[private] So You Came All This Way For... [Adna]

[adna]

and if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones
‘cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs

She does not know why she’s here.

To be fair, on most days Adna does not know why she is where she ends up. Her days remain disconnected and sporadic, and she is left walking the line of anger and rage and utter sorrow. She feels it in her bones—the loss, the confusion—and it scrapes her clean, leaves her empty and wanting. This echo chamber of a heart drives her from whatever land she could consider a home (the truth is that Loess is not a home, not anymore) and toward the north where the rocky land becomes covered with trees.

When she reaches the border of it, she pauses, lifting a scaled leg and then gently dropping it.

She has no right to be here, she thinks, and she frowns as she looks into the shadows and to the land where others live. She has no right to trespass or walk further, even if it’s to cut through the border and make her way to Tephra where she has heard her family now lives. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, imagining her mother and father and siblings in the golden glow of their love, in the gentleness of it.

That had once been her reality; she had once been the spoiled firstborn.

Then she had been the loving older sister.

Now she is the self-imposed orphan, a woman without roots because she forcefully yanked them out. She clenches her jaw to keep the pain from washing over her features and swallows hard, trying to ignore the tears that start in the back of her throat. Instead, she looks through the mist and sees the approaching form of a golden stallion. She’s never seen him before—which is not odd since she has met so few before—and she stiffens slightly, realizing that she is a stranger on the border of a strange land without a reason.

Her fangs touch her bottom lip and she takes a step back, ready to leave.

But for some reason, she stays.

adna

we're setting fire to our insides for fun
collecting pictures from a flood that wrecked our home

@[Aten]