She does not think she was supposed to last this long.

It defied all that she knew to be true, to be one of the things that remains standing after all the turmoil and upheaval that Beqanna has endured. It did not make sense that she—something that had been designed to break from the start—would be one of the things still intact, still whole. 

She had so often thought her mother to be overprotective to a fault; she had refused to believe that she was as delicate as her mother thought her to be. She knew that that glass heart of hers may not be able to withstand the blows that another could, but she did not think herself to be so fragile, so weak, that she needed to be shielded. 

It was not until she watched the world fall apart—watched how easily mountains crumbled and entire kingdoms fell—that she fully reconciled with the idea that she is just as breakable as everyone had feared her to be.

She guards herself better now, because of it. She keeps to the quiet parts of the meadow, watching the world with soft lilac-colored eyes and a quiet longing, but she does not dare to get too close.

She should have been paying closer attention to her surroundings, but the sound of the man’s voice seems to come from nowhere, cutting off her aimless thoughts and catching her off guard.

She does not know why she had assumed she was alone; no one is ever truly alone here.

“...me?” she asks, confused because rarely did anyone ask for her help with anything. But there is no one else within their vicinity that he could be speaking to, and she cannot deny that curiosity has gotten the best of her. Against her better judgment and promise to herself to be more careful, she moves towards him, her glass hooves making the occasional odd clink against a rock.

He looks vaguely familiar but she cannot remember if she has met him before — she has been alone for so long that her memories feel like ghosts, faded and intangible. It seemed to be a lifetime ago since she last saw her parents, her twin, or the blue-marked boy that used to haunt her dreams; all the other faces that she has met in passing are even harder to recall. 

She follows his gaze to where he had been looking across the river, but cannot seem to find what he is looking at, her eyes unable to focus on any one thing. What used to be there, she finds herself wondering? It is almost frustrating how bad her memory seems to be — she is sure there used to be something distinguishable across the river, but what was it? Beqanna had undergone so many changes in a relatively short span of time that she had stopped paying attention, but this felt different, as if the truth was being kept behind a veil. “What are we looking at?”

She cannot quite keep the unease that stirs in her chest from reflecting back in her lilac eyes when he voices his request. “If you can’t do it, what makes you think I can do it? Look at you, and look at me,” she says the last word with an air of exasperation, tilting her head in a gesture towards the smooth, chestnut-red glass of her body. While for the most part she has made it through the world largely unscathed, she is not entirely unmarred—a chip here, a scratch in the glass there. When she was younger she had ignored all of her mother’s warnings and pleas to be more careful, and her lack of caution showed. It’s only recently that she began to behave like the breakable thing she realizes she is.

But she doesn’t want to be fragile; she wants to be able to throw herself headlong into the nothing and see what happens, she wants to have the privilege of recklessly satisfying both their curiosities without wondering if she will only shatter against it.

So instead she inhales a steadying breath, looking in concentration across the river for a long moment, and then back to him. “So how do you propose I do it? Just…walk across? Get a running start and jump?” Her heart gives a thrilled little skip at the idea of this experiment. What will she find on the other side? What if the nothing swallows her up and she can’t find her way back? What if she doesn’t want to?

She hopes he cannot see the way her face falls when he finally realizes she is too fragile for whatever he had planned. She is used to this, of course; she is always too fragile, and she is always the last to accept it.

She supposes it is for the best, anyway. What would she have done had she actually made it across? She is not a skilled fighter, and there is no telling what the other side of the river is hiding. Beqanna’s magic could be beautiful, but so rarely could it be trusted. Nothing was ever as simple as an earthquake or a storm or an eclipse, and it seemed as though everywhere that magic took root, some sort of darkness bloomed to offset it.

Her eyes follow a sparrow returning from the Unknown, and her delicate head tilts, the very beginnings of an idea starting to form. It would be too late to peer through the sparrow’s vision now, but what if…. “Maybe I could try to find something that lives over there and look through their sight?” she says, as if that is an entirely normal thing to say. She can only assume that he is as accustomed to everyone’s individual abilities as she is.

In her distraction of formulating her own idea she had not noticed that he was about to walk away, and she glances back towards him, he is looking at her as if he is finally seeing her.

“Gale,” she says with a smile, her lilac eyes lit with delight, oblivious to whatever he is wrestling with within his mind. “You do remember me.” She has no idea the type of chaos his curse had caused; she still sees him as the amiable stallion she had met all those years ago, just after the Alliance, and her joy in seeing him again is genuine. “I did, and so did you. And it looks like now we’ve found ourselves another mystery.”

The smile that he returns to her nearly catches her off guard — so fleeting and bright like a shooting star streaking across a barren sky, the kind you find yourself wishing you had been paying closer attention so that you might not have missed it.

And it is only then in the shadow that the brightness had left behind that she realizes how different he seemed from the last time she saw him. The smile had felt like a window to something she was not supposed to see, to a past version of himself that did not really exist anymore, and she feels almost guilty for witnessing it.

She can’t claim to have known him, not really; they are strangers by most definitions. But she remembers how easily they had smiled and laughed, even with the pressing darkness. If something had been wrong the last time she saw him then it had only just started, or maybe he had just been better at hiding it. She has never been in the position where she had to hide anything, but she imagines that secrets must be heavy, draining things, and she couldn’t blame him for not having the energy to pretend any longer.

“That we know of,” she says in response to what he says about monsters, looking again across the river. “Maybe they’re hiding over there. Maybe that’s why we aren’t meant to go across.” She laughs a little as she says it, because she knows it is silly. Beqanna didn’t usually do much to protect them, though she didn’t necessarily purposely harm them, either. Not if you were smart enough to not stay away from the places she was so clearly trying to keep you out of.

She glances down at herself at his comment about starting a fire, and for a moment worry floods her face, her lilac-colored eyes darkening with it. “You don’t think I could actually do that, right? That’s the last thing I need, burning the whole place down by accident…” she trails off just a bit, trading in the worry for a distracted kind of thoughtfulness before asking, “have you tried setting it on fire?”