Summary »

She is freedom and the sky, the endless constellations, and the heavens above grant her the brightest of stars, the most wonderful caress of the wilderness. Within her eyes she holds the night sky and the bio-luminescent flora of the Tangled Wood, and the soft glow of fireflies. On her skin they paint the most gracious of colors, the most beautiful of images.

Ixchel was a canvas, and they painted her a goddess.

But when she walks the earth and lets her toes feel the rich soil of the Verdant Labyrinth, she does not feel the goddess that she is supposed to be. Her clanmates chant upon her songs of praise, words of love, unending glory, but she cannot hear them.

They are not the ballads she desires. Not ballads of love.

Not the love like reverence they give her. Not like that. They are in love with the idea of her, not her very being, not her. When they look at her they see a brilliant painting, not the canvas underneath (not the soul that makes the body and yearns to be free).

(And though she longs for romance, the beautiful red dawn, the endless possibilities that the world could give her—it is only in the graceful steps of the Matriarch's dance, the way she holds Ixchel's hands in her own and smiles at her a brilliant thousand suns, gleaming and gleaming, and she is surely more of the heavens than Ixchel ever could be.

But she moves away just as quickly, just as fast as the tempo of her songs, and leaves Ixchel's hands smoldering with golden ashes in her wake.)

She pines, forever.