divine places to die in; jenger-pony

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

There is a small, sad part of her that warns her to leave him be, warns her that she should know better than to stay when he would clearly be so much more pleased with the quiet of solitude. She can see it in the stiffness of his body, in the shadow-sneer that still ghosts his lips when he turns to glance at her with dark, void eyes. She saw it, too, in teeth bared and ugly, flashed like a warning in her face when they should’ve been buried in the soft of her pale copper neck.

But the same thing that drew her to him before, that broken familiarity, still holds her close and fast to him now. It is the dark that clings to his face, the bottomless depths of eyes like the night sky. When she peers inside it feels like falling forever, like loneliness. Mothers eyes were like that now, sad and defeated, sharp where once they had been soft – or so Malis had told her. But something had happened and it had changed the bay mare, cut a chasm through her chest that only ever seemed to pull further apart – a chasm that must have torn her in two when the whole world changed, because the mare that was, she never came back.

It makes her wonder about Mandan, about the dark in his eyes.

But for a moment, when her wings stretch and lift restlessly against her back, when feather becomes membrane and the talons gleam like steel, his face changes. It only lasts a moment – the tightening of a dark brow, the gleam of something flickering in those eyes – but it is like seeing the man beneath, the man from before. The one still buried under so much life and scar tissue that he no longer remembers how to be.

Her brow furrows beneath her forelock, and she does not notice the way her head lilts uncertainly to one side when she takes one single small step in his direction. Her indigo nose lifts to him again, hovering hesitantly, but she lets it fall back to her chest before it has a chance to brush against the dark of his face. “I think I saw you, just for a second.” She isn’t sure she even means to say it aloud, but the whispered words are gone before she can stop them, gone before she can put them back in her chest. But she did see him, she feels sure of it, like an escaped memory of that man that was.

It is hard to pull her eyes from his face, harder still to look away. But when his face sours she finds that it becomes much easier to do, that suddenly she does not want to look at him. ‘Here is the same as anywhere,’ she hears him say, and the wrongness of it snaps those pale green eyes back to his wild face. Nowhere is the same as anywhere else, not in this changed world, but something keeps her quiet, holds her tongue – and she finds that she does not want to risk pushing him further still than he chooses to be. “You should visist Tephra sometime.” She says instead, uncharacteristically quiet, soft when her eyes lift and fall from a face that remains closed off from her. “There are streams of magma that light the plains like shooting stars, it’s beautiful at night.”

Exist