so we let our shadows fall away like dust

It doesn’t matter that she had wanted to stay, that she had wanted him to find a way to convince her not to go. There was nothing he could have done or said, no amount of kisses traced by memory over the angles of her face that would have kept her feet from running. It was an impossible hope, an empty hope, that treacherous reflex of alove that she would always feel for the deepwater stallion. But she had dared to want it anyways.

It hadn’t mattered, though.

With his back turned she had slipped away, held in place only by his eyes, only by that fierce way he had of watching her. She slipped easily through the trees, unhindered by rock and root, flowing like wet sunshine across a world of perpetual autumn. She didn’t slow for the unevenness at the edge of the mountain, didn’t slow for the soft pines or a ground made from their needled flesh. She didn’t even stop for the forest, didn’t tuck herself away in the cave she had spent most of her childhood in, hidden safely from a world that would only watch and wonder and pry at the bruises in her quiet eyes.

Instead she ran until the burn in her lungs matched the fire in her chest, until sweat was damp on her shoulders and in the hollows of her hips, until there was a wildness in her eyes that could only be blamed on the pain and the hurt and the coming undone. She ran until running wasn’t enough, until it stopped helping, until the agony in her chest caught up with her and latched on, buried in the soft of her flesh like gleaming metal burrs. But when she slowed, when she stopped, she noticed him curled against the earth.

Her heart thunders, instantaneous, but this new agony is different, repurposed, somehow easier and so she bends into it willingly. One, two, three steps across the meadow and towards him, approaching from behind where his eyes have not yet spied her, and he rises. Even at this distance she can pick out the near-white armor, sharp against the black, etched in his blood just as it had been before. Her neck twinges, a sharp pain in the memory of an old scar on her neck, in a place beneath her mane where his teeth had buried themselves beneath such delicate blue.

It is enough to make her stop, to push doubt through the network of veins like bare branches beneath her skin.
Blinking, she looks away, but when she looks back again her chest tightens of its own volition.

Two others have joined him, one blue and white and beautiful, familiar in a way she cannot name. The other a bird before he lands, deep black and handsomely feathered, a horse when he stops beside the mare. He is a bright green, the color of new grass, of spring, but he keeps the black wings and they settle against him in sharp contrast. He does not seem familiar. 

Her chest tightens again and there is something about the way they watch him, about the quiet intensity of the woman and the easy way the green one stays beside her, accidentally predatorial to his core, that makes her worry over the bone-clad stallion which such heavy, broken shoulders.

It draws her to Dovev’s side immediately.

She manipulates light and shadow easily, pushing the dark where she needs it, twisting it around the scattering of individual trees so that when she appears from behind him, pushing her mouth possessively against that thin, beautiful shoulder, it is as though she appeared from thin air. Shadow, as it were. Her teeth find this jaw, gentle pressure to coax his face towards her, and then she lifts her mouth to the curve of his ear, leaving a kiss in the soft place just behind it as though they were more than strangers, more than the scar he had carved into her neck. “You have an excellent nose for deception.” Her voice is silver and sharp, whisper-soft, but she suspects he will know the pain in it by memory. He has heard it from her before.

She slips beneath his neck and against his chest, turning in a soft u-shape towards the blue mare and the green stallion. At this closeness she is startled by the familiarity of the woman, of her face and her eyes and even the shade of her skin. It is the same as Luster’s own. But she hides the surprise easily, forcing it behind the pain, behind the hurt, burying it in the sharp angles of a wildly beautiful face. Her eyes are bright, luminous when the drift back and forth between the pair, curious when she turns to touch her mouth to the soft hollow of skin just behind the corner of his lips. Possessive, worried for him, and still she isn’t sure why. “Who are your friends?”

so we let our shadows fall away like dust

Luster, he croons with his lips against her throat, and at this she can smile, small and thin and shadowed, I’m sorry to hear this. I’d hoped to be wrong. His mouth has travelled up to her ear by the time he is done speaking, ending with a kiss that she quietly leans into, and she wonders silently if he can taste her surprise. It is not like when Stillwater touches her, not that molten fire she has come to expect. It is, strangely, something gentler, maybe made so by the distance between them, by the lack of want that flutters in her chest for this man. Still, that smile deepens for him, only him, and she is soft when she curls beneath his neck to find comfort in the heat of his chest – soft, too, when his mouth tastes the shape of her spine and the hollow curve of each vertebrae.

She is not ready for his words though, even soft and buried in the easy bliss of his attention, not ready for the name on his lips or an introduction she had imagined a thousand times but never once like this. “Heartfire?” She repeats and she is emptier, quieter than an echo. “My Heartfire?” She asks again, as if he would have any idea what it is she is asking, any idea which thought she follows like a vein back to her heart. It is the name that belongs to her sister and, though she knows there could be many and each one a stranger, it is impossible to look into that blue face and not see the reflection of something she thinks she knows, if only in her core, if only by instinct.

For a moment she is distracted by his lips against her cheek, soft and imploring, by the kiss he traces across the blue like stars in the gleaming dark. But the low warning of Heartfire’s voice calls Luster back from the quiet and into the present where the world tries, once again, to wound her. He would be far safer without you next to him, Luster. There is no time to react before the grass shudders and breaks apart, dust and dead beneath their quiet hooves. When her bruised eyes drop, startled, round and brown and beautiful, it is only to find a circle of bare dirt, ruined earth, and her jaw hardens reflexively. The threat is impossible to miss.

But –

She finds she does not move, cannot move, leans deeper into the embrace of that bone and black chest even as her eyes narrow dangerously against such familiar blue. A blue she longs to fall against. Instead she pulls light from the sun, from the sky, drenches both she and Dovev in it until it gleams from the surface of their skin like they are dark gems. She is still new at this, but she finds that balance between nothingness and tangibility, creating a membrane like soft rubber to coat them both. It would do nothing against whatever had happened to the grass, such instant death, but it would guard against lesser things.

Her eyes are still narrowed and sharp when the green stallion murmurs his pleasure to Heartfire, apparently impressed with the destruction she had caused so effortlessly. It makes her wonder at them both, at the dark in the woman who must be her sister, at the dark in the man who seems so intrigued by her, so comfortable with her. But then he moves, that strange green man, shifts closer, and as he does the green seems to bleed from him, fading until it is only a small star on a forehead that is otherwise grey and dappled. Luster, come now. How could you mistake me? She is furious at once, seething and hurt, though she buries it deep and hides it well, hardening like a blade against Dovev’s dark chest.

“Snake, then.” She says, barbed and beautiful, watching him with eyes as hard and sharp as stones as she slips out from beneath Dovev’s neck just a few easy steps. “I think you’re more of a Snake.” It doesn’t bother her that Heartfire and Dovev will not understand, that they weren’t there the day this man had appeared to her as a soft grey woman, warm and friendly, asking Luster to guess her name. Then, turning to Heartfire with eyes that flash dangerously, “You keep interesting company, sister.”

But she is drawn away again by a voice that is low and, perhaps, as dangerous as she feels, wild in the wake of so much hurt, carved sharp and wicked by the teeth of so many lies. And you. The man says, and she only needs to see his eyes settle on Dovev for the swelling of sudden, thick shadow to pool beneath all of them. Have you lost your teeth, or perhaps your tongue, that you would shield yourself so pathetically behind a young mare for protection? She is silent when she slips back beneath Dovev, silent even when that smile appears in the pale velvet of such delicate lips. Be careful about your answer, she settles under his nose, sinuous and beautiful, or I might be inclined to take both from your mouth by force.

She curves silently beneath those dark lips, twisting to leave a kiss against the curve of that mouth again. Then, with eyes that flash and sharpen against a treacherous grey and green face, her smile widens, amused. “I wish you wouldn’t, I so enjoy both of those things.”