She left when winter came the world turned white.
For months she had stayed in the Chamber, living among the ghosts that haunted her dreams, dreams that always turned dark and disfigured and ended with her standing beside the pit, peering down. There was a girl standing in the bottom, cloaked with shadow and something wet. She was brown and blue like Victra, and her wings were as mangled as a wind-blown moths’. A brindle stallion stood on the other side of the pit, and he too peered down inside with a chesire smile gleaming against a cruel mouth. It was when he looked up across the way to find her watching, when he pulled her inside and she fell in a tangle of wings too confined to open between narrow dirt walls, that she would wake breathless and wild-eyed until she found the shapes of her family nearby. Eventually, the nightmares subsided, returning only on the days that her wandering had carried her past the pit that still hung open like a hungry mouth. But the dark never faded from her chest, nor that sharpness from the bottoms of those pale, emerald eyes.
It was only when it became clear that Gendry would not be returning, not now, not for a long while, that she found the courage to leave. It hadn’t been love that held her back, not a lonesome yearning in a broken heart; it was the way her belly had grown in recent weeks, the way it hung solid and heavy beneath her even now as her appetite waned. But when each new day brought no news of the blood-orange stallion, no news of the one who had stolen her back from a brindled stranger who left bruises beneath her skin and shredded the wings against her back, the desire to stay faded altogether. In its place was a warning meant for a different time, yet she could not help but hear it now and heed it. ‘We can’t stay here, he might come back.’ There was a small part of her that was certain Gendry would not have left if he thought she was still in danger (smaller still when she had woke in the morning to find him gone) but the nightmares made her unreasonable, dreams of falling forever inside a dirt grave. Perhaps this was what motherhood felt like, though she couldn’t bring herself to ask either of her parents about this relentless worry clawing at her chest, a need to find a safer place than the one that had betrayed her.
So she slipped away in the night, bidding her family a quiet farewell, a vague farewell, before skirting pointedly around the edge of the kingdom that housed the pit. It was easy to disappear into the dark, made of night herself with dark brown dapples and deep indigo points. The shadows welcomed her eagerly and she was strangely unafraid when she unfurled those beautiful blue feather wings (wings that Raz had broken and Gendry had healed) and leapt into the sky. She stayed among the constellations until dawn cracked red and orange across a sliver of the sky just beyond the horizon. It was only with the sunlight against her back, pale and gold and watery as it rose another inch in the sky, that she finally landed amongst the white powder burying the field. Despite that she was tired, that she had spent the end of the night flying between open skies and empty mountain peaks, she kept those bright wings erect and unfurled at her withers in an almost arrogant way. They pulled attention away from the suspicious swell of her belly, from the wariness in her eyes that she tried to hide with a sharp confidence she wore like a mask. She could have folded them against her sides to hide herself completely, but doing so made her feel small, it reminded her of what had happened before when she was too slow, too cowed to react at all. So she looks around her once, twice, and even though she pretends it isn’t why she does so, she is quietly relieved to not see even a hint of brindle in the morning shadows around her.
1) field posts are horrifying
2) no chamber, also probably no tundra because i have too many there
3) kingdoms preferred, but herds could also be fun
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