"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
She aches for what she cannot define.
She aches, too, because to whom can she express the singular pang in her chest, the longing for the stars, the quiet, the standstill of time? It is impossible to know what it’s like to live there in space’s queer timelessness, to watch galaxies collapse and feel simultaneously like a god and like an infinitesimally small speck of dust.
She is a creature kept from its migration, because the home she wishes for is impossible
(Was always impossible, she wonders sometimes if it was a dream, a capsule of madness.)
She is not like her mother – she was born to the stars, but not of them; nor is she like her father, full of magic, a megalomaniac god.
All she has is a reflection of the sky in her coat, a living painting. Of course, she merely mirrors the sky, a lovely trick but ultimately a useless one.
There is a new legion of them, half-siblings scattered piecemeal with stars and colors. None of them were kept as she and brother were, in the strange timelessness, coats made to bring the stars home.
(She misses it. God, she misses it.)
She had tried to find father, while he was here, meaning to throw herself at his feet and beg to be sent back. He hadn’t loved her, had existed alongside them for only a short while (or perhaps a long one. Time does not exist in space, not like it does here, where it is heavy and ponderous across the skin.)
But he had heeded none of her cries, and she cannot find a god when the god does not want to be found.
So she remains stranded, a girl apart, once of the stars and now of the meadow. She shines a bright blue, a reflection of the sky, clouds drifting lazily over her hindquarters. She is lovely in the way things made magic are, and though her eyes may be dull, her coat is not, and she shines on.
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)
***She is so firmly grounded. ***Rocks and seafoam-green lichen, soil, the tangle of roots, tree bark, willowy new saplings; she is: the flutter of bug wings, the trill of passerines, the slow bleed of one season into the next. Clockwork, and inevitable. Defined by the shades and smells around her, and one ill-fated warbler nestling. A vast network of neurons, pure instinct and blood-fed flesh. Unconventionally forged, but grown in the quiet womb of a mother, like anyone else. Unremarkable — ponyish and rosy, an agelessness that has its limits. It will run its course, and the youthful character of her step will capitulate to sore joints and the call to surrender oneself to the ground. ***So unlike the death of a star. A mighty knell of energetic heat and light. Implosion. No, not nearly as magnificent as all that.
***She knows nothing of the stars. Nothing of their unthinkable size or their striking impermanence. They are distant, a perspective she cannot observe from. They had played audience to a dalliance, and the damp heave of birth, but she does not call them friend. They are poetic, mysterious works of the Mother, but they lay beyond her realm of intellect — conceptual at best. And she is a scholar. A collector of information and readings, an observer of behaviour and biology. Everything she knows, and has yet to know, surrounds her with sound and scent.
***They are so separated. A wide gulf of galaxies and comets; a mesosphere, stratosphere and troposphere, incompatible atmospheres and tugging gravities. Unimaginable, and yet her look of isolation and want is undeniably alike. It impels the mousy mare, ever drawn to moments of familiarity and newness. “Hello.” ***Cirrocumuli dapple the bright blue shoulder. ***The little mare looks up curiously, watching an acrobatic display of thrushes.
***“You are brilliant.” Her voice characteristically soft and thoughtful. She turns to head to better watch her with a big, brown eye. Two things compromised of magic, and given home in opposite halls — the mousy mare, a simple weaving of nature; and the sky-mare, a physics equation. “I am Vineine.”
*magic-borne daughter of Prague and Elladora ****‘...Herself in the Heavens, her beam on the waves.’
It is kindness and cruelty both, that she was made to mirror the sky above her. It is a memory; especially on clear nights when the stars seem almost touchable, and they scatter across her skin and she remembers with an aching clarity what it was like, among them. But it is a taunting memory, what she will never have again drawn across her body, again and again until days come when she does not want to look at herself, when she cannot stand her own skin.
Memories are like that, though, tinged in bitter sweetness, the sky laid over her a joy and despondency both.
The earth is strange to her still, the fecundity of nature overwhelming, sometimes – she is not used to so much greenery, not when she spent moments (or eons) among blackness and lights so brilliant you had to look away. The smells of it, too – she had now known things had smells, not like this, so imbued with life. The only smell she can recall before this is a cold purity – winter air is the closest she can think, but it’s not right. The earth is overwhelming.
Once, all around her, stars collapsed and died and were reborn.
Now, all around her, animals rut and birth and kill. Same, but not the same.
There had been sounds, behind her, but she paid them little mind. She feels dulled, today, far too anchored.
(The heaviness of the world astounds her still, she grew up weightless, and when she came here she felt impossibly weighty and strange.)
The steps lend themselves to a girl, who strolls closer until the space between them is tenuous at best. She murmurs a hello, and Carinae’s head dips in kind.
“Hello.”
Another pause, as clouds wander across her haunches, and the mare speaks again. You are brilliant, she says, but Carinae is not so sure. She does not think of it as brilliance, anymore then she thinks of her own shapes and angles as anything particularly noteworthy – it is part of her, the way bones and organs are.
“Thank you,” she manages, because she is a polite girl, if a lost one.
“I’m Carinae.”
A beat, a moment to inhale.
“Where are you from, Vineine?”
She likes their stories, the tales of their lands that are as distant to her as the sky must be to them.
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)
***She is made of her own place, too. In a less phenomenal, more plain, kind of way. In the burrs that tangle in the thick waves of her tail, the dirt congealed up her knees and the austere patience, like that of a mountain, or a rock splitting a river. In the arch of her neck, like the bow of a branch; the bent of a pollinator, busying around the bright, arousing revelation of wildflower stamina. She is dirt, and ozone, and patrichor. But she is flesh, and unembellished fleshed. Endowed the scents and the residuals, but detached from it wholly. Separated not from union, but having never been a part of it at all. ***But then, neither is this mare a star. But nurtured in that bare womb with them like siblings. Vineine is no flower, or beetle, or bluebird; she was created at the discretion of the Mother (everyone is), but outside of her modus operandi — fleshy coupling; seed and ova. A disciple of Nature, so peculiarly conceived. But at least her playmates ran red and blue with blood; cajoled in fixed time and gravity.
***The Mother is strange, complex. ***Sometimes flesh-parents can be too, bending the rules so alike a pantheon gods.
***Her fellowship begins and ends at the surface layer of her flesh. She wonders how deeply the sky echoes in this mare; whether she has a comet heart, or a neural network of stars. The cruel superficiality of this coat in flux is lost on her.
***This does not just happen. She does not mean to stare at the clouds, like cotton, running over the plain of her chest, but finds it hard not to observe that perfect mirror. She wonders whether it plays back the stars or the trash of lightening just as meticulously. “I am from everywhere,” She smiles — wilderness. “But, I've only just recently returned to the place where I was born, the jungle.” How ironic, and fortunate. That for years she raised children and made love, all while letting her call to home simmer and proof. For her, homecoming had been easy. ***So easy, she had delayed it, until it could not wait any longer. ***Her story was bright and vivid. But so very ordinary, mostly. “Where are you from?” Because your skin knows the unrest of the sky too well, but Beqanna is full of queer creatures. Not all of them are as unconventional as they appear. But she feels too remote, too grievous. Nostalgia is heavy, and it is fickle.
*magic-borne daughter of Prague and Elladora ****‘...Herself in the Heavens, her beam on the waves.’
Her first coming to the land – to earth, to terra firma – had been strange.
One moment she had been as she always had, suspended in the perplexing eternal plane she’d been birthed upon, and the next she’d been in a field, moving through a field, sent on a strange quest that left her burnt and battered.
She’d died, in that quest, lost on the battlefield, yet when she had woken it had not been back in space, but rather, in the meadow. And there she had stayed, grounded, anchored.
(Some days feel heavier than others.)
She lets her stare, feels the easy weight of the mare’s gaze. It’s not an uncommon thing, even in a world that is colored by jewel-toned horses, she is one of the few who shifts continually, who wears clouds or stars across her back.
(She once blinded a few with the sun, used herself as a conduit. It had been terrible and powerful and she’d understood, in that moment, the pleasure her father must find in burning.)
“The jungle,” she repeats, because it sounds lush and exotic. She’s only known the meadow, the forest – nomad’s lands, and ones she keeps to, because she is an anachronism, a star fallen.
“Are there jaguars, there?”
She asks because she once saw wildcats, on her quest, sinuous animals full of a lissome strength she envies.
And the question is asked of her in turn, of course, so she replies as best she can.
“I was born in space,” she says, and it sounds so simple, like that – like it was a birthplace and not a culture, a home and not a world where she lived timeless, where she saw galaxies collapse, stars explode, all manner of things that were impossible for anyone to see, “but then I was brought here.”
She says brought because she had not come here willingly, but rather, had been pulled back by some force she cannot cmomprehend.
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)
