let your fists come undone; mandan

[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 is up with the dawn, the near-copper of her rich apricot skin reflecting the sharp pinks and oranges that stretch across the waking sky. In the fading dark, she rises from her slumber with a soft, sleepy sigh, stretches, and slips out from the cover of her stone and earth den in the belly of Tephra. Her wings unfurl at her shoulders, spreading wide and full, all soft shades of indigo feather.

Without a word she takes to the skies, settling up where the fog and mist meet to diffuse the morning light across her skin, up where she is nearly invisible to a world that still sleeps. She follows a route that is almost painfully familiar - a sweeping curve down through the field and across the meadow, and then shifts towards the forest and its tall, reaching trees. Though she does not think about it, will not look this truth in the eyes, there is a face in particular she searches for as her wings carry her low enough to feel the treetops whisper past her heels.

There was a man she met here once, a man who, despite being gone, has never truly left her. She cannot help but to wonder where he is, if he’s well and happy, if he’s moved on with his life in the time that has since stretched between them. Wonder, more selfishly, if he thinks about her the same way she thinks of him now. When it is dark and the night is lonely, when the morning brings little relief from it, does he remember how they lay curled together waiting to greet the sun?

She finds a place where the meadow reaches out to stroke the edge of the forest, where she can land without tangling her wings, where the branches are few and the grass is soft and gold, and pushes the thought away before the barbs wrapped around it can dig tighter into her heart. There is a path waiting here for her, as familiar as an old friend, and she steps onto it with a quiet sigh as her wings fold obediently to her sides.

The world within the forest is at once bright and beautiful, with leaves of ruby and topaz clinging to slender, reaching branches. She fits well in this world, a deep copper to match the trees - only the indigo on her legs and face seem out of place as even the feathers in her wings shift to match the colors of the autumn leaves overhead. Her strides are even and unhurried, those emerald eyes half-closed as the path widens around a bend into a small forest clearing, and her wings stretch wide from her withers to fill the new space.

Exist

@[mandan]