The Academy: take these broken wings and learn to fly;

There's a blue rising along the desert mountainside where small cacti fan the sky. An old hawk swerves and rises above brambles and thorns; brown-winged and savage she lifts the sky.
- Sheryl Luna
A rogue’s heart is not their own.
She once believed this; until she met him and her heart lifted at the slightest breeze that brushed across her face, and how that same heart leapt at the slightest whiff of sea! Acacia was certain that a rogue’s heart was not their own, but was certain too, that her own heart was coming back to her borne on the tides of stallion and salt. If she was afraid, she did not show it but the fear was there - deep in the blood of her, hidden and biding its time.

He promised to pass through the groves and find her amongst all the greenness and the shadows. She remembers that promise, holds the sweetness of it to her pale breast as he goes - returns to the sea, she imagines. And on her parting breath, she tells him her name; “Acacia,” she murmurs, thorns in the throat and something else too, a strange longing that does not keep him by her side.

But time passes, not too slow and not quick enough; marked only by sunset and sunrise, which she often watches through the entwined hands of leaf and bough. This morning, the same birds sing but their songs do nothing for her. A restlessness builds, begins in the blood and travels through her until her feet forget stillness and flutter beneath her. She flits, from tree to tree, a pale moth of a horse that beats itself against the morning light in all uselessness. But the restless feeling remains and she turns to a path not known to her before. Adventure then, is the cure.

She comes across tended copses of flower and tree, in which the bustle of bird and bee is unmistakable. This place… she muses to herself, feeling the restlessness escape her limbs as they settle into a stride of leisure - of ease. In the distance, she saw the gaping mouths of temples fallen to ruin, their beams like exposed teeth and tongues protruding from dead faces. She skirted the edges of these old places, smelling their age and snorting out her unease at their presence -- Acacia was not comfortable around manmade things, the old scent of man a thing ingrained in her that made fear arise.

Then she smells him - sea and air and stallion. She smiles; enters the shadowing green of the vine-gnarled boughs at his side, enjoying the brightness of his skin as it contrasts beautifully with the green of the vines. Her eyes are a hungry desert drinking in the sight of him like long awaited for rain. “Pirate,” she echoes in a whisper, bringing her nose to his for a moment before her lips skitter across his shoulder in greeting.