Even at night, the memory of breathing remains. She’s not entirely certain why. Skeletons do not need breath, just as they do not need food and water and the other things that mark one as alive. But as she stands on a stone at the head of the crashing waterfall, her ribs expand. As though her body wants nothing more than to remember that she will live once again.
The endless night should have cured her of it, but it had not. She had been endlessly grateful for the death that claims her in darkness when the monsters had come. They had no interest in bones, and she had been kept safe when others had not.
Her chest aches at the thought. Though she has no heart in the cavity of her ribs, she can still feel the squeeze of it. It had been awful to know others suffered for a thing they could not control.
Shifting, Azure shakes her head, the grinning skull clattering as she tries to clear the memories. Lifting the glowing bone, she peers at the distant horizon. Faint streaks of pink and orange are beginning to break that distant line, a foretelling of the sunrise to come. Her empty ribs expand, as though she had drawn in a deep breath. She hadn’t of course, but she could pretend.
Lifting the slender bones of her wings, she spreads the skeletal appendages briefly before settling them once more with a clack of bone against bone. Without flesh and feather, she could not fly. She had once been foolish enough to try though. A faint laugh escapes her at the memory. She had tumbled ignominiously to the bottom of the small hill she had attempted to leap from, skeleton jangling loudly for anyone to hear. Fortunately for her, without flesh, she had not bruised.
She could still call the wolf and run, or perhaps the fish and swim. But as she stares at the spray of the waterfall below her, she knows she will not. Instead she draws her head up and watches the horizon. And she waits for the distant sunrise to release her from her skeletal cage.
Azure
you take the shape of everything I'm drawn to
@lannister