You’ve made even winter a blessing, for I can wander from the hidden hollows and shadows to walk in your dull daylight. I used to dread the solstice and the long nights, the feeling of my bright summer coat thickening to a blanket. But you? You made it first that these days were the time I could spend longer beneath your thumb, then ruined it in the same fashion. Such is typical. I look for you even on a cloudy day but you never come find me, and I think I’m finally beginning to understand the arrogance and the idiocy you left planted firmly in my brain. It’s been a slow realization, a painful one, evolving day by day from a whispering fear in the back of my mind to an overwhelming truth that I could deny no longer.
I was never special.
Not to you, not to them, not to anyone.
Not to
you.
I don’t know what it was that led me to believe I was anything more than a mere insect to you, one you only briefly allowed to land before you tried to rip off my wings. When I fluttered away, unharmed, you not only did not presume to follow, you almost instantly forgot that I had ever existed. Because I barely had, in your world. If there is any consolation to be had, let it be that I am not alone; blood and bone was sacrificed so freely in your name and you paid them even less attention. Maybe I was prettier by some arbitrary margin. Maybe I was more foolish. Maybe there was already a tear in my wings that led you to believe I would be easier to destroy than the others. A petty part of me hopes that it did hurt, on some level that your favorite moth fluttered away, but reality tells me that I should know better.
Because you have not hunted me at all.
And it doesn’t comfort me in the slightest.
These ramblings distract me, not only in and of themselves but by way of a sluggish gait, glassy eyes in a head that remains low and uninterested. I wander through pathless forest and empty gray meadows, cold and pointless in your wake. Minute purpose is assigned to me through the addition of a pulse to my veins, though the growth does not show yet on my stocky frame. I wonder if there might be a life there after the embrace of the wolf child, but push these thoughts aside in favor of apathy and self pity.
A sound rents the numbness of the air, unnatural and strange. It piques my interest against this backdrop of listless behavior and causes me to stop, suspicious eyes searching the world around. I see her then, all bones and bare skin, wandering about with her eyes on the crows.
Bird-brain, I thought, though it doesn’t occur what one might say about someone who
watches a supposed bird-brain with such odd curiosity. I hear her speak, and such strange behavior even further interests me. Not that I’m one to judge odd girls talking to the sky (we certainly have our reasons), but this was no prayer, no knowledge. Or was it? Is she really babbling, or does she know something I do not?
Unsure what to make of this, the spotted mare followed and slowly approached the other.
“I would hope my secrets are never entrusted to those gossips.” She paused several steps back and allowed her eyes to trace the pink lines of flesh cut into the girl’s coat, the way her skin was stretched over her bones. A secret corner of her mind wondered if she knew who was responsible for those wounds, but a twinge of unhappiness from the thought led her to banish it. We are far too distant to report something so strange, for he is a busy man.
And surely, not so cruel as to let a lamb escape once she’s seen the knife.
naoi
