Suddenly I'm Miss Midwest (Celeste)

[Celeste]

Celeste remembers little of what came before. (But, then, isn’t that the benefit of death? As a Shade, the world fades to gray and what once was becomes as immaterial as the spirit that roams the halls of the Afterlife.) The black mare doesn’t even remember dying. She just remembers the haze and the wandering; her clouded mind feeling like she has misplaced something and turning corners in the Land of the After did nothing to jolt that memory.

Who had she been before?

There are bonds there, things that chain parts of her soul and become born again when Celeste re-draws her first breath. Daughter, some cornerstone of her remembers. Mother, a bedrock part of her soul adds. Her dark brow furrows but she can’t recall the faces through the fog. Distant, disorganized memories that can’t quite click into place.

Some parts of Beqanna she remembers. She had found her favorite clearing, a corner of the Meadow that she had spent summer hours idling away during her youth. The hilly landscape flattened out in the distance to reveal the Field and some parts of her past come back to her, remembering trying to recruit and be recruited (but to where? By who?). The black mare stares out to that horizon with an expression that says she’d relive if it, if she could. She’d remember, if it would only come back.

(That was the funny thing about dying. Everyone seemed to assume that it would be forever.)

Suddenly frustrated, the dark mare snorted and left the only place she knew in this remade Beqanna. It seemed that whatever spectres haunted her mind were still guarded by the realm of Death and even though Celeste was alive, the Afterlife seemed reluctant to part with her secrets. Whatever bargain had been made, whatever deal had been struck to bring the Magician’s daughter back to life evaded her.

So she wanders. And she walks. She goes until the River trickles ahead of her, bringing scents downstream from the kingdoms of this new Beqanna that she doesn’t yet know. Celeste is so busy in her remembering that she doesn’t take the time to notice where she is walking until-

Until.

She bumps into another horse. "S-sorry," she murmurs. (Such things didn't happen in the Other World. Ghosts passed through and by each other; never in to another.)

The red and the black make her brow furrow again. She knows those colors, somehow. Those feathers. Celeste collides into them and it brings forth a spark of recognition through the grey mists of her mind, making her frown as she studies the other mare’s face. "Beqanna,” the black mare says. She can remember that much and overhearing other horses confirmed it. Tilting her head inquisitively to the right, she studies the other mare from that angle. Blinking she adds, "But here is the River.” Celeste blinks again, shifting her (living) weight to a more comfortable stance. "I think.”

@[Seraph] *poofs confetti dust*