09-07-2017, 07:42 PM
the incense that sun on prairie offers to sky
Spark recognizes this strength in him because she sees it in herself despite how much she doesn’t want to. A strength like that means she has changed too, but then she has always known she has since the moment the fire came in through the door left open wide by the sickness that ravaged her and it cleaned her up, built her anew like he’d been built anew by ice and a polar bear’s soul. In some small way, she could relate to him and in other ways, she couldn’t because she had never endured the likes of the things he had had to endure and that made him stronger in her eyes.
She flashes him a dazzling smile, coming closer again now that she has settled her flames down. Her nose finds his shoulder and she rubs the side of her face against it; “I found myself again but it hasn’t been easy. He comes and he goes, and I still love him but I feel like sometimes, it isn’t enough. Our love won’t hold either of us together for very long.” Spark pulls her black-bonneted head back from his side to look him in his good eye, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to talk your ears off.” The expression on her pale face is sheepish. She’s never confided this much in someone. Never expected to. Never planned to. But she feels as if a heavy stony weight has fallen off her back because someone else knows now.
He looks down at her, as if he’s surprised that she would even bother to touch him after the things he’s told her. She looks up at him with her mismatched eyes that mark as Offspring’s child though she hasn’t been a child since the days when she came up to his big black knees, but something in the way that the chestnut stallion looks at her now makes her feel small and oddly safe. “No,” she murmurs from where she has tucked herself into his side, something that is so characteristic of Spark to do with those that she trusts. “I’m sure that was not his intention at all but it’s funny how we have a way of changing the intent of things.”
Spark can see that he goes back inside himself to a place that she cannot follow. Wouldn’t even dream of following him into. She gives him time, her nose still tickled by the hairs of his mane after her initial sneeze and that seems to be what snaps him back to her side, smiling and dazzling her with the warmth in his eyes. His muzzle touches her, they share a breath or two as he asks about her fire and she senses his inherent need for distraction from the memories that are still close to the surface to be forgettable. Spark though is wary, deep down. She’s never told anyone - not her father, not her twin brother - how exactly it is she came by her trait.
But she musters up the nerve to do so now because she feels a strange kinship to Ledger and she owes him the truth if nothing else. Maybe the truth needs to be told now instead of staying bottled up inside of her for so long. She wonders if the fire will go out of her though with the telling because the secret of how she came by it is what keeps her igniting into flame all the time, or so she tells herself. Spark doesn’t really know how she can combust and be that pure thing of flame, just that she can and it always came easier on the heels of anger. She looks at him one last time before tucking herself even closer to his side, needing the solidness of his flesh as support for something she has never breathed a word of to anyone.
Where to begin?
It all comes flooding back into her mind and she doesn’t it, but her fur starts to smoke and there are little sizzling noises along the back of her spine.
“I fell in love when I was little. He was older than I was, much older but not so much as to be an issue for us. Like me, he had a sibling - a sister, that he was close to and he understood the bond between my brother and I. He could bring the stars down from the sky and spin them around his skin. It was magic…” here, she trails off, remembering and her voice is a girlish murmur touched with awe as if she can still see it for the first time, that teal glow around his handsome face, the constellations he made and named for her - after her, even.
She recovers, still unaware that she is smoking and sizzling and that she has instinctively put some distance between herself and Ledger now. “We never stayed together much, always drifted apart but somehow, always found one another again as I grew up - as I became a mare. Ours was a sweet love, innocent in the beginning. Until his sister showed up and everything changed. She came back, thinking he’d love her because she had two foals with her - twins, his and hers. Somehow she had tricked him into thinking she was I and he thought we were having a baby together.”
Spark gnashes her lip between her teeth, feeling the hot sweep of fury through her as she remembers the proud triumphant look Alight had worn on her face, her wings afire above the backs of the foals, singing their newborn skins. She blinks, unable to dispel the image burned into the back of her mismatched eyes - one black, the other red, and the red seems to hold a ring of fire in it. Her tail bursts into flame and lashes at her pale flanks. If only she had been this mare of fire back then! But she had been meek and sad, looking between them and looking at the twins that should have been her own but weren’t.
“He believed that the night he’d spent in a mare’s company had been with me but it was her disguised by powerful magic as me. They bickered, he cast her aside, told her what she did was wrong and that he loved me but he loved those children more, and I don’t blame him for that. He took the colt and she dragged the filly back into the sea with her. I never saw them again. Not her or the girl. He came back with his son, still looking for the lost little sister but things aren’t the same. How can they be? But after that night and before he came back, I… I gave up.”
Spark didn’t know how else to explain and for a moment, the fire and the heart goes right out of her. “I wanted to die.” She pinned the chestnut stallion with a stare of hard determination. “When you feel like your heart has been ripped from your chest, what point is there in living still? I didn’t think I’d ever recover. So I stopped drinking water. It tasted like sand. I stopped eating grass. It tasted like sand. Everything was bland and meaningless to me then. So I became sick, too weak to do anything other than lie there with my legs folded beneath me and dream and I kept dreaming of that night, of my anger, and of the volcano at my back.”
Here, her voice takes an almost reverent tone as if it was the volcano of Tephra that saved her. She never knew where the fire came from - it was just there all of a sudden. “I sweated. I dreamed. I knew I was going to die then something happened, I changed. Anger swept through me hot as magma and I felt like I was becoming volcanic, like I was being cleansed of all pain and hate, even the love too, seemed like it burnt up to ash inside me. When my brother found me, nosed my face and my neck, something snapped in me and I shed this flesh for pure flame and freedom.”
She flashes him a dazzling smile, coming closer again now that she has settled her flames down. Her nose finds his shoulder and she rubs the side of her face against it; “I found myself again but it hasn’t been easy. He comes and he goes, and I still love him but I feel like sometimes, it isn’t enough. Our love won’t hold either of us together for very long.” Spark pulls her black-bonneted head back from his side to look him in his good eye, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to talk your ears off.” The expression on her pale face is sheepish. She’s never confided this much in someone. Never expected to. Never planned to. But she feels as if a heavy stony weight has fallen off her back because someone else knows now.
Spark