so we let our shadows fall away like dust
It doesn’t matter that she had wanted to stay, that she had wanted him to find a way to convince her not to go. There was nothing he could have done or said, no amount of kisses traced by memory over the angles of her face that would have kept her feet from running. It was an impossible hope, an empty hope, that treacherous reflex of alove that she would always feel for the deepwater stallion. But she had dared to want it anyways.
It hadn’t mattered, though.
With his back turned she had slipped away, held in place only by his eyes, only by that fierce way he had of watching her. She slipped easily through the trees, unhindered by rock and root, flowing like wet sunshine across a world of perpetual autumn. She didn’t slow for the unevenness at the edge of the mountain, didn’t slow for the soft pines or a ground made from their needled flesh. She didn’t even stop for the forest, didn’t tuck herself away in the cave she had spent most of her childhood in, hidden safely from a world that would only watch and wonder and pry at the bruises in her quiet eyes.
Instead she ran until the burn in her lungs matched the fire in her chest, until sweat was damp on her shoulders and in the hollows of her hips, until there was a wildness in her eyes that could only be blamed on the pain and the hurt and the coming undone. She ran until running wasn’t enough, until it stopped helping, until the agony in her chest caught up with her and latched on, buried in the soft of her flesh like gleaming metal burrs. But when she slowed, when she stopped, she noticed him curled against the earth.
Her heart thunders, instantaneous, but this new agony is different, repurposed, somehow easier and so she bends into it willingly. One, two, three steps across the meadow and towards him, approaching from behind where his eyes have not yet spied her, and he rises. Even at this distance she can pick out the near-white armor, sharp against the black, etched in his blood just as it had been before. Her neck twinges, a sharp pain in the memory of an old scar on her neck, in a place beneath her mane where his teeth had buried themselves beneath such delicate blue.
It is enough to make her stop, to push doubt through the network of veins like bare branches beneath her skin.
Blinking, she looks away, but when she looks back again her chest tightens of its own volition.
Two others have joined him, one blue and white and beautiful, familiar in a way she cannot name. The other a bird before he lands, deep black and handsomely feathered, a horse when he stops beside the mare. He is a bright green, the color of new grass, of spring, but he keeps the black wings and they settle against him in sharp contrast. He does not seem familiar.
Her chest tightens again and there is something about the way they watch him, about the quiet intensity of the woman and the easy way the green one stays beside her, accidentally predatorial to his core, that makes her worry over the bone-clad stallion which such heavy, broken shoulders.
It draws her to Dovev’s side immediately.
She manipulates light and shadow easily, pushing the dark where she needs it, twisting it around the scattering of individual trees so that when she appears from behind him, pushing her mouth possessively against that thin, beautiful shoulder, it is as though she appeared from thin air. Shadow, as it were. Her teeth find this jaw, gentle pressure to coax his face towards her, and then she lifts her mouth to the curve of his ear, leaving a kiss in the soft place just behind it as though they were more than strangers, more than the scar he had carved into her neck. “You have an excellent nose for deception.” Her voice is silver and sharp, whisper-soft, but she suspects he will know the pain in it by memory. He has heard it from her before.
She slips beneath his neck and against his chest, turning in a soft u-shape towards the blue mare and the green stallion. At this closeness she is startled by the familiarity of the woman, of her face and her eyes and even the shade of her skin. It is the same as Luster’s own. But she hides the surprise easily, forcing it behind the pain, behind the hurt, burying it in the sharp angles of a wildly beautiful face. Her eyes are bright, luminous when the drift back and forth between the pair, curious when she turns to touch her mouth to the soft hollow of skin just behind the corner of his lips. Possessive, worried for him, and still she isn’t sure why. “Who are your friends?”
