paint it black; any

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

Morning finds her awake and restless, perched and leaning at the edge of the ocean in the same way a flower reaches for the sun. Her eyes are distant, clouded, half-hidden beneath the furrowing of a dark apricot brow. There are a thousand questions that rattle and clack like stones trapped in her chest – a thousand questions that chase sleep from her eyes and coax her out into the glow of copper and gold dawn.

Silently and without warning, she leaps into the ocean. But before the waves can reach up to grasp her, to pull her close and below with the bits of shell and tornados of sand that dance beneath the surface, she unfurls those wings to catch her. They are no longer the mousy copper and white feather of barn owl wings, smooth and soft when they widen to push the air beneath them – instead they are of dragon wings, strong and sleek and a shade of deep yellow like marigolds blossomed beneath the sun. Where bone splits the gold membrane and talons curl like steel teeth, the scales are as rubies, unforgiving and red.

In moments Tephra is gone and there is only the endlessness of the ocean, blue and black and bruised in its deepest parts. But it is not this solitude she is searching for and so she continues on, held high aloft by the billowing of such strange, unnerving wings. When the meadow comes into view, green and brown and white with the incoherency of colors melted haphazardly together, those wings brace and still, holding her until her feet are close enough to feel the sponginess of spring and damp earth beneath her.

She lands at a run, her head thrown back and wildness trapped in the pounding of her chest. For awhile, she is content to race, to feel the new warmth of spring against her face and the give of the ground beneath the pounding of feathered feet. But a flash of something dark and familiar out of the corner of her vision pulls her back, and she slows to make out the heavy shape of someone she had not seen since summertime.

“Lior!" She calls the moment his name takes shape on her tongue, a smile brightening the indigo of a delicate mouth. It takes only a few strides to close the distance between them, a few strides and she is at his side and running her nose along the seams of those enormous dragon wings. “These are new.” She says with a grin, coming back around to touch her nose once in greeting to the curve of that heavy black jaw. In the language of wings, her own lift and fall in their arrogant way, unfurling wickedly in the light of the sun pooling around them. “Are you any good with them yet?” There is a challenge in the gleaming of those pale green eyes that dance across his face, a wildness in the smile that plays with the corners of those indigo lips. “Show me.” Her wings unfurl to their fullest, red and gold and wild, and she is in the sky once more, looking back only once to make sure he was following.

Exist