The river shivered and shook like mercury as an easterly wind fought its current, the full moon’s face broken and distorted on the water’s skin. The high-hanging disc, with its clear white light, threw cavernous shadows; from trees, from scrubs and rocks, hillocks and hollows. Deep shadows that mocked the night’s darkness and swallowed it with their lightlessness, turning whatever they touched into indiscernible blackness, even the lively surface of the river.
The night-shadows crawled and crumbled across the water, gobbled up the ground. It seemed as if they would swallow the moon itself. But even this ‘seeming’ was banished by another bright light.
She flew resplendent with sky-wide wings of argent light, swooping along the winding course of the river. She caught the updrafts and downdrafts, delighting in the playful breezes even though, with wings of starlight, she could pay them no heed.
*Mystere! Mystere!*
She heard the stars call her name, blew them a timbrous nicker in reply as she climbed, higher, higher, higher. The stars came no closer but winked back at the silvery mare. She climbed and climbed but the air became thinner, freezing her breath with an ice-hot pain. Reluctantly she stopped, dropped her lustrous wings of light, and began to plummet back towards the silver thread of the river.
She was a pearlescent meteor as she hurtled down, pulling threads of starlight into a crackling ball. Just as it seemed it might be too late, that she would hurtle into the earth to leave only a crater, the light spread, silent and silver-webbed, back into wings. The meteor became a mare once again, braking rapidly, swooping to land soft in the mercury water like an oversize swan.
Mystere paddled to the edge of the river, emerging onto a soft sandy shore beside a willow that hung hump-backed over the water, its fingers of leaves pulling in the silvery water. Mystere shook the water from her coat, her opaline eyes looking back to the sky. A lilting laugh escaped from her dark skinned muzzle, while around her darted spots of starlight, playful as fireflies.
*Mystere*
Eternal Star Child
@[Chemdog]