The Academy: a million miles to montreal; astarte

He has been here before. It’s the same, and different, but he knows that it’s not quite the same. Just as well that he might know that it’s not quite different, either. DaVinci can nearly taste the dew on his lips, the raindrops crystalline and glittering on the edges of emerald leaves, as the veins search with quiet fingers all the way back to the stems. Flowers, aloft within themselves, flutter in the breeze like the strands of his mane often do, graced with barbs and leaves and twigs; and it is almost like a bird’s nest that they sit so delicately -- a home, within itself -- and DaVinci doesn’t even notice them.

He doesn’t have to. DaVinci is searching, searching for roots struck by lightning and weathered by the storm, he’s searching for the soft flowers that bloom in twilight, he’s searching for vines that wrap around the trunks of sycamore trees -- and more than anything else, he’s searching for a heart. A bloody, beating thing in the Academy’s gardens, red and pulsing in the earth where it was lost; and it is now that he wonders if the callings of the heart are fact or fiction, if they amount to anything at all --

The dappled stallion knows that they do, they always do, and maybe it’s the distant rumble of the ocean that makes him stop. Maybe it’s the quiet brush of wind on his face. Or maybe it’s the daisies, flourishing from the dirt in a softly triumphant surge from the ground, reaching for the sky in the only matter that it can -- bloom and grow. Bloom, and grow. DaVinci, too, hopes to make like the daisy. And grow.

So there he stands, alone amidst the fog and the fairies, and he worries.

... daVinci