I am starlight given flesh, but oh, I know you've heard that all before. So I will spin you another tale, one of a girl and a beast that wears a cape of dreams and blood, muddied and mixed until they are purer than the sun itself.

My family is beautiful in only the way that they are terrifying. We dress ourselves in lightness, brightness, purity. We mark ourselves with runes and constellations and oh, I am a constellation all my own. My flesh is stardust and my soul is a wave of fire crashing and crashing and crashing into oblivion with the force of a thousand suns exploding. Where my brother has taken on the unholy, the ancient, I have taken on the truly divine and breathed it into the very core of me, stapling it on my neck like a banner below my hair of spun silver and ivory that falls and falls as any star does: beautifully, effortlessly, deathlessly toward the ground. Only a single gold pin (it's the color of my eyes, the color you liked so well when it sparkled as any night sky is meant to do) presses against my nape to hold it tamely back in place. This keeps it from my horn, so often bloodied, ready to rend heart from rib, to carve my name into the annals of the Dumas family until it is not known without me ingrained at the very heart of it.

There have been many star-skinned girls before me. I look so much like my mother, like my rune-spun brother, but oh I fight like my father never could. He laughs at the gold that gilds my feet, he laughs at the braids in my tail. He does not laugh when I don my pale armor and ready for death to greet me again.

We are old friends.

Older than the stars. Older than the fiery heart of the world.

More than Miriam, more than life, Death and I are made of the same ilk, bred from the same seed.

There is a beast inside us all. Mine takes the body of a smile. She is hungry and insatiable as any monster is, but what is more, she is clever and charming. I can't say all the time that I like her, only that we tolerate one another for our own mutual survival.

Without her, I am dead.

Without me, she does not exist.

We are a team, perfectly in sync. I was not bred for the slaughter she sews, but I know how to work a knife at the dinner table better than any man I know. Together, we are whole, yin and yang resting within our breast. You would think I should scream, hiding such a monster, feeding her scraps from my hand, letting her lick the pomegranate juice when it drips.

I know, sometimes, at night, she screams when she remembers everything we've done. I'll wake up sweating, the taste of curdled milk in my throat that she throws herself against the walls to get rid of. It's never spit out. I swallow it down like a poison, like a penitence that will go on forever until I die.

When Henry returned from Solterra, he'd seldom speak at all. Lips sealed tighter than if they were sewn. Once, just once, I saw him look at me and I heard him say, clear as day, pale as the skin on my back: "You're a monster." The beast inside me showed him our pearly smile, our gleaming white teeth.

I never wanted to cry more than when he told me that.

It wasn't like it was untrue. He never lies.

You told me once that a good liar always tells the truth. I think that's why I wear my honesty like my armor, pressing it on eyelids and down throats like petals between pages, one after another falls under my hands as my words fall out of my mouth. I don't think I'd lie, not truly, for I never let anything other than the truth slip past my lips and into your drink.

When I'd plan our outings - trips to the North so that I may grow more accustomed to miles of sand without a body (yours doesn't count, it never did) to be found - I know you found them lovely. Even my little monster leans into your touch, she purrs when she smells your sorrow and burdens. And we'd wrap tighter and tighter, a snake about your throat. Sometimes, I know, my greed is the most selfish and hungering thing of all.

I wonder if you watched as the grace fell from you skin, like golden ichor of the gods slopping onto a glass floor, reflecting sin and pain and selfishness in the name of "love." You never looked more holy than when you ripped the blood from my lips and stained my cheeks pink, your white teeth a battlefield where I used to be.

You used to ask me why my favorite color was red. I lied. I lied to you over and over again. What I should have told you is that I never had a favorite color, they never mattered, not until I saw you. Not until I found you. That's why it would never work. That's why I had to leave. It's because of you.

Everything is because of you.

---

Once, long ago, I was at the side of my father when he told me that my emotions would rip a hole in the sky and pull down a black hole. What he meant is that I was too much a girl to be useful. I know now that he meant love would be the death of me and in my dying a star, as fierce and cold as a winter storm, would be born.

It is why he put armor to my skin nearly the second I could bare its weight. Every morning is a ritual, a baptism by sword and by sheer force of will. "I don't want you to die," he would whisper into my hair as my brother helped me braid it back, his lips were always full of beaches and sand and the sky. I felt their touch, but it was only the ghost of them that would stay with me when my father would put on my helmet, the plating along my spine, and send me off to train.

Again. Again.

I am a porcelain plate polished every morning and shattering every night.

He doesn't think I will be worth anything.

The Seer tells him I will be everything.

---

Henry pulls my hair when he braids it. He plucks it, strand by strand, so that I feel every attachment point and remember what it is like to be defeathered. I don't think that he likes that we would be equals when I don my armor. Of course, he goes to train with the Halcyon, his wings granting him position.

We are only half siblings, at the end of the day, but I love him. I love him so dearly as though he is my own heart and his flesh is that upon my bones.

When he comes home with cuts I bandage them with kelp and seaweed, pulling it from the waters he loved as a boy. I know this because I loved it too. Everything he loved, I did.

Once, the Halcyon went to Solterra, protecting some dignitary or another. He came back laced in scarlet and silence.

That's when our secrets began.

---

My father tells me I am weak every day that I would join the family for breakfast in the parlor. He pours over my faults, naming them as constellations and stars that fall. At last, when he grows tired of everything that is wrong with me, he tells me he's to send me off - away to the land that broke my brother, that stole Henry as he was and made him the Henry that he is.

He is terrible, my dear Henry now.

But I will go. My father has said it and so it shall be.

---

I could kiss you for hours or days or years and never grow tired. The way your eyes, those golden eyes that purr like a lion in heat, fall on mine and clash and fight and war drives me wild. You drive me wild with your burdens, with your smiles. Somewhere between the curve of your hips that matches the curve of your cheeks, I think that these are the feminine wiles all warriors are warned away from.

You are dangerous.

Not to many.

Not to most.

You are dangerous to me.

Still, I press your memory into my ribs, crushing your sturdy bones to mine. You are shorter and thicker, you are more steadfast and I know the taste of shame because you have shown it to me in the way that I waver, the way my ship has forgotten which way is north.

How can I go on holding you when everything you are is the weakness in me?

---

I go on with you for years.

And I am your secret you will never tell.

---

And you, Miriam, touch me like I am holy, like I am a god. If I am, then you are my sacrifice, my broken lamb. You make me drunk with power, heady and intoxicated on strawberry wine, on Solterran sunsets.

Even when I walk away, I won't say goodbye. You're pressed into my soul, how could you ever leave?