HOLD MY HAND AGAINST THE NIGHT

SHOW ME ALL THE DEMONS LEFT TO FIGHT:

With each day the winter numbed her spirit. It had flailed and fought against itself, against the world – it seemed. Living each day as it came. But the heroine could not live without contact. She craved a warm voice; a firm touch of reassurance, familiar faces, scents. Such haunted her steps, and inhabited the shadows in the twilight – the late mornings, lacking the sun’s true strength. Lacking the power to breathe life into the fading memories of the dead.
 
From cool winds to bitter storms, and to the wet and frigid seasons.
 
The young mare trudged through the snow, the faintest idea of her plan pulling her tired body along. A thick layer of snow collected on the earth, it spilled softly from the gray sky. Covering the girl as she went along. Usually, she wasn’t so fond of the cold. But she had learned to ignore the light blanket of numbness spread across her body. It helped that her wings could add warmth to her sides, but Ru was largely unaware of her physical condition. It was hard for her to reconcile the troubles she’d put herself out there in the wild. Without words to describe the empty adjustment, it was easy to ignore the common pains of a wild-child. Though a wild child no longer.
 
With dulled eyes, and a steady breath, she settled just outside the World’s Edge borders. Ears pricked forwards, cautious eyes scanning the grounds. The girl’s tail swished, and all at once Ru felt incredibly anxious. She could feel it swelling within her breast, bottling in her neck – as if to choke her with each breath.
 
Steady, her mind rumbled on, alone in that head. A command she would follow, simply because it was the one thing that tethered her to this reality set ahead. Mother’s confident gaze vanished with the blurring of her face, and the generic tone of her voice.
 
She was doing well then. She was in control after all – wasn’t she? For a moment it felt like it, a fleeting thing that cracked easily under the weight of a shaky inhale. The sting of the cold, the girl’s parched lips.
 
Every worst-case scenario flitted through Ru’s mind. Suddenly she couldn’t bare to think she might be cast out into the wilds for eternity, that no one would want her – whether that’d been from her poor ability to communicate, or the low desire to welcome more mouths during the winter. Or that she was quite useless, wasn’t she? It was building, and churning, and hissing inside of her – thoughts, all unnecessary and superficial – would not stop.
 
Ru grit her teeth, inhaling with a shiver and glaring out ahead of her. Swallowing hard, in an attempt to push that feeling away. 

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦