For the Sky (DISCONTINUED)

17 - A Distant Memory

I never imagined that I'd have to learn to walk all over again. All foals can run hours upon being born - it's not something we remember or have any second thoughts of. When the lands were wild and ruthless, you had to be able to spring up and run from danger as soon as you hit the ground. As my knees wobbled and shook, my shoulders protesting with every step, I considered that maybe there wasn't really a purpose in all this - I didn't have anything to run from, really.

I tried not to think about Frin as I limped my way back through the forest. To think that it's only been mere hours since I've last set foot on this trail, that I'd left with high spirits. Aro's fog still lay thick and heavy on the woods and just breathing it made me feel guilty. With each pitiful groan that escaped me as my hips rotated to propel me onward, I wished that I'd stop breathing altogether. There was nothing left.

I cursed myself then as I walked, as my legs regained their innate whisking motion in their step, for every idiotic decision I'd made along the way. I agreed on that ridiculous journey, thinking that I stood a chance at enacting change, I brought along a kid for the ride, I dragged one of the last Ceffyl Dwr children out of the waterfall and coaxed the kelpie queen herself out of the swamp, and all for what? For these things to perish, one by one - for the northern kingdom only in a place somehow worse than how it was before - all because of that damned little braid still stuck in that dumb brute's mane. To be so naive, to be so lovestruck, to be so homesick, to be so enamored and weak-willed to not see that at every twist and turn, Asger was lying through his teeth, and quite poorly at that, seemed an achievement in shame all on its own.

I walked slowly but deliberately. I considered that if I stopped to rest even for a second that I'd slip away and vanish entirely. I walked longer than I could've imagined I could ever walk in a single day. Every now and again, my ears would ring, I would energetically swish my tail at a pesky insect. But I felt detached from it somehow, like in reality I wasn't there and all, and following some kind of pre-tread path in an instinctual daze.

It was a daze - it must've been. I don't know how many hours or hypothetically, days passed before I felt myself shiver beneath the shadow of something of considerable height. I looked up, and there it was. The castle.

The Burnt Castle, as it had began to be referred to in word of mouth and local maps - demoted from a capital of the sprawling and powerful North, to a "landmark of great historical importance". A footnote in a textbook by now. A number of years ago it used to be home. But that felt like such a distant memory, I wondered if I'd dreamed it - the concept of being a princess, of being any kind of significant figure at all, baffled me. I felt minuscule - the shadow of this decomposing structure didn't help in the slightest.

I sighed. I looked up. Predictably, nothing had changed. It was the same old ruin that had been ransacked years ago, that I'd looked back at with tearful eyes as Bartholomew guided me with his wing through the burning forest around us. It was the same old ruin that I rummaged through with Chief, learning what was salvageable and where was safe to tread. It was the same old ruin that I then sat and watched under sunny and cloudy skies alike for hours, settling my persistent gut feeling to come back to it. And now I have. The place was a magnet for me specifically - a beacon that I'd finally returned to.

Having nothing left to think about - having nothing left at all, I pushed myself into an amble and entered the great double doors of the keep as I'd always wanted to.

The ghosts of life and familiarity still lingered - here were the frames that once held paintings that I would make faces at behind my mother's back, here were the stairway railings, now coated with mud and moss and soot that I'd watch my father sweep his wings over ever so tenderly as he'd descend the steps to give a speech to his designated guests. Up there was the skylight, its tinted glass gone, whether from heat or looting or both, now open to the sky, once a colorful kaleidoscope of colors that I would look up at and dream of going norther than north and seeing the dancing lights that I'd read about with Bartholomew.