my soul is in the sky
Home. She was home. In a way, anyway, though it depends on how you define home. Home, if it is the place where you are born, would be the beach for her, a place that is home only to corpses and carrion birds. Home, if it’s the place where you were raised, would be the Jungle, but that home is long gone and Rae does not mourn for its loss. Home, if it’s the place you choose, well, she doesn’t have one of those. Home, for Rae, is not a place, not really. Not unless the sky can be a place. Home is everywhere for her, wherever the wind takes her. Rae was born of lighting and the sky, and she knew no other way to live but at its beck and call.
Where Rae was made of the sky, touched by its uncontrollable nature and the blue of a perfect, clear day, her twin had been made of the earth. Though he carried their parent’s electric in his veins, he’d been made like the mountain, unmovable, unshakeable. He’d followed her briefly, but then he’d found a home and stayed. Rae, though she loved her brother, could not stay. They parted easily, knowing he would be there and that she would find him when the wind brought her there again, as it would in its own time. She’d never called one place home, and still, she wasn’t sure she ever would. The idea of settling unnerved her, but there was something beautiful in being back in the place where she began. The land hummed in her veins and the wind sung in her ears a chorus of home, even as the sky beckoned her back into its loving embrace.
Nothing was as she left it. Death and disease hung in the air. The lands she knew as a child were gone, replaced by strange landscapes filled with strange faces she did not know. It had not been so many years, but change happened quickly, swiftly. Time, for that matter, moved differently in different lands, and so what was only five years for her may have been far longer here. In fact, it certainly was, though she has little idea how much time has truly passed since she left Beqanna as a babe, just old enough to be left on her own. Foolish girl she’d been then, and foolish girl she was now, depending on who you asked. Most found her nature to be foolish, to come and go and simply not care about creating roots. Roots belonged to her brother though, not her. They were two halves of a whole. He was the tree, the thing that stayed and flourished and grew. She was the wind that blew through the leaves and took them on their way.
She swoops into the meadow, more bird than horse in her movements, one of the few places unchanged since her departure. Even she is changed since her birth, the wild magic of the world splashing blue into her hair, a color that did not run in the family. The rest of her looked so like her mother though; if it weren’t for the wings and the touch of sky blue, she might be mistaken for Rhy. Rae was not her mother though and never would be, not that she could know what her mother had been like. She’d been half of the cause of her mother’s death, though she felt no guilt having been unable to control her power in the womb. Still, she would grieve the loss of a mare she’d wanted to know, would have been privileged to know. Perhaps, if her parents hadn’t been dead upon her entry into this world, Rae might have understood the concept of roots, but without them the sky became the only home she cared about. The sky that gave her its power and called to her, always.
Today though, she finds the earth, walking land that is familiar and not all at once, wondering what her old home – new home? – might have in store for her. How long would she stay in one place before the sky called her up and away again, before the wind changed her course?
rae