Her knowledge of the stars has grown intimate in the last many weeks – the position of twinkling constellations and the places they go to rest when dawn wakes and stretches and puts the sun back up in the sky. She is not entirely certain what it is that keeps her awake – if she dreams, she does not remember it anymore. But she is suspicious of why her mind hides them from her, now, when it never used to before.

Was it a dark man drenched in bone and blood, a man who placed burning kisses where they were not welcome, buried teeth in skin that gave so readily beneath the aggression. It would make sense if that were why, if it was him that came to find her each night, him that her mind hid from her. The wound on her neck was mostly healed by now, bare and pink and ugly beneath her mane, but she remembered when it was something else, something more. Can remember, too, the way skin sound when it is pulled apart.

But she thinks that maybe it is also the absence of a different dark man, a stranger who had curled around her in the night so that she could fall asleep to the rhythms of his heart. Maybe it is impossible to sleep without his mouth warm behind the crook of her ear, without her side pressed to his.

She sighs and shakes her head, blinking rapidly until the thoughts are gone, until there is only the dark and the night and the small flickering lights that guide her wandering feet. It takes a moment for the meadow to solidify around her, for the silhouettes of the slender, spotted deer to peel away from the shadows. But when her eyes do adjust to the dark again, she only has a second to watch them before something startles them into motion.

It is reflexive when she throws her light into the sky just above her head, a hundred softly flickering lights that drenched everything nearby in cool, milky light. She hears first the clink of the rings, a soft sound to match the stars, and then a second later can make out a new silhouette – still chest, still slender, but decidedly equine. This stranger lifts her face to the sky and it must be the quiet Luster thinks she can see in the shadows of this unknown face, or perhaps the strangeness of this skin on a horse, because suddenly she is closing the distance between them until she is close enough to reach out and touch her spotted spine.

She doesn’t though. Instead she is quiet, uncertain, her eyes soft bruises of almost black as she looks up into the sky, too. Her own stars flutter and fade, false stars like sunken ships, until it is only dark and starlight again. “Are you having a hard time sleeping, too?” She asks, soft and quiet, her voice as silver as the stars above them. Her nose drops and her face turns, and her eyes flow like water over the hollows and angles of the delicate chestnut face beside her. They catch on the rings in her ears, a soft, beautiful metal, and she remembers the clinking she had heard moments before. “Those are beautiful.” She says with a small smile, just the subtle quirk of delicate, white lips. Then, a little softer and with eyes that drop bashfully to her feet, “I’m Luster.”

She meant to lift her eyes again, to return them to that chestnut face or the stars overhead, but a flash of color catches her attention and she is instantly immobile. She looks for it again, that familiar flash, and it is as though her eyes remember where exactly to look because they land instantly on a pair of gold bangles, one around each foreleg, same again in the back. She sucks in a breath and suddenly she can move again, though it is only to lift her chin to the stranger and watch her with dark, worried eyes half hidden beneath the tangles of her dark mane.

I don't understand, that quiet face says, though she is as silent as the stars, are you trapped, too?

A pair of small blue ears flick forward to capture the sound of that laugh before it has a chance to disperse amongst the stars. I haven’t even tried sleeping yet, the woman says and her smile is enough to coax something similar from Lusters pale, white mouth. “It’s late though,” she says, worried, as though this has not been made obvious by the moon and the stars and the endless black of night, “are you alright?” The worry in her chest is reflexive, easy, and she cannot help but wonder what it is that keeps her sleep at bay.

She is distracted by a name, Djinni, and she smiles again quietly because somehow the name matches the soft gold of those earrings and Luster finds she likes the balance. “It suits you.” She says, eyes bright and luminous, gentle when they drift from those earrings and back to that delicate chestnut face.

But the worry she feels when she finds those bangles is not appeased by the wryness of the smile that greets her. You don’t like them? The mare asks, and Luster can only cling to her silence because the truth feels to rude to say out loud. No. She thinks instead, vehement and confused, but she is careful not to let too much of that feeling slip across her face. Once she might’ve thought them beautiful, solid sunlight, burnished and bright, but now it means something different and she finds that they make her feel a little sick. I’ve gotten rather used to them.

Lusters small head lilts slightly, tipping sideways as confusion leaks like shadow across the marbled blue of her face. “Gotten used to them?” She repeats it like a question, and she knows she is digging, prying, but she cannot help herself, “you haven’t always had them?” Maybe the worry in her voice will soften the intrusiveness of what she asks.

But Djinni shakes her off with a new question, light and easy and Luster doesn’t even notice when it happens. “We haven’t.” She agrees, and the smiles that appears on those starshine lips so soft, so open. “I moved here just recently with my family. I met a girl in the meadow once - Rora,” she pauses and her brow furrows in quiet question, “do you know Rora? She told me a little about Sylva, and I fell in love with the sound of it.” She pauses again and to keep her eyes from flicking back down to those gleaming bangles, she lifts her chin to the sky to lose herself in the constellations above them. “What about you, Djinni. Have you lived here long?There are stars in her voice, silver and lonely, and when she chances a glance back at the beautiful chestnut spotted mare, they flash in the brown of her eyes, too.