Such a lovely color for you .:{Malis}:.

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

If Malis is beautiful, it is only in the way that broken things are. She is none of Dacia’s soft beauty, none of that quiet, tender warmth. Where Dacia is earnest, Malis is full of dark and secret and cold truths. She is pieced together by the broken bones of impossible memories, dreams made real, wholly tangible. There was a life where she might have been more like this beautiful green mare with honest eyes, where she might have believed in wonderful things, heart things. But that life had slipped from Malis just as the night slipped away from the sun each day in an endless, exhaustless cycle. All that was left for her were the shadows in her soul, the darkness she both craved and feared, a darkness so eager to consume her.

If Malis is beautiful, then it is in the way that death is beautiful to the broken.

She stays quiet when Hellbane speaks, quiet because there are no words for her in this moment, there is no place for her in this conversation. But Victra is immune to any of the uncertain tension that ebbs from the tide of her mother and her small face remains eagerly upturned to this new pair she has already decided she loves as much as the rest of her small family. When the boys lips touch her wing-tip, her face is alight with the smile that blossoms across the blue. “I can change them sometimes.” She offers with the hint of a shy, earnest smile that etches itself across her mouth. She lifts her wings again, graceful even in the awkwardness of her lanky youth, and frowns with concentration until the dark leathery wings are blue and bright and as strange as she. “Do you like them?” And she is everything that Malis is not, everything soft and kind and beautiful. All of the best bits.

The blue points of her ears tip forward in time to catch Hellbane’s words, and she cannot help the curiosity that builds and glows in the emerald of her bright eyes. “Who is Mortal?” She asks breathlessly, easing forward again from beneath the still of her mother’s mouth where it rests against her hip. Slowly, slowly she eases forward, drawing her lips across the green of his muzzle just as she had traced the colors of both Killdare and Malis. But the sound of Dacia’s voice distracts her and she lifts her delicate face to the green mare, a growing smile curling against her blue mouth. “I won’t be so little for long, there is big in my bones!” And then her attention is back on the boy and his beautiful green, her mirror image in emerald. The earth to her sky.

Malis’ eyes lift back to Dacia’s and hold her gaze there quietly. “Did he tell you?” She asks in a quiet voice, a hollow voice because she can guess by the way this woman watches her that Killdare had not. A sigh fills her lungs, her chest, and she holds it in until her throat aches and she cannot hold it anymore. “It doesn’t have to be.” She says then in a voice that must be a whisper, because she is certain she has heard the leaves speak louder than this. “Home, I mean.” Her eyes are as still and cold as stone, not unkind but certainly distant, and the longer they watch this green mare the more they swell with the shadows that drench her heart. It is in this moment that she realizes she does not want to leave again, not yet, not now. She would have to leave Victra behind because what kind of life would she have as a nomad, lost to the mountains with her wild, broken mother. Malis crumbles in the silence, her blue horned face a mask of stony fortitude. But then her face cracks and it fissures, and she is certain that if Dacia looks close enough she will finally see why Killdare felt anything for the blue mare at all. She is little more than a broken thing, little more than a crushed heart, and he must see in her a creature to fix. It is the flaw of all man, to want to fix the broken. But the broken are not meant to be fixed, they are not made to find heroes.

MALIS

makai x oksana

texture © hexe78