The Academy: no one save the wind;

"Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do."
It is a frightening thing -- there are names to be used by the Manitou to call to the spirit within the flesh and there are names to be used by others every day. Names are a powerful thing and she fears the power another has over her when they hold her true name upon their tongue. She fears - she trusts; that is the way of it, that the earth and the Manitou that walk it in their shapes of fog and fern, will not allow it to be abused by this mare - this fox-red sister.

She trembles, sighs and the night passes; fear falls before trust and she trusts - so be it, she thinks, so be it.

***
Raven, not listening to the earth, does not hear her but feels that touch and leans into it, even as her name - her true name, that secret thing that awakens the spirit - comes whispered on a breath that fills her lungs and quickens the heart inside her. She smiles, raven-hair falling across her painted face as her lips find the shoulder of Astarte and taste the sea on her red skin. Memories shift across her eyes like stars in the sky, like the hair the wind blows off her face. She hears wings beat the air - bats or birds, she doesn’t care to know which and hopes it is not the latter for things haunt her and she sighs as Astarte speaks.

“It will not be easy,” she murmurs, fear and sadness quieting her tongue for Raven clings to ways not of this world. It is hard to part with the traditions steeped in her blood, and harder still to tell of the things that came before this - these moments in moonlight and mare’s breath. “But I will do it,” she promises, and nuzzles at the red neck, still tasting the sea, still remembering and something inside her burns - at a memory, at a new beginning.