Such a lovely color for you .:{Malis}:.

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

There are always a thousand thoughts swimming in the oceans of her mind, a billion questions sunk like stones in its depths. Lately Dacia has been at the forefront. The indigo mare cannot help but wonder whether or not Killdare had ever found the right words to share with her, whether he had found any words to share at all. Truths can be hard that way; they wedge themselves like blades between bones, creating chasms and crevices like flayed open wounds. Malis thinks he had told her first because it was easier that way, because she had come later, because losing Malis would not have been the same as losing his Dacia. Their roots were not buried as deep as the ones he had woven around Dacia- there was no promised forever between them.

Perhaps this distance suits her, though. While she had not been born a broken creature, the life of such found her quickly. A family broken and shattered, scattered to the furthest corners of kingdoms and lonely in between places- and maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so much if theirs was the kind of family who were meant to fall apart. But Malis had never expected it. The cracks that had tracked across her soul like the veins on leaf had only widened and deepened with time. There was no healing in a world like this one, a world so full of dark and violence, there was only unraveling. So she did.

But Killdare had changed that somehow, not quite fixed it, but he had stopped the progression of those hairline fractures if only for a little while. He had become a friend and something more, something strange and easy, and he had offered her a home and a family. It was the birth of Victra that changed everything again, and only time would tell if it were for the better or worse.

The blue mare reaches over to touch her nose to the crest of her daughter’s dark mane, brushing the corn silk hairs smoothly in place with the soft of her blue mouth. They are often quiet when together, Victra having noticed Malis’ preference towards silence and brooding, and today is no different. Victra is busy exhausting herself with her strange, beautiful wings which she holds aloft at her withers to cup the warmth of the sunlight that filters through the treetops. Her small bay and indigo face is crumpled with concentration as some of the feathers in her wings shift their shape, widening and shortening, lengthening and narrowing. First they are blue and black like those of the mulish blue-jays hooting in the trees, then they change and they are bright and extravagant like peacock feathers and she cannot help but giggle at her own ridiculousness. When at last she is too tired to play more with her shape-shifting wings, the feathers shrink until they are gone, and the skin stretches so it is thin and smooth and almost see-through in places. She lets the black bat wings settle against her shoulders and then leans in close to her mother, resting that small, perfect face in the crook of a slender blue shoulder.

Malis turns again to nuzzle Victra, but those lips pause just shy of her daughters ears as she locks eyes with Dacia at last. She knows her immediately, if not by the soft green than by the colt that stands beside her. He is so much like Victra that a reluctant smile slithers across her mouth, just a slit of warmth for a heartbeat before she manages to hide it again. The boy is bay like his father, like Victra, with points like his mother, and again like Victra. This feels like the first solid thing to be found in the tangles of this messy family. But Malis must have tensed (of course she did, how could she not) because Victra lifts her sleepy head and turns to follow the direction of her mother’s quiet gaze. But where Malis would have stayed still and immobile, a statue carved from the stone whose color she had stolen, Victra is absolutely delighted.

Before Malis can stop her, she tumbles forward and the sleepiness seems to fall away from the girl like steam from sun-baked stones after a storm. “Ooh, you are like me!” She says as she reaches out to touch noses with the green pointed colt standing beside his dam. “Except you are green and I am blue.” Her eyes are wide and green when she tilts her face at him imploringly, regarding him with perhaps just a little impatience as she waits for him to be as delighted with this discovery as she is. But she is distracted when Malis appears behind her and touches a nose to her hip, coaxing her back to her side with the furrowing of her dark brow. For a moment she says nothing, because what could she possibly offer to this woman, but the silence settles too heavy against her back and with some reluctant uncertainty she says, “I am Malis, and this is my daughter, Victra.”

MALIS

makai x oksana