yael

Today, for reasons entirely unknown, her various accoutrements lay heavy against deceptively radiant skin. Though the sun shines with all the springtime glee it can muster, the golden woman’s heart seems to weigh enough to sink her to the bottom of the ocean. When she should have been uplifted by blooming flowers and the twitterpated songs of birds as they flit about, her mind is elsewhere; roaming the maze of the past that she just can’t bring herself to board up forever. It’s the twins this time: Tariq and Tzion. She’s fairly sure they would be yearlings now, or two or three (time is a fickle thing when you seem to be stuck between worlds. All she truly knows is that they were in utero before, and when she came here, they weren’t), their siblings even older.

Their siblings don’t worry the little Ima as much as the twins do - she has faith that they can (mostly) take care of themselves. All mothers must let go at some point, and Yael can finally admit that she had a bit of a problem with allowing her offspring to make their own mistakes unless they left B’kanna. But the twins - theirs are faces she will never know, soft kisses she can never cherish, hearts who will never know just how much she loves them - how much they were wanted by their parents.

Dainty legs and unhurried hooves carry her on a course with no direction; not even whim controls her path, it is pure auto-pilot without knowing where to go. And yet, Yael is not worried. She has wings to bear her aloft should anything attack from the shadows - she is not accustomed to keeping watch. She does not now. She forgets she no longer wields a certain amount of power. And so the petite pegasus finds herself in the heart of the labyrinth, lost in imagined conversations and dancing with ghosts around a resplendent oak tree.

Even her private, occasional laughter seems loud.

yael

Curse her sun-soaked skin! Curse her wandering mind and aimless thoughts! Curse her past securities, her lax vigilance, her overreaching ego! If only (If only!) she could shed her bedazzling cloak and blend in like the mouse she is so affectionately called. If only sanity walked this maze with her, instead of her seemingly perpetual wintry shadow.

A familiar sounds tinkles through the still air, tap-tap-tapping at her conscious. Dainty, willful legs pause midstep, long ears swiveling to find the source of the sound in the midst of this unfamiliar labyrinth. Too late, there is no time to pause and decipher what or why; a banshee’s laugh rends the peace in two and Yael, still a mere herd-beast at the core, bolts further into the unknown. Again, she finds herself entrapped between a rock and a hard place - freedom and safety hampered by the closed in walls and blind corners. Left, right, right, left again; once more she finds her Hunter hot on her heels.

And then some angel turns her eye from the chase, leaving Yael to her own devices and necessity to its winding course. There is light at the end of this path, but as she bursts through with bated breath, she can see that there is no escape here. The way is blocked, and there is no room for the pint-sized pegasus to gain either altitude or speed. Wheeling around to face the white witch, the monster that is so intent on tasting her blood on its tongue, the golden mouse can do nothing but attempt to strike first.

Balanced aloft by a great swoop of her divinely given wings, her own hard hooves fly towards the mindless predator with all the accuracy of a child first learning to cast a line.

yael

By some small miracle, her hooves strike the hunter in the shoulder, but with that satisfying thud comes a searing pain, white-hot and concentrated, as an ivory rapier pierces the meat of her upper neck. By another, larger miracle, the deadly weapon misses the vital life sources that pulse up and down her neck, but that does not mean she will not bleed freely. The gleaming dagger slides freely in one side and out the other, as if the witch were trying to slice off a piece of Yael for consumption.

Just as soon as the pain reaches her eyes, the source of it is gone again, yanked from her flesh in a different path, widening the puncture. The air vibrates with roars and a higher pitched shriek, as Yael gives in the agony and curses the white walker to the sunlit sky. Let her nights be filled with as much brightness as her days, let the shadows never cross the seeker’s path again! Her vision swims - eyes go double, and then fuzzy as blood begins to flow freely and she finds that any exertion to turn her head results in stabbing pain.

Again, the monster comes at her, teeth snapping like a wild animal - and the golden mouse is caught off-guard. She blinks and stumbles backward, shying away to avoid as many bites as she can, but they come quickly, and without a pattern. “Stop!” she cries in vain, trying to move her wings into a protective position, but even those great, welcoming appendages cannot stem the assault. Her attacker is like a mad snake, she things, hissing and leaping forward constantly, until she is pepered with bite marks and stumbles on something loose on the ground - stone or vine or mud, it matters not - and ends up sitting on the ground.

And in this moment, she fears Beloved will do her worst; she fully believes that bites will turn to savage thrusts of her horn, to barbaric kicks to the head. After some forty-odd years, her life will end here and no one will ever know.

And then something sparks within her, and there is a sudden rushing of energy through her veins. Then she opens her mouth to speak, and there is nothing but the enthusiastic flow of air out of her mouth, before it ends in a strangled growl. Her perception changes, her skin tightens, and her body begins to shift. The silver from her main expands to cover her whole lizardesque frame, and feathers turn to webbed skin, bones sprout claws, and her nose and teeth elongate. Yes. Yes! YES! The form is familiar, cherished; and if dragons could cry, she would be sobbing in elation because something from before remains. All hope is not lost! Briefly frozen, as if the software had to catch up to the hardware, Yael’s thoughts turn to the catalyst: the Hunter. She is vulnerable in this moment, but a renewed vigor has her confident that should Beloved strike again, she will be repayed tenfold with blood and flames.

Whatever shall the hunter do when it all of a sudden becomes the Prey?

Angry, whirling eyes slowly turn to the horned woman, her lips curling back to reveal a long line of teeth - daring even the insane to try again. Normally, she would be loathe to take a life, but in this case, she might make an exception.

yael

A lover of the light, the good witch, the Great Mother - they can call her whatever they want, and she will come without hesitation or judgement.  

It would be foolish to deny that Beloved’s squeals are music to her now-scaled ears, the fear and confusion in her tormentor’s eyes more satisfying than the coldest water on a dry and dusty throat. Her revenge need not be bloody or violent. Her Hunter can keep her life (though it may be kinder - and wiser - if she were to rid the world of that special kind of crazy), and know somewhere deep within, wherever she hides things she cannot bear to admit, that the Mouse is forever safe. There won’t be a next time for this pair, unless they meet upon the battlefield. The white mare would have to have truly lost it, to want to go up against a dragon’s sharp talons and clickety-clackety teeth, to tempt the fire that bubbles up from her belly, to risk a spiny tail - all because a poor little mouse got away?

But as Yael well knows, insanity is unpredictable. It… takes that which should never be taken, crushing newborn heads into white-gold sand, spreading blood until it sinks down, down, into the dunes. The smell of afterbirth and death invaded every corner of their kingdom that day - on that day, the skies wept along with her.

And here it is - again. A curse she can never escape.

A feeble attempt is made to chase Beloved away, but never draws close enough to swat at the retreating hindquarters. After listening to make sure that the mare truly did flee (and wasn’t coming back), dragon-Yael turns and spreads her moonlight-colored, black-taloned wings, powerful hindquarters propelling her into the sky. She wobbles a bit at first, but soon finds the familiar feeling in the muscles. How long had it been since she’d assumed this form? Months? Half a year?

Goddamn it’s good to be back. Even if it’s on a much smaller scale.