the rocks might melt; the sea may burn. || 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.

Her eyes find his in the dark, the melding of green and hazel and gold in the flickering starlight, and it doesn’t take much to reclaim the grin that had belonged to the boy from their past. But the sight of that smile, of the boy she had spent endless nights with peering back out at her from the body of someone older, someone grown, only deepens the wildness coursing beneath her skin. Impatiently, eagerly, she throws back her head, catching all of the stars in the dark of those wild green eyes, binding them inside with a single blink. With her face to the sky, to the glowing night, she does not notice how his eyes trace the hollows of her cheeks or the curve of gleaming, copper neck.

But then he draws her back to him, and with their foreheads pressed tightly together, she cannot hold back the laughter that rings from her lips. She is exultant when she pulls apart from him, aching with the magic that fills her up inside, and it is like the lava is beneath her skin, in her veins, for the way she burns fever-bright in the night. “It might be a bit of an understatement.” She concedes, flashing a grin at the chuckle this earns. “I met a mare earlier, she was as blue as I, and Canaan, she gave me something!” Her voice is thick with longing when she breaks away from him again, pressing her smile and the dull edge of mischievous teeth to the soft of a pale, perfect neck. A whisper, and then, “Canaan, watch.”

She drifts just out of reach, touching her lips to the downy softness of the amber feathers within his wings. Closing her eyes, her wings unfurled even wider than before, as large as his and just as strong. Then slowly, feather by feather, they faded from the deep russet to that soft amber until she moved again to face him, holding them as he held his in perfect mirror. With a gentleness that belied the fire in her eyes, she lifted her chin defiantly and flapped the wings once, hard, so that when they reopened again they were once more delicate and feminine and a deep, gleaming bronze. Hers, not his.

Then they are gone together, racing like comets across the grasslands, one a deep copper, the other like trapped starlight. She takes the lead quickly, easily, and though she knows he must let her do so, she doesn’t care. Physically, he is her better – corded with muscle and sinew and raw energy, but she is wildness personified, grace and freedom. You know you can never beat me! She hears him boom in the night, breathless like she is, and just as buoyant. His teeth find traction in the curve of her hip and she bucks in the next stride, throwing a grin back over her shoulder, though her hooves land nowhere near him.

He is at her shoulder then, hearts and hooves pounding together in a rhythm of wildness only they can feel, and when their wings brush and the feathers tangle and twine and come together, she makes no effort to hide the pleasure that burns bright in her eyes. It comes unexpectedly, this burst of magic, from the marrow of her bones and the blood in her veins, from the echo of her heart and the pounding of her hoofbeats – and she cannot stop it, does not want to stop it, when it pours into Canaan and fills him up as it had filled her.

She had meant to ask first, do you want this, do you wanted to be remade like me, but the relief is immediate, like being able to exhale after having held ones breath for a lifetime, and she finds no regret when she searches her heart. They are changed, but they are not different - it was only what the world had already given, only things reclaimed. Exist knew this from her earliest memories in the mountain, curled in the half-dark with Victra and Leliana. But did Canaan know? It is too late to wonder now, impossible to take anything back, so she lifts her face to the night sky, eager to be lost, to swim among the stars and their cold silver light. When he calls to her, when she hears that single, terrifying word, fly, it is with all her faith placed in him that she unfurls those russet wings and pushes herself from the familiarity of the green ground and into a black and endless sky.

"Show me how, Canaan." In the humid air, in the aching wind, her voice is ripped from her lips, just a whisper of sound lost to the gleaming, diamond stars.

Exist