She thinks she should hate them. Hate fire, stars, and polar cold. Except she cannot because those things sneak into her dreams on shadow-horses’ backs that reveal glimmers of color much like the skins they wore in life - bay overo, silver buckskin, and palomino. It makes her not want to dream; to want to burn her dreams to ash as readily as she can anything else that is around her through a single touch. But her dreams don’t burn up. Just smoke and smolder in her brain and in the place in her pale breast where the heart has turned to cold ash.

Spark has always been the more aimless of the two. She followed Spear for a time, that tein nature hard to break and abandon but he succeeded where she could not, severing that bond between them as cleanly as if he had singed and scorched it through his unique brand of magic. It felt like a phantom limb causing her pain, but one that had been cauterized. So she drifted, lost and alone, to and fro, near and far. It felt like she was searching for something but she always came up empty.

Just like now —

On a night that foretells of snow and bitter cold, she comes back and has no idea why her travels brought her back to here, of all the places. Firelight gleams beneath the paleness of her fur and outlines the Medicine Hat patch on her brow; her mane and tail flicker between pale hair and bright flame; the earth smokes where her hooves touch it - she burns everything she touches. Perhaps that is most fitting in all of this; she cannot be touched and could not suffer touch now that it has been so long denied her. She shuns that closeness as much as her mismatched eyes (one black and one red) shun that tantalizing glow up ahead.

By the gods! It is stars and her treacherous heart stirs off some of the cold ash and gives a painful thump as she thinks for one minute - one torturous moment! - that it is Giver with a swirl of stars around him. But as she looks deeper, better, she can see that it is not him but another that has stars in his skin. Spark can only sigh, disappointed again. It is never one of the three that she dreams of. Never. But they haunt her like ghosts that won’t be exorcised and laid to rest. She’d make a deal with Coyote for some peace if she half believed all the things her mother had said about the trickster-god.

Tephra is to her as Taiga is to him; but neither of them know this because as of this moment, they still haven’t even met although Spark is staring at him. Or more so as the constellations that shift and swirl across his fur, from the glimpses she gets between the feathers of his tucked close wings. This too, is a difference - none of them that she dreams of (or misses) have wings, even if Spear could make them ignite from his sides as pure furious flame. He never has though and she’s glad of that, like it is one more small blessing in disguise. The stars are bad enough to shake things loose that ought to remain locked up.

He is thinking predatory thoughts and she is thinking of stars, but not in such a profound and poetic way as to be lost or smitten. She is thinking if she can burn them all out with a touch, the strategic placement of lip to shoulder and hip and everywhere else. Would they ignite and burst into the nothingness that is the rest of his skin underneath? In her own way, she is predatory too and never has been. The losses she has suffered have shaped her in a newer harder way, one that she clings to because the hardness is shiny and protective - like ice, for all that she burns.

So, Spark stares as he stares and perhaps their stares meet in the midst of all that.

@Illum