listen before i go. [ slate ]

SLATE.

He skewers her as quickly as she did he - but her spear is in his hand and his sword is in her stomach.

She feels it, breathes in - metal on muscle, nerves, invading her. Violating her. Nothing new.

"Oh," breathes out with her words.

A sword bites into her shoulder, as feral and wild as she. Her right arm falls to the ground and Slate spills from the wound, hot blood catching fire as she bleeds.

"Well..."

The sword leaves her center as cleanly as it had entered, as her energy leaves it's the only thing holding her up. So she falls, thumps to the ground on her knees, it's not enough. She tips forward, following her blood. Meets it there. Splashes her cheek into the red.

Breathes in, shallow. It hurts. Reaches for the fresh wound in her abdomen, her back, both. Her arm doesn't move. It's lying beside her, hand still clutching the handle of her spear. The river runs softly underneath the sounds of battle. Her blood runs wild.

Breathes out, there she goes.

With the wind.

It carries her somewhere else. Gently, softly, she leaves her punctured shell behind. A wild girl, so calm. Like the river. Lets herself drift, forgets it all. Allows it all to leave her. Until she's just Slate. Or what was Slate. Until there's nothing around her but mist and fog and the wind sets her bare feet down on the dirt path and she stares up at a mountain topped with snow.

Slate blinks, stood at its base. White clouds dance around her ankles as she steps forward and she is surprised she can do that, walk - although she's already forgotten why. One foot in front of the other, the mountain peak silently calls her name. 

Grey and white, she ascends. The fog disappears from her feet as she climbs but still it swirls around the mountain, stretches up into the sky, becomes every inch of the universe. Hours and hours, days and days, compressed into minutes. Seconds, perhaps. Maybe weeks. All that is here is Slate and the mountain and the cool rush of breeze as she climbs higher and higher and higher. Her footsteps make no sound.

At the top of the mountain she expects to be alone. Slate isn't quite sure what she expected, really, blinking in confusion, but the girl that greets her sits atop the very edge of the mountaintop and turns upon her arrival.

Giant blue eyes blink over a shoulder and a little smile creeps on to her face. Usually Slate wouldn't trust her. But something about this place, about the soft clumps of snow littered everywhere and her eyes, the way she pats down the space next to her, Slate trusts in  it.

She creeps forward closely, joining the girl. Their knees swing over the ledge and feet dangle in the air. Snowflakes fall softly. They land in the girls dark brown hair, glistening and sparkling.

She says nothing, the girl. Slate doesn't either. They just sit, at the top of the world, and watch the endless mist of clouds roll by. 

"Where am I?" asks Slate, once an eon ends and her soul becomes curious. 

The girl just smiles, flattening the palms of her hands on the ground beside her hips. Slate doesn't quite know how, but in that moment she understands that this girl cannot talk. Sure enough, the faintest pink scar crescents the circumference of her neck.

Snow falls in her own hair now. And on her bare knees. All around her. She should be freezing but she isn't. Neither warm, nor cold. Just content, trapped in a perfect second of weather. 

"What's your name?" 

The girl says nothing and tilts her face upwards. Her scar reminds Slate, "Oh," she adds. "Right. Sorry."

Another little smile, shaped like the line on her neck. She doesn't seem bothered.

They go back to silence, thoughts drifting like snow in the slight breeze. Slate doesn't know where she is but she feels safe. Safe, despite sitting next to a stranger. Safe, despite her legs dangling off of the edge of a mountain. Safe, despite not remembering a single thing about who she is, nor how she came to be here.

A black spot appears in the white-grey horizon, growing larger with each moment. It morphs and focuses into that of a crow, swooping around their heads until it lands on the stranger's leg and cocks its head to the side once, twice, three times.

The girl nods, and off the crow darts, diving back down the mountain into the endless cloud.

Time to go, Slate thinks - but not in her own voice. 

She turns her head to her right, and the girl is gone.

Startled, Slate pulls her legs back up to the safety of the ledge and shuffles to all fours - crouched as she peers over the mountain peak's ledge. No sign of where the girl went, save for a crease in the clouds where the bird had left them. She turns her head back around to look behind her - nothing but patches of white frost left on the ground.

It's stopped snowing. 

Slate knows she has to jump. There's no walking back down the mountain. It's an innate knowledge, raw and new and yet it's as if she has known this for a thousand years. Her hands shake, trembling knees knocking together - suddenly she is freezing, the icy wind her enemy pushing her forward. "N-n-n-no-o-o, n-n-no," teeth chatter, shaking her head, frost tickling her chin and ears and the tip of her nose.

"N-n-n-no I-i-i- c-c-c-ca-a-a-a-n... no-n-no-no-no-"

But she steps forward anyway, one foot in front of another, and soon she stands shaking at the top of the mountain and cannot bear to look down.

But she does look down. Down, down, down, into the unknown. Everything tells her it's dangerous, that she mustn't - but everything else screams for her to jump. Just as the wind had carried her to the bottom of the mountain it coaxes her back down, the only way she can go. A dip in the clouds, into the unknown, no promise of landing. No promise of falling. Nothing, and everything, below the mist.

She knows she must bend her knees and jump, but she can't. And yet she takes a breath. Tries to trust in the wind. Listens. Hears everything and nothing. Silver and the rush of water. A match striking quick and fast. The streak of a bullet. A single drop of blood. The wind. No sound but the wind. Breathe in, bend, breathe out, jump-

Fall into the clouds, wake up on the sand. In the same second. On two opposite ends of time.

The mountain stands tall above her, strong at the top of her vision. At its peak streaks the same dust of snow she sat next to moments, universes ago. There's a blue sky above her, a sun half-eclipsed by cloud, and a streak of lightning frozen in the blue and white.

Slate sits up, turns around. Trees dusted with frost sit at the base of the mountain that weren't there before, robins and crows settled in branches. Flowers dot the coast where the forest meets the sand. A lone island sits out at sea. 

When she blinks she sees a spark, hears a single tick of clockwork.

"Hello Slate," someone says behind her. Turning, her gaze  finds a grey-eyed girl with a voice like life itself and a crowd of friends gathered behind her. Blue eyes from the mountain - Slate's mountain - smiles softly at the speaker's side.

Snow begins to fall at the top of the grey peak.

Slate meets her smile with a grin.

" MAYBE YOU ARE ALL
THE WILD IN ME. "