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)
wow that only took me a month