There is nothing wild about her.
                
She is calm but comely, the young girl with a pelt of softly glowing coal.  She has black, black eyes ringed by gold.  She has a gentle way about her (when she casts shadows on plants, she shifts to again allow the passage of sunlight).  The world frightens her but only in its magnificence, in her fear of not finding her place in it, in her worry of not shining bright enough.  Sometimes she experiments.  Vael stands alone and everything still happens around her, without her (the sun arrows across the sky, the animals weave and dig and climb through the forest, night pulls a cloak over everything). She is unmoving through it all.  So still that she forgets to breathe and by the time she remembers, chokes on the air that hurriedly fills her lungs. 
                
She is strange, perhaps, but not wild.

The forest is another matter entirely.  It is her home as much as a stranger’s embrace is a comfort, but she finds that it suits her well enough for now.  Walking through the dappled, sunlit woodland is like reliving her best dream.  And for a mind that is mostly blanked of its memories (for the black hole that has deleted her mother’s face, her father’s name) it is easy enough to recall the few good ones.  

Vael crunches over the thin snow and thinks of nothing.  This is easy, too, because she has so little to dwell on, to reminisce.  Only the vague feeling of not belonging nips at her heels.  Or rather, the feeling that she belongs somewhere else.  I am not meant to be here, the almost two year-old has thought to herself a million and one times now.  I am not meant to be alone, but I am.  So I must deal with it and move on.  The ache in her breast is harder to ignore, though.  The careful halving of her heart with a surgeon’s precision is not nothing.  Salt.  The name is ironically sweet on her tongue, the only one her mind had held onto in the turbulence.  She won’t forget it ever.

The inky girl does not fear the crack of bone that sounds from behind a curtain of ropy, dead vines and naked deciduous trees.  Normally, she would turn her cheek and retreat to the sanctuary of the deeper woods.   But today, Vael is pensive and impassive to the placement of her feet.  A dark and deep well of loneliness resides within her.  She has never drawn from it, never quenched her thirst on the temptation – and oh, has it tempted her – but now, it overflows.  Gold and black pushes boldly through grey and rot and he is there, her savior.

And he is asleep.

“Oh – ”  slips into the cold space between them before she clamps her jaw tight.  She pulls back, instinctive.  Worry churns her stomach at having possibly woken him.  The vines she had flung apart with abandon now knock against her shoulders, her head as she tucks herself into the forest again.  Not bright enough for this world, not by half.   

Vael

and I swear I'm not a pretender

He stirs. 

She stills.

A fresh hope ignites within her – that he will fall easily into sleep’s embrace once more, that she hasn’t been an interruption, a burden.  But she can’t make herself look away as his eyelids shudder like leaves in the wind.  He grasps consciousness with a grace that is almost art, framed between the winter trees as he is.  Lines of tension pulse through his body to remind him that he is awake, to shake off any remnants of sticky sleep from his brain.  And then, he turns to her.

She forgets that she had wished him back to sleep moments ago, because this will be better.  She hopes, now, that he will forgive her intrusion and stay.  At least for a while.  Until the earth stops going on without her, spinning and spinning away the days.

“Oh,” Vael starts again, knowing it is unwise not to finish a thought (how they will congeal at the base of your tongue until you choke on all the words you never said).   “Yes.  All the time.”  The roughness in his voice is what finally draws her out of the woods.  It is so different than her own – hollow and bright – that she wonders if he needs mending.  She is no stranger to brokenness.  The fragments of her memories cut her like shattered glass if she tries to hold onto them too long.  But her heart glows stronger than her skin in spite of it, or maybe because of it.  Brokenness builds her, spurs her. She will heal the world, someday, she knows it.
                
“I have no one to wander with,” she says as he shakes the debris from his black hide, darkening himself further.  It is not meant as a regret or an invitation, it simply is.  I am not meant to be alone, but I am.  And she has been.  But the stallion’s company reminds her there is another way.  His smile reminds her, too, what she’s been missing.

As she watches him, Vael realizes that it isn’t brokenness that ails him.  It is only difference that stretches like a yawning canyon between them.  She wants to study it.  She wants to know why he is in constant motion while she is always stilled, like a corpse.  She wants to measure the confidence of a man who wakes softly and assured with a stranger shielded in the shadows.  The girl like a gilded star does not fear him, either, and she laughs at the notion.  “Your teeth do not scare me, Alek.  Your story, your emotions, your intentions – those might.   Though I doubt it.”  She takes another step and the vines brush roughly against her hips.  “My name is Vael.”  And then, as an afterthought and with a smile, she lies for the first time.  “I’m sorry for waking you.”   

Vael

and I swear I'm not a pretender

Vael is a chameleon.

She adapts readily to her surroundings.  It is ingrained in her, imprinted on her DNA to shift as she is needed, to bend when the current is too strong.  In this case, it is a happy occasion to mold herself.  In the shadows of dead trees that needlessly reached for the sky, she had been comfortable.  But here, as the sun streams down upon her glossy black in wavering patterns of warmth and light, she is comfortable, too.  Maybe even more so.

She is not meant to be alone, and she becomes greedy, quickly, in his company.  Greedy, for the heat that doubles when she is beside him.  Greedy, for the richness of his voice that fills all the hollows of her hungry ears.  Greedy, for eyes that see her (that do not see past her like she’s a ghost).  She could lose herself in those eyes that pierce her like a trident.  Not because one is a verdant, dewy meadow in the morning and the other is the sun pressed upon the blue ocean at its set.  Not because they work together to pull his lips into a knowing grin that’s meaning is almost lost on her.  It is because they see her – and she sees Alek.

Only –
               
       Vael doesn’t agree with him.  She shakes her dished head without rigor.  “Everyone is worth at least a moment’s time, don’t you think?”   This close, she can trace the muscles making valleys and peaks of his face.  She watches with interest as one twinges, tugs the soft crease of his smile into a deeper divot, a lopsided smirk.  In a moment, so much can change.  She feels her body respond, her pulse quicken (reactions she doesn’t understand, but finds she likes regardless).  The forest becomes a cold vacuum that sucks at her ankles as they stand together as a shield against winter.  “We can learn so much about each other in only a moment.”  She has the urge to tuck herself under his neck as a child might, but the argument is still on her tongue. 

So too, is the burst of air she releases when she whuffs in his face.

She hopes it at least disrupts his side-swept forelock, but she doesn’t stick around to find out.  The black girl steps back into the chill of the wood’s embrace, her own grin breaking apart as silvery laughter forces itself out into the quiet air.  Perhaps it is foolish to play with a perfect stranger.  But subtlety is not Vael’s forte.  Neither, for that matter, is company in general.  Either way, she imagines she will learn all she needs to about Alek based on what he does in the next moments.

For her part, she draws out from between the vines as slow as honey.  His voice is a tether she is loath to loose, even in the chaos she’s created.  Who cares if he berates her, as long as she’s not alone?  Who cares if he strikes her down, as long as he sees her?  My intentions definitely will, he says, but she hadn’t meant that – had worried more for the shiver of death than that of another kind.  She is languid but he is purposeful grace; they meet somewhere in the middle of their motions and just after her lie is dismissed.  “You must have been companion to a great many to make such observations, Alek.”  Her smile fades like the sun behind a cloud.  “Color me surprised,” she says, and it’s back again, brighter than before.  “Do you find ladies in the woods along all of your walks?  Or am I just lucky?”   

Vael

and I swear I'm not a pretender