Hearth

I dance in a sway of low clouds, shivering at the velvet touch of mild moisture over my wings and flanks. The sun warms my back like a hot stone while it rests high and bright above, casting a strong shadow below on the fields in the likeness of giant bird of prey. I spare a glance beneath me and behold a blaze of unfocused greens with blurs of purple and shimmers of clear blue water. It is a meadow, I find, caressing the ribs of a great river; a wide and open space that breaks from the encloser of the evergreens and redwoods almost like a wound and yet a far more welcome sight. I ponder my direction and figure I must have traveled southward for the weather is a far contradiction to my day just before. Yesterday was riddled with the breath of winter, deep to the shank with snow and in the dead of night and now I fly in the cusp of spring with the sun hot on my back. But I suppose that is not all that odd at all, if this land were in its transistion months. I have seen such things before. I have known them before in another place.

As I continue to behold the land a thought comes to me, or rather a name.

Helovia.

It is the name that those two spoke to me the night before, the one they claimed this land had. Helovia, Helovia. I try the word again and again in my head, musing over it, half for amusement and half for understanding it. A land with a name. I find the concept strange to me yet... curious. The only difference I could discern between this and all of the world was distance. The earth is the earth, wide and ever reaching, its foundation a soil made of bodies connecting one and all and the sky eternal. That is the true identity of things in the end, or so I've always known it to be.

Still eying the meadow from above I feel a begging in my legs to feel the earth beneath my hooves, crying for the challage of my weight upon rather then the tepid weightlessness of air. My great wings do not protest to this urge I find, still wearied by my harsh usage of them these past days. Inwardly I sign to myself, slightly resistant to return to the ground so soon, though not afraid too. Far from it. But I cannot travel with my fair wings in such a state. It is unkind to push them any further then what they can bear. A creature of sky I may be but I am also a child of earth, a part of me I have forgotten as of late it seems. I angle toward the river and descend down onto its bank, scattering the sands with an unpolished landing and relishing in the sweet relief of my wings. The plush of the tannish grains is an unusual feeling and I shift my weight restively, testing the surface before lumbering onward toward the water. Once to the edge I bow my head to its shifting surface, beholding my flame-marked face for a moment before shattering the image as I supped lanqidly to sooth my thirst, tuning into the babble of the water and the shifting of the thistles and tall grass in the breeze.

____________
"Speech."

For flame, for heart