12-08-2015, 04:49 PM
The scent of hibiscus.
The pattering of rain on palm trees.
The crash of the ocean, continuous.
It is the sound of waves upon the shore that wakes her;
To understand why she wakes to the sound of the sea, we must step back in time to when she first touched her hooves to the boney white shore - -
She had come to die.
There was nothing left for her but this, death.
So she came to the only place that held a trace of the sea, the waves gray and listless and so unlike the waves of her bright island birthplace.
Her bones ached; her heart, more so. She had never been able to shake the ghost of his face - it was ingrained on her heart, oaken and old, like she is - so old! His name is an oath stricken from her lips, it echoes and rattles through the space between each rib and breaks the silence between each heartbeat. She dreams of him and her island home each night; tall cliffs, the peaks of his ears, and she dies a little more each day inside.
Lanai has been dying for years.
The light bay mare moves out onto the beach, heedless of the skeletons heaped about, their bones small grim mountains that remind her of the thing she seeks - death, release. Her lips purse, a fat heavy sigh falls out and an explosive crack stops her short. Befuddled, she looks down at her feet to discover that she is standing atop a pile of bones on that ill gleaming sand. No matter how she moves, she will further disturb the bones of some dead horse unbeknownst to her.
Lanai sighs, there is nothing she can do - those bones will turn to dust anyway. So she turns amongst them, every step carelessly stomping them further to pieces. Femur, vertebrae, they suffer the same crippling indecency of being trampled to fine dust but those bones held a secret deep in their marrow of an old dalean queen born of the very stars and earth. There was still some magic left in those old bones, and Lanai bent her head to what was left - mostly bone-dust now and inhaled long and deep of the fine powdery stuff.
She went into the arms of the gray wave after that.
She gulped in water-filled breath after breath the deeper she swam out until at last, she sank open-mouthed into the deep.
Lanai was dead, or so she thought.
The sound of the waves woke her; crashing endlessly upon the shore. She must be in heaven and a sad sweet smile touched her face until she opened her eyes, horrified to discover herself wet and alive on the same beach she had come to die on. “Those bones,” she muttered despondently as she climbed to her feet. Her left side and legs bore a light sheen of bone-dust that stuck to her damp bay fur. She knew she couldn't stay here, she wasn't dead after all.
She died hours ago, only to have the sea spit her back out. Lanai is not sure which betrayal is worse - when he left her, cracking her heart in two, or going into the sea to die only to be thrown back onto the shore. Why couldn't her broken heart stay broken and why couldn't she just die? She shook her head, surprised at the newfound lightness in her that had not been there before - Lanai was always so melancholic. It was her heart, it seemed larger and lighter somehow.
Lanai found her way back to the meadow. It has not changed, not in years anyway. But she has; there is gray in her muzzle, fragments of broken bone and dead coral tangled in her hair. The sway to her back has deepened after three foals - a lovely daughter and two large colts. She has a scrape on her knee that has bled and is speckled with sand; that bone-dust is everywhere, in the scrape, in her lungs, in the very marrow of her bones and it has changed her, she knows that, sorrows over it but only for a moment before her ever-sad eyes turn up to the sky in odd expectation.
Lanai wishes it would rain, that's when she's happiest.