arleigh

She tumbles into the world in a graceless heap of long legs and damp fur, nostrils sputtering and spitting fluids as her little lungs struggle to pull oxygen in through wet airways. She gasps, coughing and grunting against the fragility of her new body. Long dark lashes brush against her cheeks, squinting against the hazy light of this dying world. It is a place she will only hear stories about—stories of the glory days, when the land was fertile and full of life, and its gods were as beautiful as they were ravenous.

Now, however, she is left to only see the final days of darkness and dissolution.

Mercifully swathed in a cocoon of ignorance, the black babe can understand nothing of the world’s death as she surges into her first few moments of life. Paper-thin nostrils quiver as she breathes, the downy fur of her body trembling as the sting of cold air and early snow awakens her fledgling senses, pupils retracting against the light (however dim) to reveal the stark paleness of a murderer’s grandmother’s eyes.

Warmth.
Suddenly she feels the warmth of someone else against the bony curves of her newborn figure—mother, her instincts tell her, the woman’s breath and smell somehow familiar. The filly turns her head, huffing a breathy, warbling squeal as her eyes find her mother’s face, trying to make sense of the lines and planes of her features. There is an innate sense of love that is roused within the girl’s young breast—a stirring of something she cannot understand in this moment, but something that she knows is natural and good.

Shifting her weight and awkwardly flapping her small, downy wings, she tries to move closer, emboldened by her mother’s encouragement to stand. She does not know that when she stretches her legs out in front of her, that her pointed toes are not normal, or that the uncomfortable throbbing in her tendons shouldn’t be there. Only when she attempts to roll her weight upward—when the weight of her little body tries to flatten her hooves and pull and tear at the tendons—does the babe realize that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Pain—!
She doesn’t know what it is, but something awful and burning suddenly fires through her front legs. Buckling over and tumbling back into the snow, the filly screams. It hurts! The invisible flames reach from her tendons and seethe along her spine, licking against every nerve in her young body with a burning and harrowing discomfort. It is then that something else, in her agony, extends from her conscious—something thrown inadvertently and haphazardly from her aching soul.

Magic.

Instinctively she reaches for her mother, with both her mind and body, pale eyes wide with fear and confusion, lips trembling, as the pain burns and her magic flares.

“Speech.”

but I will hold on hope, and I won’t let you choke

on the noose around your neck