[P] til the day you cast a shadow;

[Sabine]

Sabine,

The weight of his gaze upon her fine, naked face is sobering. It confronts her; pushing her into light when she knew only the comfort of shadow -- for what does the wallflower know of scrutiny? Of consideration? Her life has been decorated by the too-bright men and women that had passed through it: Acton was gold to rival the sun, Rhoswen was red to drown the earth and Raum was silver to mirror the moon. Sabine? The witness to their sins, their glory, their brilliance, from a watchtower she had built out of modest vines and gossamer veils. 

At night she tells herself that no play can be immortalised without an audience to honour it so, but even the kindest lies cannot stop the tears from staining her pale skin beneath a moon that cared nothing for a child as obscure and wraithlike as she. She could not bear it: the gravity of her mediocrity dragging her parents ten feet down from their alabaster plinth. 

It is a small mercy, then, when the boy's eyes linger not long enough to bring heat to her cheeks or stiffness to her hips. Instead, he laughs and the sound is so strange that the cyclical thoughts of her own adequacy dissipate into the fermenting desert air, rotating the sequence so that it was Sabine's opportunity to study her company. Seconds pass before she realises the expression upon her face must be blatantly perplexed, let alone the fact that she had been staring far too intensely at someone she had known but five minutes. As the blue light of her horns splinters in novel spirals over the boy's dark spine, the roseate girl tries to blink away the startled look that had taken hostage of her delicate features. Sabine did not know laughter could sound heavy, until it had fallen out of this stranger's mouth in a sack filled with carbon and metal and rock. His morbid sentiment passes her by like a car hurtling past a stop-sign: indifferent and overlooked, for Sabi is too busy studying the details of her feet and feeding the embarrassment running a mile up her scalp. Her face must have been a picture.

By the time she looks up again, the dark-clothed coyote had begun to head south toward where she could only assume (naively, trustingly) the capital lay. It is the gift of youth that wipes clean her bashful thoughts so that when she falls in step beside his wiry shoulders, all thoughts of his laugh and her reaction were but a distant nightmare. If it were not for the thrashing fear in her heart at the thought of where this slow march would end, the probing words "how long have you lived here then? Oh, and I'm Sabine," might never have left her timid lips. But she couldn't be silent; not now, when distraction was her only defence against the swallowing blackness of her grief. 

(sad birds still sing.)

@abel | "speech" | notes: <3

rallidae