divine places to die in; jenger-pony

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

She does not like the deep forest – has not liked it since the day she fell in among these branches to find her wings trapped in briar and bramble. But even more than she dislikes the forest she finds that she dislikes the way such resentment feels when it bubbles and sits in the pit of her stomach. So she is here now to reconcile, to forgive the branches for pulling her out of the sky, to forgive the thorns for burying their teeth in the soft skin beneath those deep russet feathers.

Exist is quiet as she slips through trees, noting how different everything looked with the life leached out of it from heavy snow and bitter cold. She hardly recognizes anything Lior had shown her when found her trapped and set her free again, not even the paths they had use to trace back to the meadow, worn and faded like an eraser dragged through the dirt.

Her eyes lift to the sky for a moment, tracing the pale shapes of soft steel clouds gathering below the horizon, clouds that promised more weather, more snow. As if in reflex, her dark wings lift and widen, trapping the wind and gathering it beneath them as they do when she flies. Even when her eyes drop again, settling like smooth pieces of jade among the brown and grey of slumbering trees, her wings still stay aloft. They know what she chooses to ignore, what she tries to amend – that her place is not in these dying woods, it is with those stark steel clouds in the skies above.

There is a sound to her left, and it is not a quiet sound, not padded steps carefully concealed. It is the shuffle of legs in deep snow, the rattle of bone-dry branches pushed aside. She turns and she is curious, patient, though her wings angle forward as if they mean to see him before she can. He spills from the trees and first he is unremarkable - tall and strong and as brown as the trees had been the last time she had seen them. But when her eyes find his, when she traces the hollows of his face and finds only shadow waiting to greet her, something stutters in her chest.

It is a look she knows well – dark eyes in dark face, a mother of two children she knew not how to raise, with wounds in the deepest part of her soul that could never heal. These were her mothers eyes, Victra's eyes. It was the kind of hurt that Exist most wanted to heal, the kind of pain she most wanted to ease. But her abilities worked only on flesh and though the heart was a muscle, these wounds were not physical ones. She doesn’t notice when it happened, when her feet carried her close enough to press her face against his neck (she must, she must, he feels so familiar), but suddenly she is beside him and her wings are tucked to her ribs, her face delicate and upturned to help carry the weight of the shadows that spill from him.

“You must be a friend,” she tells him in a whisper-voice, pulling away long enough to see the dark again, “these woods keep bringing me friends. That’s how I know.” She pauses to press her nose to his shoulder again, her eyes furrowed and a frown hiding in the corners of her lips, “I’m Exist.”

Exist