Novel
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
She watches them too. Strangers on a strange planet. All sharing a field, as though pretending to ignore each other is the most normal thing to do. Perhaps it is. Perhaps that’s all the reason they have for being on this earth. In this land. Strangers drifting passed each other, not even a nod of acknowledgement to recognize everyone doing the same exact pointless, lonely thing as you.
Novel notices, and she finds it exceedingly odd. But in the eye of the raven, everything is different. Life is so much less serious. So much less everything. It’s easier, to pretend. Easy to think that this could be the rest of her life.
But she is not a raven, not truly. Though the bird has stolen her soul, it cannot pluck away her mind so easily. And so she watches. She peers at the odd and the lonely alike, wondering. And when the boy of purple arrives in the meadow, such sad heaviness in such a forlorn package, she can wonder no longer.
The loud caw rings across the meadow, heralding her appearance. She has never been good at silence. Never been meant for invisibility. With a wild flap of her wings, a stray feather drifting away behind her, she drops to the meadow, avian head tilting as beady black eyes fixate upon the silly purple stallion (they’re all silly, truthfully. To the raven). With another loud squawk, her body lengths and elongates, shifting in what is no doubt an uncomfortable display from bird to horse.
For a moment, just the briefest second, her coat melts from orange to blue. But then it shudders and ripples and purple bleeds across her skin. Coating her until a matching color of the deepest purple graces her coat, a delicate, odd little twin to the stallion before her.
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before.