gleam
i will rearrange the stars
pull them down to where you are
She knows she is dreaming when the world starts tremble. But she leaps up anyhow, those wide eyes turned to the walls of the cave as they weep rock and clay down their vibrating sides. She is no stranger to the oddness of nightmares, to the fear that builds, even now, in the pit of that wasted, delicate belly. These nightmares curl around her in the dark as her brother should have done, would have done, if they had not been pried apart by warring parents - by lies and greed and wickedness,betrayal, she had seen swirl in strange color across their skin.
She means to wait until this strange quivering stops, until the ring of dusk at the mouth of this cave is still and solid instead of fuzzy with motion.Until mother comes and prods her awake so that those quiet whimpers can fade back to a guarded silence in the depths of her chest. But it does not stop and mother does not come, so she steps outside and into the dimness of deep evening to find the only world she has ever known writhing in its death throes.
Not a dream.
The ground heaves, a breathing giant she cannot fathom, spires of dust and dirt rising like red from a severed artery. There is no one around, there never is. Only she and mother and the ancient stars that cling to her skin - the ones mother fusses over and runs lips across until something darker pulls her away again. Except now it is only she and the stars and a buckled wasteland come undone.
Another shudder in the rock beneath her feet throws her forward and she falls hard, a tangle of pale silver and tawny, delicate and gangly and avian in her frailty. She whispers a breathless sound, a soft oomph with the echo of a whimper that contorts her face as she struggles to stand again, lurching awkwardly when the world groans and heaves again. A word lodges in her throat, a cry swallowed for its irrationality. Mama. But she remembers being forced into water when she barely knew how to walk, remembers the burns across her belly, being herded back into the cave alone when there should have been two.
The word dies on her lips, broken and brittle and turned to dust.
Instead she turns, runs, finds that the mountains seem lower or maybe this heaved and dying place is buckled higher, because nothing is where she remembers, nothing where she left it.
The mountain scoops her up into the night sky, plucks her from Pangea even as the land pitches and sinks and water swells and swallows her entire childhood. Horror bubbles in her belly at so much dark and wet, at the roiling waves that lick and churn and consume. “Mama.” She does say this time, the whisper of starlight, silver and trembling and sinking through dark She couldn’t lose mama, couldn’t be the only one left. Not when she had lost her twin as he crumpled unnoticed in the sand behind them, not when father had chased them (mother) back, telling them (her) to get out. She darted forward searching for that flash of gold and burning wings, but the water continues to rise, still hungry, still searching, and she is forced back and turns again, running until she has crossed the mountain and half-raced, half-fallen back down the other side and into the kind of world she has only ever known in her dreams.
There are trees everywhere, trunks wider than she is long, and she can make out the gleam of orange and red and gold leaves in the starlit glow of her pulsing silver skin. It is in this way that she wanders, slower now, damp in the hips and the shoulders with her fear, bruised and dazed by a world come undone that still feels as though it must be a dream, a nightmare. Her eyes stay on the branches above, wide with wonder and awe, softening when she catches glimpses of the stars between the leaves and the nebulae in her skin flare bright with pleasure.
She does not notice when the dirt and grass change to sand underfoot, only notices that the trees are gone and there are stars everywhere, the sky a mouth of diamond studded dark yawning openly at her. It is only when her front hooves touch the water and it splashes against her ankles that her eyes finally drop to find a large pond unfurled before her. She has exactly one second to appreciate the night sky trapped and reflected back in it before fear pushes her back and against a pile of large irregular boulders that she huddles beside. So much water, it was everywhere. At least Pangea is dry and dusty - was dry and dusty. Was?
She makes a small sound of distress, a quiet whimper that trembles in her chest as she shrugs deeper into the shallow stone alcove. Her legs crumple and she sinks into the dark. She means to hide, to close her eyes and wake up in the dusty cave to mamas insistent prodding, but it is decidedly difficult for a star to be invisible in the night - let alone a million stars, bright and infinitesimal and draped across the skin of something small and silver and uncertain. But she finds she cannot look away from the water, cannot stop the shivers that race through that delicate avian body as fear flares and shock deepens and night cools the places sweat had dampened.
In that dark, rippling surface she can remember her first moments. Can remember opening her eyes and taking a breath - so many breaths. It had been warm when she huddled against her brother and they found mamas belly together, nursed until mama grew impatient and herded them away, hurried them from Pangea to Tephra so that they could be pried apart. She forced them to swim when they could barely stand, didn’t notice when those flaming wings scalded their shoulders and bellies and burned such new flesh. That was how Gleam learned to use her stars like a shield, pull them close and safe around her. She whimpers again, a breathless kind of sound, pries that wide-eyed gaze from the quiet water and severs the memories where they unfurl. Not now, not now.
She pulls her legs in tighter, tries to push back further beneath the rock ledge because at least it was familiar, a small stone place - tight and dark and lonely. Like the cave she had been born and raised in, kept in so that father wouldn’t find her. But that was silly, has always seemed silly. Father did not want her, only Gloam, else he would have come for her. Would have kept mother from dragging her back out across an ocean she could not swim. “No,” she says, a soft pleading sound she buries in her forelegs when she leans down to hide her face, hide from a night of madness and impossibility. It is only when she hears a noise somewhere nearby, a whoosh or a rustle or the wind in the leaves, that she looks up again with wide uncertain eyes that swirl with rust and dusk, the mottled orange of ancient galaxies.
