There was a time when she was bright and sweet and so beautiful, when those pale sea green eyes were so soft and her smiles so easy. She had known the innocence of a child well protected by her parents and her brother and her fathers wolves. Too protected, perhaps, too sheltered to see a world broken beyond saving, too naive to guess that she might ever become something so gruesome. Had she never left home, her heart might be more whole, fewer breaks, fewer cracks, less erosion in her aching chest. But her body would still be the same, still wholly wretched, chronically ruined.
As a baby, she had been perfectly plain. A shade of chestnut like worn, dark copper interrupted only by the white of her legs and her quiet face, of soft uneven peppering in unsymmetrical places. Flaxen hair as soft and pale as cornsilk, a shade of cream softer than downy feather. Her brother had boasted wings at his shoulders, beautiful things as fickle and changing as his stormy, wild moods. But her own shoulders had been bare, just smooth, just chestnut. So perfectly plain.
It was later that the antlers came in, at first just soft nubs on her brow until they grew up through her skin into something gruesome and beautiful. A crown of bone and ragged flesh. But she hadn’t minded because there had been an identical set on her brothers brow - something far more beautiful than either of theirs on her mothers brow. It didn’t stop there, though, and soon there were new hard knots spread all across her delicate copper body. Hard ridges and long lines that made her cry out in soft whimpers when she tried to race beside her beautiful, wild brother. Those knots grew and grew, becoming more painful and more defined until those, too, finally tore through the soft, exhausted flesh all across her body.
Bone, somehow, and for some reason she could not fathom. Long ridges of white stained in the pink froth of her own blood - bone in the shape of her hips and her shoulders, narrow ones like blades over each rib. A plate across the copper blaze at the center of her face. All of it erupted through the chestnut of her own skin, all of it edged in the ragged pink mess of ruined, puckered flesh.
She cannot remember the last time she didn’t hurt.
Does not remember what it is to be seen by someone who does not flinch.
It is why she has taken to this corner of her home, hidden behind the volcano and against the belly of a loyal ocean. There is some relief in the cerulean waves when she wades in and they lap against skin that never stops weeping red tears. Water that, if only for a moment, rinses her clean so she is only red and bone, beautiful and elegant in her incredible wrongness.
But she doesn’t expect anyone to find her here, to find this place she had made safe, a home that is meant to be only hers. But as she steps around the uneven base of the volcanic mountain, feeling the soft kiss of ash settle against her back like dirty snow, she can feel all the air suddenly crushed from her lungs at the silhouette of a horse standing on her beach.
She halts abruptly, inhaling fast through nostrils that flare wide and uneasy. Her jaw clenches, muscles cording in her cheek as she takes a wary step back and angles her delicate, armored face away from him. But there is some lonely, aching song in her chest, a whisper that asks her to stay, to just look for a moment. It isn’t as though he’s even noticed her yet, he hasn’t turned his face to her to witness this strange, wretched thing standing a short ways behind him. And he is beautiful in a way she cannot name. Maybe in his resolute quiet or the grey dapples on his skin that remind her of home, of the ash that has a habit of settling like lace across her back.
Certainly it cannot be that his wings remind her of her brother, her twin, or of how much she misses his nearness. Must not be something that might be enough to undo this self imposed banishment. There would be no sense in that, not when she is so broken and so wretched and wholly dangerous in her selfishness. Someone died because of you. She reminds herself with a wince, with a shade of brokenness that sags in her shoulders as she looks down at the opal stone of her gleaming hooves, remembering.
i am brambles but i am tangled in your love
i think i wrote you a post that will be very hard to reply to because i'm the worst D: