She waits for the dark to come with the setting sun before emerging from the shadows. It is easier to wait until the whole world is a shadow, rather than the small pockets that exist during the day. It is easier for her to blend in – to be the monster that she is – when the stark light is not glittering off of her scales. It is easier to wake when most are asleep, to avoid the stares and scares of young and old alike when she passes by. In the dark, she is her new self. In the dark, she is free.
Some creatures are not meant for the light.
Zosma moves through the edge of the forest like the refugee she has become, with a nimble and hurried grace. The fir branches still shake as her leathery wings scrape them, dislodging needles to rain down and slide off of her sleek, reptilian body. She has taken this trail to the river every night. It is as familiar to her as the stars once were, when she lived and loved among them. Here, she makes sure she can’t see them anymore. The crowded evergreens shelter and shield her from the constellations above. They reach across the inky sky like hands (Her hands) grasping at nothing, but grasping all the same. Waiting, reaching, but never closing on anything more than dust.
Eventually, the shadows relinquish her to the winding river banks. She makes a conscious effort to focus on the glassy surface of moving water in the near distance (to not look directly up at the sky, nor to look at her reflection directly below). In this way, Zosma stills herself into nothingness. She can almost believe she is still the pale mare that fell in love with the honey-eyed woman on an island far away. She can almost forget that she is a monster that worshipped and adored a demon, only to be remade in her image and cast aside.
She pulls the shadows around her when she thinks too long like this.
They are weak things still, tendrils of fading smoke that try but fail to conceal her. She is always surprised to see them, though. Each time the black mare is yanked from her reverie, she startles to see that she has stretched some of the darkness from the forest to wrap around her. Tonight, as she loses herself in violent memories of broken angels and rabid children, they are denser than they have ever been. Zosma marvels at the way they spin around her limbs and wings quicker when she notices them, almost as if they are excited she has. A smile starts on her face for the first time in too long. But then there is a crack sounding from the woods just beside her. Too close for her to disappear again without being seen.
Zosma
@[Sid]