Solira: The Ocean: for his mourners will be outcast men; and outcasts always mourn. any. --

“ I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ”

-- Yeats

Once upon a time she had been free, and careless; once upon a time, she was beautiful, the way wild ponies are beautiful; but she isn’t beautiful anymore and she isn’t carefree.

Now, she listens for the storm that gathers over the shore; an spectacle of groaning lightning and roaring wind. She watches it, pensively, as they rumble and scream in the dark; watches the quickened waves writhe upon the reef, an anticlimax of stillness and impotence; they will never grow beyond fangless torrents, and the rain, when it comes, is wet and cold.

The rain, when it comes, hisses into the wounds that gape wide open, like toothless mouths, from the burnt edges of her skin; it sings down her charred, chafed flesh; it mingles with the dark fluids that seep from where the skin flakes and peels back; she doesn’t seem to mind it.

The shallow waters whine and snap; she smiles at them, and her eyes are calm.

Mind it she doesn’t. Instead, she walks with utmost care, soft; quiet as a mouse. Once upon a time she ran free, barely looking where she went; now she moves with elegance, even if it is unwanted; her tendons feel leathery, like cooked meat, her joints swollen and perhaps infected; she doesn’t seem to care.

Care she doesn’t; she is alive by magic, pure and simple, the earnestness of the elements. So they rebel futilely above her, air and lightning and water beyond; so sparks rise and crack against her, twine in her half-molten mane, become light and electricity and tension; almost magnetic.

Perhaps.

In the shore, where she has come, in the wreath of a storm – for extra irony, she supposes – she smiles; and perhaps it doesn’t matter that her eyes are blindness gray, serene and clear as the celestial violence isn’t, still like a monolith among them, because she has no wish to mingle and perhaps, she won’t.

There are feelings in her still, feelings she must rid herself of; just as well; she will meditate in her captivity.

And maybe, maybe, she will watch the storm die.

Jörmungandr?

Yes?

“ stormreaver ”
of night and light and half-light