She waits until they are asleep, her brother and sister together, her mother and father in the grotto with the healers. Waits until the world is dim and the sky is lit with cold, silver torches. Until she isn’t needed any more.
Then she is gone.
With an impossible grace she canters towards the edge of volcanic cliffs where they overlook the ocean, unfurls her wings, and leaps. She is careful to push off hard, thrust herself away from the stone so the wind cannot thrash her there as it might’ve when she were small and delicate and all overly large feather wings. It is unlikely anything would happen now that she is strong and grown and as wiry and any wild thing is, but it is a habit she has never bothered to break - perhaps even a tradition she finds some comfort in. The rush of adrenaline in that second of falling over black nothingness before her wings catch the wind and carry her off.
She is aware of everything, always. The thunder-crash of black waves below, the swells tipped with glittering diamond starlight before they fall and break against each other. The stink of fish and brine that, for the most part, keep her well out of the ocean. It has been different lately though, with no other way to rinse her fathers blood where it flecks like flat rubies across her skin.
Her eyes close for a second, welcome the true-dark that she has found nowhere else, and open only when she is certain the tears have been banished back into the ache from whence they were birthed. It is easy to see the resolve as it flickers across her gold and dark face, see it in the way her wings beat harder against the night, in the near-glare of those amber eyes when they sift through the night and find the tall pines of the forest swaying well beneath her.
If a corner of the world existed, she would have gone there, but instead all that waits for her are the lonely forests of old taiga. It is, admittedly, her favorite place to spend the night. She has found that most still remember what the land had been, what had happened to it. Still remember her ghosts, and leave before night finds them there. But she is too young to remember. To her, these forests, this graveyard, it is a quiet place. It is solace and sanity and everything she needs on a night like this where her heart feels as though it has beat itself to death against her ribs.
She lands, those pale cream wings folding in to settle like snow over her back, and heads for the point of the land where it stretches towards the sea. It is like white noise for her. The wind through brittle, tired branches. The waves falling over one another to race to deserted shores. Mind-numbing nothingness interrupted only by the sound of her sad, stuttered breathing as she looks out across a star-strewn night.
marble
@[laura]