The wind flows beneath my wings, wholesome as the moon’s pale glow that cascades across my slate hide. I find that it is better now, to carry my body through the slips of air, since I was bound to the earth for so long, healing after the aftermath of a tree. Perhaps it is more sacred, to be so close to the touch of the Moon and so in tune with the strength of my winged blood, after having lost the ability to chase the Moon’s steady stride across the sky. Perhaps it is simply that I have missed the freedom, the sheer expedience and grace that lies upon the bending breeze.

I feel whole here, the steady rhythm of my wings in time with the beating of my heart. Here is where I am strong, untroubled, free. There are no chains that can hold me to the earth while I am tenderly laying my cheek against the Moon’s loving bosom. Here, there are no faces of dead lovers and sons born for a life empty of any joy, there are no strange masks or bodies with which I must abide.

I can even feel beautiful, a whole creature truly fit for the comfort of heavenly arms even while marked as visibly by the vile filth of my homeland as I am.

Elysia, the name is a black bell that sounds sweetly until it’s reverberations will not leave your mind be. Many nights I have listened to its song, unbroken and haunting the cry of my veins that beg with me to crawl back into it’s hideous embrace. Only my dreams and songs of my sisters had carried me through those dark evenings, a never ending stream of nightmares brewed behind each closed eye – never ending, that is, until the dream that has carried me here.

I chose to fly again that night, though the muscles were still weak from disuse and the cold winds of higher altitudes made the bones ache; the turning seasons have brought the pain to me even lower than the summer heat had allowed me to fly, the burning forest beneath me announcing the arrival of fall even without the cold’s gentle kiss.

One day, I will come back and burn that tree. I will burn it while my mother’s head bakes for the ravens upon its highest bough. Perhaps the Pain Bringer, too, shall have the gracious fate of being allowed to witness her death singing the flesh from her body, licking her mane away in zealous gulps, her queen’s crown dripping fat into her pleading eyes.

But these aspirations of vengeance can wait; perhaps they will even become ashes scattered by fairer wind.

I must find my sisters.

I must find the thistle field.

I spot the dream’s origin place, a clearing twenty feet by forty, oval for the most part with a few odd jabs into its perfection by weather wearied shrubbery. At it’s center, a fine conifer rises its egotistical crown into the heavens; my body nimbly maneuvers in tight circles down it’s length, wings held tightly upwards to allow for them to remain unscathed in such close proximity to the stinging boughs of the tree. I have healed well – though the muscles still groan when put under such intense acrobatic pressure, the year between the break and my first day back in the skies had done much to recover their resilience.

In time, I would be almost as new. I am strong. I have to be for my family, the daughters of the storm.

Landing gracefully, my forelimbs embrace my weight as my cloven hooves touch down onto the earth, and like a finely staged dance the brittle leaves upon the floor of the forest rise in a cloud of dusty upheaval at their impact. Lion's tail strikes around my body, a half halo of gleaming, pale blue hair that ripples and waves as a river, and I gaze proudly upon the kingdom before me, waiting for the traveler who will carry me to my beloved kin.

Nice trick, says a male voice, crashing into my ears like glass tidbits pulled across the flesh by a surging current. Rather than becoming the blood that swirls in rivulets through the water, I become the steady flow of water. I let my own unseen weight press and glide against his surfaces, denying my veins the opportunity to strike out at him for daring to be a lowly man in my presence.

It is even worse when I turn to view him, the dual horns rising from her brow, the slack and lazy rounding of his eyes that hint to the objects nestled in that bag we wears on his shoulder. He is male and he is unicorn, and while I had mentally prepared myself for such unwelcome encounters, though I had repeated most constantly that things could not be so outside the slick, hedonistic walls of Elysia…

I feel my heart roar against his wrongness.

The poison is deepest here, and while I find my mind forcing my lightly dished face in a nod of acknowledgement towards his compliment, I feel the racing of the disfigured organ in my pores. That small voice, the after effect of the splendid bell of my mother’s twisted fantasies, tells me I should kill him for being so insolent. I should pull his sleepy eyes from his face and smash them between my teeth, their gooey pop symbolic of the sinful nature of his over eager stare.

I stamp out the sound of the perverse lyric with the gentle hum of the Moon’s light above me, look to this stranger with a solidly blue gaze that bores into his flesh; it is all I have to not insult him, to not write my hoof poem across his dark and massive body.

Still, my face is rarely changing – I wear a mask of wisdom, an emotionless and blank gaze that would see his soul. Is that not why I have come here, to escape the unbidden pulls and assaults of the wrongness of assumption? Perhaps he is strong. Perhaps he is high because he needs the drugs to not feel pain with each stride, bow, and bend. Perhaps I am right, and he is a simple, unicorn man.

I do not know.

”Do you need a home?” he asks me, and my brows heighten but slightly in response. A waspish remark is bit back, literally, as I hold the edge of my tongue between my front teeth, wanting to curse him for assuming such things of a lady such as myself. I am not here for a home. I am here for a family – and unless he or they of his kin know of Hespera, Brighid, Selene, Persephone, Iris, or Antiope, I want none of his company.

He might as well go fuck a tree, or babble nonsense into a brook. Such a question is useless to me.


"I seek my sisters," I answer bluntly, my voice haunting and full of unnatural cadence – he is not of the same origins as I, this is to be sure. I am a gypsy queen, a lady with lips of moon beams and star shadow, and he is simply a man of this place that is so accepting of his wrongness. There is no lilt of a tender accent to his words that I can define, as there is with mine, the easy flow of Grecian hymns a silken cover to wrap each of my offerings of air to his ears. "for they have come to this land. Tell me…" I tuck my broad and beautiful wings more to my sides as I step closer to him, their arch rising above my ears and casting long shadows across my features from where the Moon has hung her face behind me. I focus on his eyes – they are the same on all of the equine varieties, and his are of an earthy brown, hazy from the toxins that he feeds himself. I can smell the stench of their leaves on him as I grow closer. I know what it is that he does to his mind.

Perhaps he cannot answer any of my questions.

Locoweed is quite dangerous, indeed. Inanna, my bitch mother, used it often to disorient her men before…

Those sort of images are exactly the ones I don’t need right now.


"This is the land of Helovia, is it not?"

The orb on his shoulder throws him off balance, the teetering stallion a sight humorous enough to bring the scant shadow of a smile to my lips; it is fleeting, but it is a moment free of the murderous intent of my pale blue tattoos, and it is pleasing enough for just that simple release to continue with this conversation for as long as it need take place. Surely, he only stumbled so because his brain was a literal cotton ball with electrical currents pulsing through it, but one could not punish the rain for the cloud from which it came.

He thinks too long about what I have said, however. The rancorous snarl of the venom in my body is almost palpable on my tongue, but I am used to such outcries; it does not escape to the porcelain smoothness of my features, which have settled back into their blank state. His response to my inquiries as to the nation I have found myself in find him much more quickly – but it does not win him any future speech master awards.

An ear flicks back in a twinge of the savagery that pounds my head, the ways in which he aligns himself with the dark lies of my heart, and perhaps there is a slight tightening of the muscles in my face. Covering the splinter with a coating of lace, I focus on the ways in which this man would be humorous if my mind was not so poisoned, so chained to a system of belief that I no longer wished to follow.

”Look lady, I don’t know your sisters,” the dark man says, and I nod in agreement quickly and without much delay. I don’t think he does either – unless that’s where all those scars have come from.

Princess, hisses the voice of the intricate displays on my flesh, the resounding bell. It forgets that I am no such thing in this land.

The stammering that happens next manages to shatter the stalwart resolve of my passionless stare – downward fall the corners of my lips, ever so delicately, and my eyebrows and ears rise in expectation of whatever it is that he struggles for hard to vocalize. Perhaps it is a complex thought; perhaps what appears to be an egg strapped to his back is actually a scrying orb, and I might be able to see where my sisters are while gazing into its depths, or perhaps he has a friend who is capable of discovering others most expediently.

He offers me only a possible acquaintance with such skills of discovery. My head and the nearly black tips of my wings sag ever so slightly from their lofty positions in his lack of immediate aide, but perhaps this “Phantom Seeker” – by the Moon I hope it is not the poor creature’s true name – will be able to find them as he says.

"How far?" I ask with narrowed gaze, tilting my crown ever so slightly to gaze at him through pupiless gems. He probably won’t be able to answer that one either, at least not properly – I assume I’ll get a general “two days” or “long time that way,” in response. I could nearly throw stones at him for abusing the herbs as he does at this point, pausing to rephrase my inquiry so as to better get my point across. "I can fly faster than you can run. If you can tell me where to go, I will meet you there."

Surely, there would be time to inspect the terrain which I was accepting during the period without the stoned stallion (surely he did not invite me to meet his friends to no benefit of his own), but it was not the main focus of this inquiry. Much of my desire to go alone was to be rid of him. He seemed as if he would be a horrid road companion, not to mention I was not overly fond of the scent of his chosen habit. There were also my most… unusual quirks, inspired by the markings of my youth, and the longer he pressed me with his offensive presence, the more likely I was to lose control of myself in face of the monster that I could be.

I have seen what happens to those who do not control themselves. Hemera, the daughter of fire, and Persephone, the child of the darkness, are lost to the poison in their blood. Both of my sisters are beyond salvation, I am most afraid; I have never dreamt of them being anything other than mad, and I trust nothing I have not seen with closed eyes (though I have not dreamt in many months; the magic of this land rebukes my right to such power). Perhaps I am wrong, and they are not fated to suffer eternally in the grasp of Inanna’s deranged plans – but I reserve no hope.

I only look to them to know what I do not wish to be.