you can't go home again

[Vineine]

***She could find each place she had laid for the heave of childbirth — the warm, damp undertaking; the moment of singularity, tucked away in a rift split apart from time and space, to meet someone so utterly new. Each of her efforts were their own epoch in her timeline; set aside from everything else in the intimate embrace where her deepest adoration lives. Impossible to explain, because words are fickle and they are monuments of the mind — so often magnificently perfect, but even more often are too pale. ***In a sheltered place under oak boughs; soft rain falling on her cheekbones and hips, adding to the slickness of her nest of long, flattened out grass. A girl, like her and him. ***A moon-bright clearing, snow still clinging to the ground stubbornly like islands. It had come on more suddenly than the first; a boy, like him almost entirely. ***The pinkish mare picks her way from her new home (in a way; in truth, it shames her a bit to say that she hadn't been there all this time), thankful for the thickness in her coat, perhaps her body's final adieu to the habits of winter preparation. For so long she had experienced each glorious season in its entirety. Habits are hard to break, and the mechanics of her body are not made to concede instantly to new surroundings. It is hot, but not unbearable. It makes her trips easier, and one day she will pine for her shag. ***She blinks against the thick fog, feeling it press against her, damp and uncomfortable. She is overburdened, happy to be, with the swell of pregnancy. Usually small in every way, the mousy mare has gained a passenger and lost the caper in her step. Rather, she waddles on, looking around with those big, thoughtful eyes. She is restless today, not regretting the trek, but questioning the wisdom of it nonetheless. Until she sees her, and it is not because she thinks she is the only mare here worth it, but because the strange way she slips in and out and then finally stills is like a beacon. And because of the way she closes her eyes and something the rosy mare cannot see, but can feel, is transpiring... ***And she wonders what it is, and she thinks the queer way she pulls the world around her like a cloak would serve her well in the impossible wild of the jungle. Vineine goes to her, nickering in into the grey air, joined by the white huff of her breath. “Hello. I'm Vineine, of the Amazons,” And it seems so unimportant, and yet it is what they are both here for, this place is always a business transaction in disguise (or, in no disguise at all). *magic-borne daughter of Prague and Elladora ****‘...Herself in the Heavens, her beam on the waves.’