I’d been made during a dark hour, when my father fought my mother but long before I’d ever come to hear about <i>that</i> story, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I was born during a dark hour as well. Night surrounded us, my mother and I, and I slipped out into a world that smelled like rich perfume. It was cold that night. A leftover wind from the mountaintops swept across the starlight wildflowers I was curled up in and made me shiver. That was my first movement. Then for the first time I felt my mother, bathing me and bringing the blood under my skin rushing to the surface. From then on I would think of her as my one source of warmth. She was my mother after all. The one horse I would come to depend on, not even knowing how much danger I was already in.<br><br>When her nose and her wet tongue brushed over my cheek I blinked and opened my eyes, staring up past the waving flyaways of her blue and white mane to where the moon hung low in the sky. It was almost gone, just a thin crescent of weak light that stood out among the stars, but I marveled at it anyway. I marveled at <i>everything</i>, desperately looking around as if I were afraid that I’d miss seeing something magical. Almost as if I knew that soon enough these infant memories would disappear.<br><br>And while I was marveling, something marvelous happened.<br><br>My mother named me. She called me a word, <font color=#fff>“Kestrell.”</font> And she tethered me to Beqanna and her bloodline forever. I couldn’t understand the gravity of it all, but I responded anyway. I turned my chin and gave her the full view of my own moon-marking, a black crescent that curved under my pale eyes, and when she touched me afterward I felt another warm surge of energy. My mother’s power was like electricity surging through my veins, empowering me to <i>leap</i> up from where I lay in the grass and dirt excitedly. All of a sudden I was <i>alive</i>, burning with the force of a thousand suns and feeling like my heart could explode out of my chest!<br><br>I wanted to move, to run, to flare my wings and find my voice but I could only stand and tremble for a moment, waiting for my knees to lock into place, and when the trembling had stopped I found that I wasn’t the one trembling anymore! The ground underneath us was, and I glanced up at the night sky again to see a strange, light plume of smoke blooming across the heavens miles and miles away. The trembling stopped, but not a moment later the wind picked up again until it was strong enough to blow down the field of peonies. My mane and tail fluttered, and I flared my wings and snorted - showing that strange cloud and the wind that I wasn’t afraid!<br><br>But then I sneezed, my legs gave underneath me and I fell back into the dirt and flowers with a painful-sounding, <font color=#fff>“Umph!”</font><br>For a brief minute I was dazed by the entire ordeal. My rump hurt, and I <i>felt</i> like crying, but I blinked away the stinging tears and thought it was actually funny. I found my voice and it bubbled up into hiccups, bursting out of my mouth with little gasping laughs. <font color=#fff>“Oh Mama!”</font> I giggled and shook my big-little head, not even realizing that my black mane and tail shimmered like a night full of stars now. <font color=#fff>“Did’ja see that?!”</font> I shook my little wings with my bellyful of laughter, and a tiny dark feather drifted down to the ground. It sparkled like black tinsel.
OOC: Kestrell is claiming Glittering
OOC: Kestrell is claiming Glittering