[private] so give me hope in the darkness

[Islay]

There had been those first blind moments of terror - paralyzing fear (worse than any monster they might have found on the ground, she thinks) where her mind had said: you cannot. To fly is to defy gravity. And you are merely a wielder of it, not a defier. You coax the stars to the ground, you are not meant to come to them. But the dark had cradled her, had crafted wings from the shadows and they carried her up, up, up and away.

Those stars that she has always called her suddenly seem so much closer; that someday, when they return, she might actually reach them. The thought is bright with joy and she is beaming when Islay looks to Mariner. She had called out to him when it had become obvious that she would not fall to her doom and so she credits him as her tutor in the skies.
(It's funny that she senses nothing of his condescension, nothing of his mocking because she had grown up with Narcisus and that had been the majority of her interactions with her foster brother.)

@[mariner] flies easily around her and while she has none of the ease of the older pegasus in the air, she smiles readily enough.

One dark wing leans to the side and she struggles to maintain her balance, but the dip is obvious enough. "I wouldn't call that nothing." A shadow-crafted appendage motions towards the obscure shapes below them. A fall from this height was not nothing, at least not a girl who had never left the ground before. The bay stallion flies past her, grazing her with a dark blue wing and the younger mare pushes herself ahead to keep up. Islay attempts to pass him before glancing towards Mariner, "What is the bravest thing you've ever done up here?" she calls back to him.

Because she can't imagine that one simply flies from one corner of Beqanna to the other. She can't conceive that such a wonderful way to exist could be reduced to simply as a mode of travel. Mariner, with all his confidence in the air, surely has to be lifted and bolstered by a dream of some sort. She dips a wing again, half-spinning in the air but doesn't finish the whole circle.

Not just yet.