jump into the heat; exist

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

She wanders as she often does, filling her days and nights with the wonders of a world they call new, though it is all she has ever known. She has seen the forest and the meadow often enough, both with and without the sister she is so willingly bound to. She has seen Tephra and her volcano, has waded into her hot springs and seen the magma dance like falling stars in the cracks of the dark rock. She has even seen Taiga, just once while visiting Ava, and beheld those immense and ancient trees, the fog that fell like clouds trapped beneath the foliage.

But there are places she has not been, things she has not seen, and it is this curiosity, this welling of wonder in the core of her chest that pulls her from the reaches of sleep and the dark of starry skies.

She is like liquid copper when she spills through the trees – silent but for the occasional snap of a young sapling bent beneath dark hooves. It is the softness of spring in the bristling green grass underfoot, the damp sponginess of thawed earth that swallows the sound of her steps as she passes by. The lowest branches reach for her, thin knotted fingers hidden beneath the guise of tawny buds and green sprouts, but her wings have not forgotten them and remain elusive and melded to the curve of her sloping ribs.

In the dark she cannot see him, that stain of dark and molten gold made wet and silver in the glow of cold stars – cannot feel his eyes when they find her shape and trace the delicate hollows carved from copper and indigo. It is only when he appears beside her, when her mane dances like rust against her neck in the wind of his sudden arrival, that she notices him at all.

It is reflexive when her wings lift and unfurl, dissolving from soft feather to the sleek and formidable leather of copper and gold dragons wings. They are imperious when they rise, wicked in the gleaming of steel talon and ruby scale, arrogant when they settle (only slightly) like a cape across her spine. There is something about his cold beauty that makes her uneasy, perhaps something about the way he had appeared as though born from the heavy dark of night. But there is something else that draws her in, that wretched curiosity still glowing in the pit of a bright and delicate chest.

Her instincts whisper predator, but she had not met one yet.
Did not fear them like she should.

“Your forest?” She echoes, taking a small step back from skin that smells like heat and dust, from horns like curling obsidian atop that dangerous gold head. It is only to regain some distance, to more easily trace the quiet power in the sloping of his shoulders and the curve of his neck – she lacks the air of uncertainty that should carry her further still from the sharp beauty of that wicked smile. Instead, and with a faint smile of her own etched into deep and gleaming indigo, she says, “I was looking for something,“ a pause and she tips her chin at him, exploring those dark eyes and dirty gold angles of a face that might have been carved from marble, “or maybe for someone.” In the cold dark she slips toward him again, the soft of her nose brushing dangerously close to the hard muscle of a dusky gold shoulder.

Exist