"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

It was so strange to be back in the Chamber again. Everything about it felt same and unfamiliar all at once, from the tall crooked pines to the way the fog rolled in and out like a hazy tide. She can remember when the kingdom had burned, when volcanoes rumbled and erupted and split the forests from the mountains, turned grass and tree and stone to ash. She had come later, but she had come to the stink of death and soot and hollowed out trees. It had been so different from the green and wild beauty of the jungle, but everything else had changed too, why wouldn’t the rest of the world follow? A family once whole and now broken, a girl once bright as a star now no more than ash and dust, forgotten to wherever she fell to, to whichever spot had become a grave.

The pair are quiet when they pull free from the tree-line, soft and bright and languid, though the filly is admittedly more gangly than her bright indigo mother when she breaks away and bounds a few strides forward with her tail slapping impatiently against the brown dapples of her haunches. She is soundless when she stops to look around, when she traces unfamiliar faces milling about the clearing. But then she spots the burning tree at the heart of the kingdom and her little head lifts higher still, those impossibly small ears erect against the crown of her delicate head. Her wings disentangle, freeing themselves from the point of her bay withers, and hang wide around her body like a halo of black and blue feather. But as she stares transfixed at the burning pine, the colors on her feathery wings start to morph. The black fades to a charcoal, the blue fades entirely. Red and orange and yellow fill those places, uneven and bright, as though the fire had been trapped within each fibrous feather bristle.

Malis watches her for a long moment, equally transfixed by her daughter as her daughter is with the tree. Neither she nor Killdare possessed any wings of their own, but the blue mare did not wonder where Victra’s had come from. Oksana, her own mother, had possessed such wings, strange things that shifted from one kind to the next, often an extension of whatever emotion she was feeling. Malis can remember wondering if that was by choice or reflex, but the longer she spent watching her daughter, the surer she felt that it was the latter. The magic did not tie itself to her emotions, there was no tether she could trace, but it loved them. It fed on the rawness.

Without warning- though Malis had been expecting it, Victra leapt forward again with wings like fire wide above her shoulders. In a few bounding steps, strides carried further than they would have been able to without the help of those wings catching air and pushing her along, the filly landed awkwardly beside a blood bay stallion Malis didn’t know. Mistrust erupted from her belly, blistering everything it touched as she quickly closed the distance between them. When she reached them her face was hard and a little wild, and something unnamable flickered like green fire from the bottoms of her eyes. But at this closeness she noticed he reeked of the chamber just as she had once, she could even smell the acrid smoke of the magma king faintly on his skin. It was different than how she smelled of him.

She softens slightly, reluctantly, forcing away the ripple of muscle coiling beneath her blue skin. With a sharp intake of breath, she buries her nose against the tufts of her daughters mane and exhales until the pound-pound of her racing heart returns to a quiet thrum. And then, in voice that is neither soft nor hard, with an expression that must be impossible to read for the way she cannot seem to untangle the emotions and thoughts that erupted inside her moments before, she says, “I’m Malis, this is Victra.”

But Victra isn’t paying them any attention, nor has she noticed the tension seeping off of her mother. Instead she drifts closer to the tree, to the stallion, those bright green eyes wide and curious when they look to Nymphetamine for explanation. “Why does it burn?” A pause, and her small brow furrows with a strange mix of worry and confusion. “Aren’t you afraid it will spread?”

MALIS

makai x oksana