Death had been different than she had imagined—and she had imagined it a lot.
It had been different to think of the way that her body had torn apart. The way that it had felt to have her mind just float away—leaving her to walk through the haze of it all. The shadow creeping around her to sink into muscles and tendons of her body. It had taken far too long for her to find her way back into the world, to slip past the veil, into a body that was her own and yet not. Something new entirely.
It was strange to realize that it was different.
To find that scars from her youth had faded, that her head was just a slightly different shape.
She was slightly shorter this time, a little more petite, but she didn’t mind. It wasn’t as though she spent that much time in this body anyway. She preferred to be a bird, to be a fish—to be anything else.
Today, it was a bird.
She takes to the skies, feeling that strange sorrow chasing her, biting at her heels. She can feel it settle across her shoulders as she weaves through the air currents, as they dance along her sides.
It has been weeks since Ghaul had ripped her apart. Only days since she had found her mother and then taken to Hyaline. Months perhaps since she has seen Gar at all.
So it is no surprise that her heart leaps into her throat when she catches sight of him.
Pulling her wings in, she spirals to the ground, shifting when she is close and taking a few running steps forward to catch herself. She pulls up, her dual-colored eyes darker than usual as she searches his face. There’s so much she wants to tell him, to catch him up on, but the only thing she can say is this:
“You’re alive.”
And the relief makes her nearly dizzy.
I want to swim until we both begin to feel the weightlessness sink in