all these voices in my head get loud
i wish that i could shut them out
i'm sorry that i let you down
The belief that she was going to come to Hyaline to grow up playing with Malik and enjoying adventures was born when she gazed down at the lake and died shortly after. Her conversation with Mazikeen had been brief and direct. Anath will be removed from Hyaline by the spring if she cannot not make or prove herself worthy of remaining. Fall is quickly fading and Anath wakes every morning to fewer leaves on the trees and fewer hopes in her small heart. She does not forget for a moment that she will be expelled and spends any free time she has trying to discover a means of staying.
She knows she is not about to bloom into an angel or shift into a wildcat.
Another morning comes long after she has anxiously woken. For many hours she has lain awake in the dark but at last sunlight spills in over the lake, changing its color before her eyes. Anath leaps to her feet, leaving behind her bed of leaves to trot down to the water. Anath is thirsty and slows near the edge while lowering her head but snorts when she sees the silt clouded shadows. Someone has wandered or run along the lake edge recently, Anath is not interested in sipping the gritty spoiled water they have left behind and steps into the water to get a clearer drink.
Sunlight reflects on the lake, catching her attention. Raising her head, her muzzle dripping, she focuses her green eyes on the sharp glimmer. The lake’s gently moving surface changes before her eyes, not truly, but in her perception alone to be more like an expanse of transparent sand. Lifting a hoof she settles it upon the place she’d been watching. It is solid, not like hard earth but with a give, like sand? No. Like something alive, ever in motion. Anath raises another hoof and it joins the first. She steadies herself against the subtle movement, and against the excited pounding of her heart, and then bounds up so that all four of her feet are upon, no above, the surface of the water. She has changed the sunlight reflecting upon the water, and made it something she can stand upon. Her white tipped tail flicks with gleeful anxiety and she tentatively feels ahead of her herself. At first there is nothing ahead of her, just water and a pending tumble into the lake. The filly tries again, her pale hoof connects with the light mirrored on the surface this time. Water dripping from her fetlocks evaporates when it lands.
Ecstatic giggles tumble away across the surface of the lake and Anath grows bolder, pacing out away from the shore until there is water all around her. She can go anywhere the light touches, the task of making the sunlight support her hooves hardly requiring thought. If she could show this to someone what would they say? Not enough. Whispers a voice in her head. This is not enough. Anath’s stomach aches, though it is empty it feels full of stones. Anath walks in a circle, peers down at the clear deep, the logs and pretty rocks far below. Then up, out toward the shore, the trees, the meadows and the creatures that move among them. Only she is here, out here standing above the water, and still she is not as alone as she will be when she must leave Hyaline.
@Any
