heaven i'll never come home
She had said she’d never come back.
But pain has a way of sending you down to the old stops, the haunted houses along your street that suddenly don’t seem so bad. Not when new trauma has burned off the stale fear and instead familiarity, a cold comfort, waits in the broken windows and sagging doorways of the past.
The trip itself was made on a whim and strong headwinds carried her back in the dead of night. A bed of bracken took her to sleep, hidden among the fronds in the blue-black of moonless night. No light to catch on gold or white.
First light creeps across the fern-bed waking her before the warmth of sunlight can, but Aloy is unbothered by the damp and dew. Her green eyes, clear as sea-glass in the piercing light, blink away sleep. Rolling onto her side to pierce open air with her twisting black horns and then rising slowly to shake out her vast wings and groom her feathers back into place. She isn't long with her ablutions. Soon her long white legs carry her away from her resting place and out toward the scent of water. She cannot get far before someone finds her.
The stranger might be drawn because they recognize something about her, something of her mother, though she is more finely built than her dam. Or Aloy draws them by her own merit, the magnetism that she cannot help no matter how she muddies herself or tangles her hair into braids of knots that hide her green eyes and gold freckled face. The stranger might be blind of nose and eye and just following the sound of footsteps. Whatever the reason for approach Aloy turns to greet whoever this might be but not with the exuberant friendliness that the former type of stranger might expect. A placid nod might be returned for a greeting, and then a question of who she is or why she is here...though it doesn’t matter because she’s looking past her company towards mountain peaks already thick with snow.
“I used to be from here.” The words may fall like crumbling ancient bricks in a thousand years dust, unnoticed and unheard and that will be okay. She says it more for herself than them, reminding her weary wounded soul that they have come to some kind of home again. There might be something to find here, hope maybe, one thing or another that she’s stopped believing in.
henlo again.