with her sweetened breath and her tongue so mean
she's the angel of small death and the codeine scene
There was very little that Bright did not automatically know, very little that was able to escape the reach of her small, strange magic. Except now. The last thing she could remember was a sudden sleepiness, a haze that fell around her like starshine swallowing her whole. She thinks she might even remember the way it felt when her soul had been pried from the mortal confines of her bright purple body, a strange buzzing in her bones and deeper, an ache that swelled until finally there was only nothing. She had succumbed to unconsciousness, her body a crumpled heap of amethyst and white falling away beneath her as she was whisked away to something plain and gray and lonely.
She woke weak and still without her physical form, with most of her recent memories stripped bare like flesh from sun-bleached bones. She could remember war but not the name for it, could remember the clash of fleshy bodies and blood spilled over flesh like water over stone. The memories she did have had remained jumbled at first, pieced together backwards and inside out until she had cast them away impatiently for the way they made her head ache. Eventually the memories returned, the bits of war and death and the horrified expression on her half-sisters face as the ever-impervious Bright had crumpled like a dead wasp.
But the why was not for her to know yet, nor did she think to look for her twin Woolf who would be here somewhere also. It was death that had done this to the mage twins, not their death but the accumulation of so many others during that wretched war. It had unhinged their magic and turned it against them. Only in the afterlife would they heal, and only after they healed would they be allowed to return.
For the most part those in the afterlife ignored the arrogant purple mare, thinking her no different than themselves. They were boring and complacent, wallowing in their deaths and she resented them for it. So when she hears his voice break the silence, catching the sound of it in the swivel of curved ears, a thin smile curls across her pale mouth. She finds him easily enough, pausing briefly to inspect the burns stretched grey and pink across most of his left side. A story lives there, she thinks, and she hates the way her magic lies dormant somewhere in her skin and she cannot use it to steal the story from him. So instead she approaches and though she knows his frustration for the way it boils inside her, she is languid and casual when she appears beside him, that thin smile deepening against her lips. “Oh yes,” she says, though her voice lacks much of the edge it had carried before coming to this place, “yes that is very constructive.”
bright