01-25-2016, 03:21 PM
But I won't rot, I won't rot. Not this mind and not this heart.
He sucks in air – it is hard and cold. It stings his nostrils and throat, and he immediately coughs it back out again. Then his lungs plead for more, and in careful, small pulls he feeds his needy, old muscles. It is colder up here than down there, if only for the wind that rushes against his sides and wings like constant waves, shoving and testing his steadfastness. It is a test with which he is intimately familiar, but every year he is less and less up to it.
He feels the stretches and pulls in his muscles as he pumps, pressing away from the earth, with both sadness and joy now. He is failing. It is a bigger effort than it has ever has been, but then maybe it is because he is flying headlong into something weighty and enormously consequential. Like his day of reckoning, he feels with every downward stroke of his feathers that he approaches the true apogee of his life. The last effort, marking their freedom to fall.
He cannot say he is not apprehensive. He has spent too much time in the wild seclusion of his flock to allow someone to string their power across his body, and hers, in such an intimate way without being unsettled. And yet, if their kind can rise the dead from the wind and roots… can she not fashion them a sort of recompense for all the time spent apart? That is enough. Enough to undergo some manipulation of his heart and soul. Enough to have himself broken open, to rework the way his clock ticks, to harmonize it with hers, and hers with his.
In a fitful gloom he had awoken the other night, and had taken to pacing the sheets of ice and snow in his new, remote home. In his dream she gave them the opposite – she had made them atone for their wanderlust and inattention.
She had made her invisible to him, and him to her. And their touches passed through like ghosts.
The chill ebbs away, pulled from the air, but even as he lands, heavy and unsteady in the unusual, soft give of sand, it stays in his bones. He slides, disrupting the smoothed edge of a dune, reaching out his wings to balance himself. He is used to the hard surfaces of stone and ice, or grass and packed earth. The heat that his wings churn up in front of him, thick with grains of sand, is nothing like what he is used to. To the desert dwellers, it is probably a mild early winter day. For him it is surprising.
He coughs, shutting his eyes against his own sandstorm and waits for it to subside. Sweat lathers his great, dark body, now patched here and there with tawny sand, stuck in the damp. He finally braves a look, searching across the great spines of dunes, patterned by the wind, and somewhere in the distance, he thinks, he can see bright green.
But he stays. Nervous and tense, the mountainous stallion leans on his hocks.
How does one summon a magician?
Will she be impossible to mistake for anything but?
In his anxiety he realizes he cannot remember he name...
He feels the stretches and pulls in his muscles as he pumps, pressing away from the earth, with both sadness and joy now. He is failing. It is a bigger effort than it has ever has been, but then maybe it is because he is flying headlong into something weighty and enormously consequential. Like his day of reckoning, he feels with every downward stroke of his feathers that he approaches the true apogee of his life. The last effort, marking their freedom to fall.
He cannot say he is not apprehensive. He has spent too much time in the wild seclusion of his flock to allow someone to string their power across his body, and hers, in such an intimate way without being unsettled. And yet, if their kind can rise the dead from the wind and roots… can she not fashion them a sort of recompense for all the time spent apart? That is enough. Enough to undergo some manipulation of his heart and soul. Enough to have himself broken open, to rework the way his clock ticks, to harmonize it with hers, and hers with his.
In a fitful gloom he had awoken the other night, and had taken to pacing the sheets of ice and snow in his new, remote home. In his dream she gave them the opposite – she had made them atone for their wanderlust and inattention.
She had made her invisible to him, and him to her. And their touches passed through like ghosts.
The chill ebbs away, pulled from the air, but even as he lands, heavy and unsteady in the unusual, soft give of sand, it stays in his bones. He slides, disrupting the smoothed edge of a dune, reaching out his wings to balance himself. He is used to the hard surfaces of stone and ice, or grass and packed earth. The heat that his wings churn up in front of him, thick with grains of sand, is nothing like what he is used to. To the desert dwellers, it is probably a mild early winter day. For him it is surprising.
He coughs, shutting his eyes against his own sandstorm and waits for it to subside. Sweat lathers his great, dark body, now patched here and there with tawny sand, stuck in the damp. He finally braves a look, searching across the great spines of dunes, patterned by the wind, and somewhere in the distance, he thinks, he can see bright green.
But he stays. Nervous and tense, the mountainous stallion leans on his hocks.
How does one summon a magician?
Will she be impossible to mistake for anything but?
In his anxiety he realizes he cannot remember he name...
I won't rot.
@[Yael]
