hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
She had taken to hiding in the in-between places, the gaps between territories where few bothered to stray. They were the quiet places, the lonely places, the places she belonged to best. She loved the meadow for what it meant to her. It was the place in which she had been born, the place she first knew the love of her mother and her father and her wordless twin. But it was also the place they had each drifted from in turn, parting like stardust in a too-big night sky. She even loved the forest for its lonely trees and hungry shadows, but so did many, and it was the many she tried so desperately to avoid. So she clung to the in-between like the stars clung to the night.
But there was War on the horizon and she had not realized. It seemed strange that a mind-reader would be so out of the loop, but Isle hated falling into someone else’s thoughts. Every time she did there was something dark and sinister waiting to catch her, yearning to hold her under and drown her in the dark. So she suppressed that part of herself, the part that had also belonged to her smiling father. She couldn’t understand how he had sifted through minds which such ease, and now he was gone and there was no way to ask him. Hurt flared like raw heat in her chest and, after a moment, new loneliness joined it.
She had felt the shift of war nearly as soon as it began, she was certain everyone would. Magic crackled like static in the air each time a barrier was erected, like a weatherless storm inching from kingdom to kingdom. She should have known what would happen, should have guessed that her self-control would wither in the face of so many and with such strong emotions bleeding from so many worn, weathered faces. But she was foolish, naïve despite herself and she slipped from mind to mind like a shipwreck crashed against every shore it sought. ‘Stop.’ She begged in a whisper, holding her head low and her ears back as if that would change anything.
It didn’t.
Thoughts of sorrow and loss, of revenge and hatred, of the names of those already lost beat themselves like tattoos against the walls of her aching mind.
Again and again and again.
As if these demons were physical, she ran from them. She bled like shadow through the trees, weaving through the forest until dark gave way to light and she recognized the meadow unfurling like an ocean of green before her. There was a moment, a single heartbeat in time, where her mind acknowledged the impossibly large black stallion perched at the meadows edge. But this fact was buried beneath other thoughts that weren’t hers, dead, dead, dead like the beat of some sinister war-drum.
She brushed past him, barely avoiding a collision as some distant part of her conscious mind stuttered awake. “Oh!” She breathed in the whisper of a broken voice, and she would have kept running if not for the fact that his mind did not unfold itself readily to her. Uncertainty flickered like dying hope in her chest as she stilled beside him, her dark eyes anchored to his face, then tracing the deep lines of scars across his immense body. Even as she counted them, as she followed their curving shapes across the deeper black, she could feel her mind quiet a little. Her chest still heaved with a fear that had settled so deep in the marrow of her bones she wasn’t sure it would ever leave, but impossibly, he had managed to soothe the flayed edges of her mind. Her breath came in short, tremulous huffs as she watched him with uncertainty etched into the soft shadows across her delicate brown face.
“Please,” she says in a voice so quiet, and she isn’t even sure what she’s asking him, “it hurts.”
Isle
