Everything changes, but it all stays the same.
Thus she believes, on the surface of her soul. A scant two years have passed since her birth, yet she feels she has encountered a lifetime worth of trial and triumph. A winter wind tugs at her mane, sending a chill down the narrow spine; yet in fall there were zephyrs, and in summer a breeze: the wind is constant, merely varied in shape. Night falls sooner, but the sun does not fail to rise. Leaves fall and the trees are laid barren, yet they remain tall and sturdy, and grow back within a year. Everything changes. Everything is the same.
She's seen so much tumult in her own life, yet the same girl rests beneath the inky skin. Her home has changed, but her relationships remain distant, cautious, flittering in and out of existence like so many fireflies on a windy day. She has grown taller, yet she still bears a crescent upon her broad face, still walks with a gangly grace on golden socks and iron hooves, hooves which walk now with faint purpose, carrying her across the sands and toward the fire where she must now make her post, skirting around the Oasis as she thinks about this change.
She is lost in her thoughts, deep within her own mind, when the boy on her back springs to full alert. Black body rises and tenses and stirs, oversized ears raised and eyes peering fiercely. The crimson girl stops, stirred from her reprieve. "What is it?" she questions, but he does not reply, merely leaps from her body and dashes to the right, away from the Oasis and out of their path. Gold-slashed face frowns, but she follows, curious and exhilarated by her brother's delight.
Everything changes, but it all stays the same. She takes in the bloodstained boy through slightly older eyes: eyes which belong to an Oracle, not a Medic; eyes which have seen death and the Gods; eyes which have shed tears as friends turned to enemies, betraying and threatening to rip from her all she holds dear; eyes which cannot save her from the start of excitement, delight, trepidation, embarrassment and, at last, concern, as Sacre enters her view and her mind, and she remembers acutely the pain of his absence.
Hurried steps stop in their tracks as the lines of his face tell a tale of woe. Copper child hovers uncertain, wondering what might have happened to wipe the sparkle from her friend's azure gaze. In all of her knowledge of the unicorn colt, the girl has never known him to be without his bright gaze. Joy never leaves him the way it leaves her; he is confident, buoyant, a beacon of sunlight in the darkest of nights. Yet the boy she sees now is an echo of her friend, hollowed and scarred by some unknown disaster. It frightens her, devastates her, makes he want to cry out, to shake him until all is well, to take away his sorrow and wear it upon her shoulders as a cloak, so he might stand tall and bright once more.
Sacre is sad, and she does not know why, but she knows that she must find some way to see him smile.
Words have never sprung easy to her tongue. She has never been eloquent, never known what to say; and as she stands now, mute, she cannot vocalize her affection, cannot tell him she's here. All she can do is stride toward the colt, the stallion, her first friend outside of her cousins, who was so quick to forgive her all her past mistakes. She offers her shoulder and reaches for his neck, head drifting toward his mane in a silent offer of solidarity, an invitation to lay upon her any weight he had to share.
@[Sacre]
[ I couldn't resist ._. ]
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[O] When I feel the bullets graze against my skin
