They’ve carved out a home for themselves at the heart of the Island, nestled so safe among the river and trees beneath the shadow of the nearest mountain. To Luster, and she often wonders if Merry might feel the same way, it still doesn’t feel like home. She misses the new forests of Taiga, misses their fire-carved den that had been home to them for so long. She had raised Merry there between those wooden walls, had watched him grow from boy to teen, so dark and beautiful and wholly perfect.
But would they go back to that place if the plague was ever cured and the land was safe again? Or would this place be to Dark and Dusty what Taiga was to her and Merry. The uncertainty of it feels like a knot in her chest and she takes a sudden deep breath as though it might loosen the tension pulling there. There were other reasons too, of course. Friends she had found again, Kharon, and the fear that someday they might all go their separate ways. The Islanders felt like family now, how could she ever leave them.
She is distracted when Dark and Dustov bound past, their little brushy manes like dark mohawks behind them. It brings a smile immediately to her lips, a blossoming sensation of joy flushing heat through her chest. She had made them. She, so broken and dark, a perfect disaster, had created something so beautiful. Something so perfect. The best parts of her, and the best parts of him.
It was impossible not to feel regret for the way things had happened, for the dark and hurt that tainted something that should have only been so beautiful, the embarrassment of believing in something so completely, the realization of being wrong. But it was easier when she could watch them play together like this, when she could see where her blue collided with his white and his stars. His ferocity in the boy so determined to rid their clearing of pesky bugs. His eyes on their daughters face, black and beautiful as night. They could have never belonged to anyone else, no one would have made them so perfect. She could never regret that.
A sound, a sensation, the feeling of being watched. Something tickles along her spine, pulling quietly at her intuition as she turns abruptly to peer into the trees across the way with her magic spilling like wet sunshine across her skin. She doesn't say a word, nothing to alarm the twins while they play and pounce, while Dark hides butterflies in the soft down of her mane.
There is only one person who can call to her light like that.
