Our breath was stale – we could taste it there in our mouths as we breathed. Serrated teeth, I could hear, clinched tightly in my mind pressing into my soft brain, blue blood tasting areas it shouldn’t. A throb arose and jumped with each step I forced. Each and every step. God bless us. God bless the beautiful connection between us, sharing colors, sharing satisfaction, sharing a corrupted form of delirium. Sharing the yare we thought we had. The blood in our muscles felt stagnant, a loss of liquidation. Something in our hearts would not function, and it was as if we were dreaming. As if the Dreamscape, so lost in eternal mishap, was here now, forcing us to believe. How did it know that we wanted to believe this war was right?

How did something so lost and dishonest find us, and rape our minds of mercy love?

There weren’t enough reasons for me. I would take lives; to know that, without having a real purpose disturbed me. A foundation in my raising was shattered like glass, little shards of gratitude looking up at me with clear eyes stained with hope. But this hope was in vain. I felt it clogging my windpipe, driving nails into my skull to pin a board with letters I couldn’t read. But I still marched, my pale forehooves dragging evidence in the sweet grass that would so soon redeem its native grazers.

Despite my reflux building, Raimo still spoke to me. He held my face in his mental grasp and shouted words that I didn’t want to comprehend. He blared them in my eyes, and he scathed my brain with images of my foal hood, digging them up with his claws so sharp. Showing me images I refused to admire like I once did, the fateful day the Tides were cast away choking on the blood of my brothers, and my father. The day treason blemished my eyes and growled at my chest. The day I lost my first love.

War took all the things I loved most. First it spit me into the arms of a valley that was green with the shiniest envy; away from the calm sea foam that raised me and held me in the lukewarm waves, current playing with my hair, and salt playing tag on my taste buds. This was everything I was born to be, fallen asleep in the sugar sand, cradled by the royal skies. I only have one reminder, and it is the dancing sparkle above my head, racing now to scan the horizon from lofty treetops, a flicker of blue glory traced yellow by the morning. He was my guardian, and I loved and hated him all the same. He made me believe things that on days like today were not phony, that were all more encouraging than degrading. He played the softest, most melancholy songs for me that only I could hear and comprehend. He reminded me of how war took all the things I loved most.

Because war took Aërwen.

I would never forgive war for that, even if I was walking in her son’s hills.

I did this because she would have. She would have been blessed to feel these lush grasses touch the dark nooks of her pasterns, the sun a mirage on our backs, hiding the vibrant orange of her irises filled with the beautiful lust of butterflies swirling in her war-made bones rather than her stomach. She would have wanted to be here, walking beside me, valor etched in the glow of her ridged face, comma star warped slightly as a smile tightened across her lips. I imagined her as I walked, emerging with the rest of the Grey, my thoughts a daze, swirling around the imaginary her beside me like the shades of the night that took her life away. This was the day I would have them. I would fight like I had them.

I would fight like she taught me to, not too careful, not too fearless – all a combination in the good of my mind, energy frozen until the first leap of charge.

It was frozen now, the sun barely touching me, barely melting the fine edges of my frozen nerves away. The world grew confident in that moment, Raimo’s voice stopped as he found I wasn’t listening, and I came to speed with all the rest of them, confidence in my stride now. Coming up on the Foothills army, ready to steady myself on the front line. I was a pale ghost in these grasses. I had no idea who I’d be hunting down, but I knew this:

She would be hunting them down with me.

skyfall is where we start
a thousand miles and poles apart
where worlds collide and days are dark
you may have my number, you can take my name
but you'll never have my heart