Brigade should be happy, but he cannot stop the way that his soul continues to shatter beneath the weight of reality. He cannot stop the way that he spends hours looking into the wilderness or studying the way that the river thrashes and feeling that strange kinship with it. He feels it like a gravity in the morning. He feels it and does not resist the way that it tugs him forward, pulling him into the endless darkness.
He does not have rhyme or reason to his path.
His antlered head swings as he levels out, as his pace picks up and his hooves thunder against the ground. The sun rises and he barely notices it. His wings turn to bramble and thorn and press to his side because he has no desire to take to the skies. Not today. Not when he needs the solid earth beneath him to remind him that he’s real. To remind himself that there’s a connection here; that he hasn’t turned to dust yet.
It is only when he reaches the river that he pauses.
The air is bitter and his lungs sting and he turns toward the water when he sees her. There is something about her—that strange, delicate sadness that catches his attention. He frowns, a movement that passes over his wild features like a storm and then washes clean. When he sees the ice begin to crack beneath her, he feels his pulse spike dangerously in his throat and he springs forward just as she flings herself backward. It’s over nearly before it began but the fear for the stranger awakens something in him.
“What were you thinking?” the words are hot and blistering and he’s spitting them before he can stop himself. He hates the way that he studies he face, the way his heart thunders in his chest.
“You can’t walk on the ice when it’s this thin. Were you trying to get yourself killed?"
BRIGADE
when I was a man I thought it ended when I knew love's perfect ache
but my peace has always depended on all the ashes in my wake