Fear is not something she is familiar with. It is simply not in her blood. A similar notion would linger, from time to time, fleeting glimpses of what she could be. It was a flame dancing just behind a black curtain. Never to touch, never to burn. Still, it is enough to temper the cold, the wasteland she wonders if she has become. So it is not quite fear that she feels when a gust of wind trembles past her, heavy with the scent of the other. Were she built for any reasonable longevity, she would have learned better by now. After all, this is not a place for fairytales or happy endings. While she is feral, yes—to the extent of the wildflowers tangled in her hair, a degree more unkempt than before—her body has not grown tough like the wilderness she has tucked herself into. This makes her vulnerable, and the only question is whether she does not know, or no longer minds. Too willowy to be among horses, not slim enough to assimilate into a colony of deer.
Ethenia slowly lifts her head from the rushing water, shifts her weight from one leg to another, and exhales. She tilts her head only a few degrees before the shadows of his silhouette collide with her line of sight. A dream, is this a dream? There is familiarity in the stallion, but he is paler than she remembers. From where she stands, the clear silver moonlight creates the illusion of a soft halo around him. Is he an angel, then? She remembers the stories she was told as a child; not all angels are good omens, and so he could be the angel of death, come finally to take her away. A cruel trick of light played by the gods (though she stopped searching for them long ago).
Angels and demons, dreams within dreams; who is she to decide what is real and what is not? Her isolation has both given her sight and made her blind. She is riddled with dreams and nightmares so vivid she can hardly tell when she is waking and when she is not. Her dreams clash against what she sees in the day, align and clash and align all over again. Waves breaking against the shores of what sanity she has left. To be sure, she is no prophet; she is not festooned with any true magic (her family cast her out for the suspicion). Still, she always felt as if there were a divide between them, a bridge that could not be gapped. A breathing sentinel from the afterlife, gasping through from the other side.
His voice almost startles her, for the angels and ghosts in her dreams rarely spoke out against their oath of silence. ”You remember me…” she repeats quietly to herself, considering for a moment. But how, how could he remember her if he were not real? If he were angel, demon, ghost? Has he collected her before and brought her back to life? Is that when this chaos in her mind began? She does not recall going between realms, but is that a memory that could be held? “From this world, or another?” She poses the question genuinely, the slow curiosity of conversation returning after the embers had long lost their light. And in spite of all familiarity in the darkness of his eyes, she decides that yes, this must be a dream. It is this conviction that stills her heart, that steadies her uncertainty.
“If this is a trick, tell me what you will have with me. Tell me what you have come for. Your eyes are the same but you are not.” The words unfurl in a trill voice, somewhat wavering but soft, still, in her defeat. She does not recognize him as the dappled grey stallion she once touched. Somewhere along the way, it became easier for her to believe in hallucinations, in visions, in ghosts (she thinks she might be one herself).
For it was her dreams that held her when the world could not.
