so we let our shadows fall away like dust
She drifts as the leaves do, tethered for so long to their branches and in love with the wind, with the promise of flight and freedom, only to find it is not flying but falling as they drift down to settle with all the other broken promises. Once, she had thought she found a place, her place, some semblance of comfort in a world she was learning did not often allow for such things. It was a home beneath the perpetual autumn, a cave beneath that, a man who was a friend, who was more and nothing all at once. But she learned as all leaves do, what it is to fall, to come undone.
Maybe she was still falling.
She is with her parents when Djinni’s call comes, and at first she makes no move to answer it. But she can feel the shadows creeping closer, dark fingers climbing up her forelegs and reaching for that broken thing inside her chest and so she turns, moves, if only to outrun it. It is easy enough to slip through the forest, easy enough to remember the trails that cut through it as her feet have travelled them a hundred times in recent weeks. It takes only seconds for her to find the clearing with the irregular rock, only an instant to find the grullo and bangled mare perched near the top with bright eyes and an absent smile. It takes even less time to remind herself not to look for a different face, a dark face, one that even now starts to pull free of her memories and take shape.
She blinks, flinches softly, and his face is gone again.
But she knows, too, that it is possible, even likely, that the deepwater stallion will join his Queen atop the rocks, and suddenly his face is branded in the bottoms of her eyes. Stern, dark, distant.
As if to combat it, she settles beside a man who is his opposite, bright and white, gleaming, the only contrast of color the deep mahogany spots scattered irregularly like stars across his skin. She doesn’t recognize him, but in truth she recognizes few – she has been neglectful in meeting her fellow Sylvans. It is something she knows she must remedy, but it has been easier to hide away, to conceal herself in that false-safety of distance.
She is quiet when Djinni speaks, turning a quiet face up to the man beside her when the grullo mare introduces him as Zai, and then flinches when her own name is paired with a similar gesture. She doesn’t want to feel any eyes on her skin, not now, threadbare and ugly. This isn’t the Luster they should first know. But instead she is only quiet, softening with the hint of a smile and a dip of that delicate head toward Djinni. She says nothing, but nothing is asked of her, and so she sinks readily back into the silence, listening.
There are several who voice their thoughts or their interest, including the stallion at her side but this time she doesn’t steal another sidelong glance at him. Only when they have quieted does she speak, soft as always, silver and fragile like stars thrown across a night sky. “I wouldn’t mind visiting other lands.” The offer comes easily, perhaps too easily, and she is glad that Djinni will not know the heat that flushes her skin beneath the blue, quieted because she knows the grulllo will guess anyway. Of course Luster was eager to disappear again, at least this could be of some use to Sylva. She pauses though, considering, and then adds almost hesitantly, “I wouldn’t mind learning how to fight though, if someone would teach me.”
There isn’t violence in her heart, nor is there anger or hatred, but there is a desperate need to protect those she loves, defend those she has met, and she thinks maybe, maybe that is enough.
