to find Shah with a heart so impossibly full it seemed to have grown within her chest.
ILKA
makai x oksana
@[insane]