06-19-2017, 09:40 PM
the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky
Spark would laugh at discovering someone thought her dangerous. Her brother told her this, time and time again, since she acquired her fire that she was different, dangerous even and she laughed in his face before nipping his shoulder in a sisterly way to show that she was still the same old Spark that he’d always known. Spark dangerous? She’d scoff at such knowledge!
(The fire in her knows otherwise, bides its time until it can show just how dangerous it is. Fire burns, it cleanses and it kills - Spark doesn’t realize this, it burns small parts of her away, cauterizes the holes where those parts once were and she seems whole still, and unaware but all magic, even in the minutest form, has a price it exacts from the one who wields it. Spark forgets this.)
She feels him touch her in return; can feel an affection for him growing beside the interest in him, in his story. Spark wants to know why he is so taken by Tephra but reluctant to commit himself to her tribe of individuals but is wise enough not to ask - he still wore too much of his travels on his skin, could not forget how the road calls to him and she knows what that is like, having once wandered herself but there had been something - no, someone, here to come back to. Her laughter prompted his own and shook her loose from her reverie, even her mind still wandered, more so than her feet did nowadays.
“Maybe,” she concedes, smiling up at him as the wind starts to cool their backs as best as it can. Here, the wind blew a tad bit cooler than over there in the volcano’s hot glimmering shadow. Out here the sulphur still clung to the air but the sea battled it, bringing a briny note to their nostrils as her ears came forward in anticipation of the chorus of tides that they would soon hear. She had never been one for large bodies of water besides rivers that snaked through the flat open plains, but something about this sea matched the spirit inside, churning and tempestuous and both storms and tides are not so different from fire.
“You will,” Spark tells him, mustering up a measure of certainty to her assurance. She had no doubt in her mind that he’d figure it all out. It just took time, and he had to allow himself that if he could. Observant, she had caught the way his eyes looked for the edges of the land. Looking for ways out if he chose it, she imagined and still could not blame him for it. Wandering was a hard mistress, kind at times and cruel at others, but she loved her four-legged grazing children best because they moved where they willed unless something stopped them, be it fences of the wooden kind or those penning the heart in.
Spark laughs;
“Only to the sea, then you can decide what you like best about this place - the volcano, or the shoreline.” She can hear it now, singing soft and siren-like to her but the fire in her balks at it, recognizing a mortal danger to its existence and she shows it only in the slightest of hesitations before planting her feet firm on the black ash-and-sand shore. Crabs skittered away from them, disturbed no doubt by their large looming presence and she pays them no mind, nor does she caution him against their pincers (having heard tell of another mare who battled the pinching claws of one not too long ago).Spark