She waited for something to pass: candid questions about rights and wrongs, webs and follies, secrets and lies and everything intertwined between, frame shuddering, limbs quaking. Fleeing and escaping came to mind abruptly, all over again, pieces of fleeing, frayed tapestries and worn out solutions, calamities without end and chaotic semblances rising above the surface. It would have been so much easier to tear away, to fold back over into old forms, to shake and tremble and sway beneath dark canopies or silent oaks, soaking in her ineptitude (but it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, and not something either of them deserved). She took the difficult path, the one mottled, bruised, and entirely forlorn, reaching for the light, the pinnacle, the essences blinking and twinkling on the other side (and she was sure he’d always be there, illuminating and golden and brilliant). Her breath mingled over the gilded edges of his mane and the satin strips of chestnut hues, and the nymph watched warmth and cold collide on the singular patchworks of autumn nightfall – prayed for absolution in the shivering of her bones and the weight of all the anarchy pressing down over her shoulders. The Songbird’s frame stilled only when Roland responded in kind, twisting his frame around hers, like a rock, like a fortress, like a shield, and she surrounded, pervaded, cloaked herself in his presence, allowing the softest, sweetest sigh to glimmer along his skin, released from the sinuous torture of her own thoughts, of her own ruminations. But he didn’t ask her what she’d been doing, why she’d been taken, how she’d been captured, why she was so stupid, why she always appeared to falter and stumble instead of rise. At first, she had no response to his query; too much, too unsure of all the possible answers, and simply reigned and relaxed in the cloaked embrace, became varnished in gold and fire through the weary silence. She didn’t cry. She didn’t laugh. Instead, she lowered her face and hid it in his mane, tried to perfect words he wouldn’t see between or couldn’t peel apart. Her recent scars weren’t visible, corporeal, or discernible; they’d all been scattered inward, pulsing and coveting and craving the beautiful sanctions of her heart.

“I’m all right.” The song felt hollow, felt forced, sinking into the summit of his withers and the harpsichord lines of his shoulders, not making any attempt to drift away from his warmth, from his stance, from his entity. He was a necessity, essential, indispensible, and she closed her eyes again to simply stand in all her fragility, in all her vulnerability, giving absolution and serenity over and over, awakened by the rubble slammed in her mind, adrift on the open seas, slumbering on the mountain trails.

One more notion drove a nettle, a thorn, into her memories, spurring last season’s images against her eyes, a veil of water, a rising harmony of disaster and flames, and Roland’s resolution to claim a rite, an invocation, a prize of his own; she wondered, if in all her absence, he’d managed to grasp hold of whatever charm, whatever information, whatever noteworthy aspects suited his specious yearnings. The sylph maneuvered slightly, pulled back only so she may rest her cheek on his pelt, so she may see and behold everything about him, eyes speculating, persistence ruminating, pitching into another realm where maybe she didn’t reign in disaster and tribulations. His last phrase had been uttered with promises and convictions (to see her before he went, to grant her a goodbye, a farewell, an adieu – but she’d been taken first), and she prayed he hadn’t waited for her, that he hadn’t spent all this time, all these days, lingering, loitering, and worrying, instead of chasing what he coveted. A guilty, ugly plunge of shame collected around her throat and bobbed within her voice, uttering pleas she feared went vastly unheard (no one should be held back from their dreams, from their wishes, from their hopes because of her - that was the last thing she wanted for anyone). The query melted and molded into the earth as a hopeful aria, as a dulcet rhapsody, as a contorted reverie, binding and flourishing when its creator couldn’t. “Did you find what you were looking for?”


@[Roland]