Perhaps it had been foolish of Holocene to so completely trust her new friend, but Ellie does not end up taking a bite out of her after all. She does not tear the leaves free from Holocene’s flesh. She does not snap the twigs of her mane. She does not harm her, which makes Holocene giddy with pleasure.
She will not always be so naive, the autumn thing. She will learn the hard way that not everyone can be trusted so implicitly. There will be plenty of creatures in the world who will want to make her hurt. But she is awash in the folly of youth for now, the soft glow of this shared kindness.
She reaches out to bump the winged filly’s shoulder in turn. It is solid, like her father’s. She is a real, tangible thing. (And Holocene is, too, but her realness is something altogether different. She is not solid in the same way that they are solid. She is solid in the same way the canopy of trees overhead is solid, swaths of blue sky filtering through the gaps.)
The bottom half of her legs still flicker in and out of focus but she is concentrating too fiercely on other things to notice. She tilts her head, thinking hard. Does she have a preference? She thinks Ellie could call her ‘crazy’ and she’d answer to it just the same. But she rolls her shoulders in that same leaf-rustling shrug and says, “Holly works. It sounds kind of like Ellie. Ellie and Holly. I think we could be best friends.”
She says it without a trace of self-consciousness, unaware that this is not the sort of thing that is meant to be declared so casually.
@[Elegance]