Since you have performed the immense task of playing my host, I think it only fair to return the favor. My family is throwing a bit of a celebration at our estate in Solterra, and I can imagine literally no one else strolling through the door than my friend Isabella.
I will try to keep you busy so you don't miss your studies too much. I've just thought of the most wonderful game we can play.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
S
he has spent a considerable amount of nights during her short, short life so far, with her head tipped back to the stars
She has watched how they spin and clash, how they spiral apart and away from one another, opening up entire chasms between them all. She has watched how they breed black holes, swallowing entire galaxies in the blink of an eye. She has dreamed she was there once, that a ghost, one of her ghosts, took her into the stars. She had reached for the sun and felt it snap beneath her, sending her spinning off into nothingness. She dreams of it still, the quiet, the black, the crushing gravity.
Such things press into her now, a strange weight in her chest.
They had gone to Dawn, her mother had taken her with. The willowy girl had stood in Elena’s shadow, watching as she spoke to people, people she knew, people Elliana did not. She was stuck there, chains hanging from her skin while her entire body burned to be elsewhere. It was only when the blue eyes of her mother turned to her and told her to stay close, but that she could go and play.
The willowy girl had needed nothing else to drop the chains beside her, send them clattering into the snow ground before like ballerina, she twirls into the barren trees. They try to catch her, to reach her, those empty branches trying to wrap around her waist as if they were her partner. They lift her into a leap and she lands in the snow with a graceful patter.
From the day she was born, her legs itched with wanderlust. And this, this is the only thing that soothes it, this moment alone, to stretch her arms from one end of the forest to the other. She thinks if she stretches them far enough they may find one other on the other side, and clasp together.
She dances, she sashays like she on ice, chaines as those short locks of hair try to flutter in her own windstorm like her mother’s does, so effortlessly.
The day passes, and Elliana falls deeper into that forest, no not falls, dancers do not fall, she glides, leaps, turns. This is her dance floor, and the snow ignites underneath the setting sun and the rising moon.
There is part of her that knows she should have gone back sooner. Back before it was dark, before the shadows started to creep, to crawl, to throw themselves upon Elliana’s body as if she were their canvas and they paint.
Part of her that knows her mother will be displeased, and like a petulant child, she had avoided it.
A snowflake falls. It lands on her tongue. It tastes like water, like cold, like sugar, and a little like kisses on foreheads.
She tastes another.
Another.
Until her lips are frozen.
She hears something.
Her lip are so cold she cant move her mouth anymore, when she drags that dark head from the sky. When she does speak, she finds she is surprised that she is capable of it. Her head tilts to the side and she considers him with her cornflower gaze, they pierce from her dark skin. “Hello?” Elliana blinks, shakes her head at such an unclever thing she has just said.
That is when the voices start.
They start like an almost silent buzz, in spring it could be confused for bees humming.
But Elliana has never known spring, she has never known the bees in their trees.
She knows those voices. They comes to her when she closes her eyes to sleep. They cry outside her window, they giggle under her bed, they whisper in her ear just when she thinks she has fallen asleep.
A shape appears before her, a lady she knows all to well. The lady with the bent neck. She doesn't cry, doesn't whimper, just closes her eyes and drowns in the voices of the dead.
☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "bronzed as earth, the second lies / hearing ticks blown gold / like pollen on bright air. Lulled / near a bed of poppies,"
In the entryway, the music swells and falls like the dunes in the Mors, or like the sea. Unlike my siblings, I am sea-stone, not sand; I have never been sure which comparison is more apt.
Whatever can be said of my brother (and many, many things can be said of my brother), Pilate does know how to throw a party. I navigate the halls of our home slowly, my eyes lingering a moment on each passing detail – each gilded thing that was not present yesterday, each string of bright lights, each servant-in-black with a tray full of wine glasses and appetizers. It would probably be wrong to attribute too much of this to Pilate. Ishak, I am sure, would scold me for my inattentiveness. He might have conducted the efforts, but the work, ultimately, fell to the hired help, and I saw them as they scrambled to adhere to his – high – standards.
I don’t pity them, because I do not pity anyone; I don’t think that I can. (Ishak says that pity is as likely to make things worse as it is to make them better, anyways.) Still, at the sight of their uniformed bodies, I can’t help but occasionally feel a certain stir of wrongness.
Maybe it is just because I spend most of my days in the hospital. Things are different, there.
I drift through each open section of the manor aimlessly – look at the gathered artists painting designs on Corradh. who seems more than happy to bask in their attentions, at Hagar cornering a pair of hapless partygoers, at Adonai lingering statuesque among statues, looking as much a moving corpse as a man (certainly, I could not mistake him for a statue – he appears too sickly for anything that we would purchase), at Pilate serving drinks and greeting each guest with a kind of indulgent enthusiasm. I wonder, idly, where Miriam is. She has barely been out of her room, but surely she did not miss the uproar of the party preparations; I am outside of the manor most of the day, and I was still aware of Pilate’s plans.
Still – no matter how I look for her, I cannot find my other sister. It’s a pity, somewhat. Ishak is preoccupied, and I think that there is something pitiful about the look of a hostess – however mild – walking alone at her family’s own party. (It is the consequence, I suppose, of being the least sociable (and beloved) sibling.) I try not to pay too much mind to the aesthetics; so long as I keep walking, it will look like I have somewhere to be. Somewhere important.
Idly, I twine my hair around the pink flowers braided into my mane. Almost all of them have fallen out; the few that remain are wilted. Still, their sweet scent remains, disguising the air of gore that lingers on my heels almost perpetually.
I have looped around the manor three times when I come to a slow halt in the entryway and pluck a wine glass from one of the trays that the servants are carrying. The waiter catches my eye, for just a moment, and I nod my head to him once. I don’t drink. Still – it looks better to have a glass.
Across the room, musicians are playing on gilded instruments. (Wherever I look, the world seems gilded.) The invitation was correct; the music is good, particularly compared for the accompaniment to the last few I attended, and I am someone who cares very little for the arts. (It is not as though my brother would settle for anything less.)
I lift my glass to my lips and smell the wine, but I do not drink.
@Maret || tbh this thread should be probably titled "ways to Not convince Maret to join Day," but, uhh world's worst welcome committee || "Two Sisters of Persephone," Plath
widows, ghosts and lovers sit and sing in the dark, arched marrow of me
T
his earth, here in the desert beneath the winter-night, is bitter. It is bitter and brittle with all the dead bodies in the sand-monster dens, the flower seeds dropped by the migrating birds that could not root and the grains of sand that whisper the stories of the bones like diamond tuning forks so faint and frail that only a unicorn can hear them.
The song of the bitter earth, as it bellows and echoes like thunder in her heart, is deafening. If her heart had any notes of its own, or her liver any sorrow of its own, or her belly any hunger that foliage could quell, she would still only hear that song.
Like thunder.
She walks on her frail legs that are no less full of decay than the dunes. Her eyes look at the moon in the way the coyotes once did. The wind rustles through her mane, and whistles through her horn, as it did to the feathers of the hawks and the eagles who can only dream of flight now. The black shadow, stretching thin in the moonlight behind her, shifts across the sand as a winter elk's once did when he strayed from the heard.
The unicorn walks and she is all the pieces of dead caught in the ocean-deep sand.
Even the music, when she slips in through the shadows in the garden, does nothing to dull the thundering roar. It only settles below the death-knell like a lone flute in a sonnet of drums. The faintness of it, the frailness that makes her think of the dunes in the moonlight, makes her treasure it more. She follows it, as the coyotes followed the lone winter elk, with hunger gnawing at her belly.
But even when she lays her cheek against the marble, close enough that she can see the sweat gathering around the musician's eyes, it does not fill her.
Nothing does. Like the dead, and the thunder, and the dreams she is never full.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
Aster is a wild thing.
There is nobody she answers to, no one she belongs to, except for the cheetah who sleeps curled around her like a comma and follows her like a shadow. Somewhere there is a brother, but she no longer misses his heartbeat beside hers, and the hollow space in her soul has long since been filled with the holy music of the wind and the waves and the storm. Only when she peers into a pool and sees her golden eyes assessing her does she think oh,, and feel like there is something she has lost. It is not a feeling she cares for, and so she runs with her cheetah a flash in the grasses before her, or lets him groom her with his rough tongue, or flies as high as she can until the cold brings tears to her eyes and his distressed pacing far, far below becomes something of a memory too.
But there is one place that calls her like a mother, one bond that lies buried but will not break. And not even Teak can follow her there, not with the bridge gone, and when she goes (as she must always go) he lies on the coast with his head between his paws and waits as motionless as a creature carved from wood.
She always knows when the island changes. She can feel it in her blood, or smell it on the wind, or hear it from the voices of the birds. And Aster does not always remember what it is that draws her back, but she always answers.
This time the change is blinding.
The morning sun shines like starfire, so brightly it is difficult to land. Aster tucks her wings in tight and hurtles downward, a falling star herself, and the wind howls in her ears and it is luck alone that she does not dash herself to pieces on the jagged teeth of crystals.
She stands alone among them, her breath fogging the surface of the nearest. There, distorted, her reflection observes her, and they are the only two living things in the world.
Isn't it lovely, all alone?
Heart made of glass, my mind of stone
T
he desert did not see much of a winter. Throughout most of the year, it's hot and dry - only barely tolerable only once the sun has set. The cold and wet was not something seen in such unforgiving places. While other parts of the realm might see rain or snow, such things were unknown to those trapped by endless mounds of sand. Csilla had not known to mind the familiarity of her birthland's landscape. Built to withstand the nature of its wrath, the heat had been no more to her than the gentle touch of a mother. Not that she had ever experienced such a thing.
Often, as a child, she had imagined that the desert had been her dam. Foolish beliefs had brought her comfort throughout the loneliness of his childhood. Before the lessons, and the tutors, and the rules - there had been nothing but what the land could offer her. One thousand imaginings had occupied her mind and the mountains that locked them in may as well have been the end of the world. It wasn't until she grew older that she grew to desperately wish such foolish thoughts to be true. All innocence was lost the moment she left behind the magical kingdom of her youth.
Torn from a fate she had resigned herself to, Csilla had been thrown into a world that was as foreign to her as some other planet. All around her the land was covered in a thick blanket of white. All memories of warmth fled from the mare's mind, her beloved desert long forgotten. Instead, she was met by the cruel unforgiveness of true winter. Icy breaths stung her lungs, yearning to be defrosted by the heat of a fire. She had no way of knowing how long she had been walking - the journey directionless and never-ending.
For the first time in her life, the young mare was completely alone. There was no sour-faced governess to direct her path, no father's ambition to steal away her childhood - no husband's gifts to inflict pain. The silence was deafening. The howling of the wind serves as her only form of company. Although, Csilla finds its opinions far more welcoming than that of any other voice she'd been forced to endure.
With no other direction to go but forward, the lone mare cuts her through the layers of ice and snow. With every agonized breath, she hoped for civilization to arise. Desperation arose as, with every rise of the land, she was met with disappointment. For as far as the eye could see - there was nothing. The familiar gray-blue shapes of mountains loomed in the distance, though Csilla knew with absolute certainty that they were not hers.
Csilla's teeth chattered and her legs trembled. The land rose and fell, with no clear path to take. Around her neck, the golden collar she was forced to always wear dripped with ice. She did not belong here, a fact made evident by her sleek summer's coat. Conquering yet another hill, Csilla paused at the top - her eyes of evergreen surveying the land hungrily. Nothing but the occasional barren tree offered itself as company. Puffs of white breath gathered around her face as hot tears stung the edges of her eyelids.
She'd been kidnapped. And what for? To be dumped in some frozen wasteland with no hope of ever being discovered? The price on her head would have been a handsome one, and yet - they had tossed her out like she had been no more than a bag of rotten grain. Death by guillotine or frostbite - both seemed equally possible. Csilla's fate still swung in the balance.
The mare's heart pounded in her chest. Sudden movement stirred beneath the snow-laden branches of a bush not to far from where she stood. From beneath the confines of its shadow, a nearly imperceptive flash of white against black grabbed at Csilla's attention. A wild hare - camouflaged to match its surroundings. The creature, not yet aware of the equine's presence, hoped peacefully out into the open. Its nose twitched as it sniffed at the snow, no doubt searching for its next meal. The spotted dun held her breath. How wonderful it must be to have such invisibility. To be but another heartbeat amongst thousands of others. No more important than the next. Such an existence was unknown to Csilla - her every hour consumed by plans not her own.
In the end, she had played her part well. Thrown into the fray at an incredibly young age, expectation and ambition had been hers to fulfill. She'd not heard from her father since the day she set off to be married. No doubt he was happy - bathing in the riches of her sacrifice.
Without warning, the hare's body grew rigid. His black nose twitched, this time the gesture far more insistent than that of his relaxed foraging. In a blink, the little animal wheeled around on its powerful haunches and - in three hops - was safely back within his den. Something was coming and Csilla no longer cared enough to be afraid. Hers was naught but a wasted life - wasted potential. The executioner could take her now.
Crash, crash, Burn, let it all burn
This hurricane's chasing us all underground
Her youth is her deceit. Lupine jaws, hide her beauty. Beneath intoxicating lashes, those red eyes reveal their violence. Her soul is ancient scripture. Her heart, every lovers' apocalypse. Draw close to her, and you shall read their tragedies. They lace with immortal blood, between the shrine of her ribs. As ancient as the relationship between moon and sea. As cold as time and death, itself.
She is the sensuous dark angel, descending the Byzantine stairwells of sheol. She bathes in its darkness. Its labyrinthine ruin. Behind the vampiric maiden, flows a silken veil of lush tresses. Their heavy, lilac strands, dripping with luminosity; trailing, a priestess' burial gown, against the deep gloaming of wormwood, of soil. Her hair dances like a funeral veil, floating, against the misty contours of her alluring visage.
Luminous curls, tousled around soft, female shoulders; their tendrils, a sateen cadence glossed against the caramel edges of her jasmine-kissed skin. As the intimacy of the evening folds around her, her lips shall curl with devilish rapture. Feline bliss, roving against the chill of their embrace. These stygian realms, as old and as ancient as time itself, fills her, completely. They scream for her needs. Her wants - her darkest desires.
A living, breathing phantasm, bending to her sirenic heart. It's the trickling hymm of liquid, cascading over brusque limestone, that echoes against these desolate chambers. The laconic radiance of water, pooling black liquid against hushed crystal; their iridescent opal stones, shining in the darkness of a long fogotten realm. When Euryale dances through their amethyst shadows, she imagines herself draped over a gilded throne; the obsidian castles in her dreams. Their water temples, lying deep underground. Rumbling, like a god in sinister dormancy. There were visions of lust, greed and deadly attraction. A shattered throne, a broken crown; they were all intimate memories of an exiled queen.
O, and how long has it been? Since she first tasted power upon her lips? To feel the narrow blade of a sword, pressed to her breast - to relish the visceral copper along their stained silver, that which her enemies spilled? O, she feels the dark earth, moving against her body - and when the earth pulls its ragged caress along her flesh. She knows the earth to be as alive and as ancient, as she. Breathing, against her heart with all the promise of an immortal lover.
Against the jowls of its feral touch, she sighs. Against the wicked lawlessness of its primordial promise, her blood sings. Ner soul, siren whispers of black ritual that dance passionately in their mortal coil. She is scarlet beauty, drenched in sable lace. She is sweet, sweet sin, and her heart belongs to their infinite darkness. Deeper, she descends. Hungry for release. Salivating, to taste a violent, bitter end. The abigo cave's jagged walls, how they'd immaculately hug the sinous curves of her vulpine figure. stalagmites, precariously, whistling up above her. Ebon rocks, towering before the subterrean underworld like some twisted, funeral pyre - a Babylonian citadel, for all their wicked angels and sinners.
Their pillars carved of stardust, salt, and limestone, would echo the great vastness of space. Their faceted edges, laced in sharp angles, roaming hungrily over her body as though they'd worship only beauty and grace. Their salivating points, sliding bone-teeth over supple, feminine skin. How they claw for her flesh. Dancing, towards her neckline; shoulders; hips - her sloping backside, wildly sensual in their endless invitation raked by sable talons of need. Lacing her in a thick, tantalizing web of shadow. It's intoxicating, to be engulfed by so much darkness. To feel the stony caress of the caves, brush their clandestine jaws against her. To feel the earth, one with her flesh. Zhe never wants to leave - O, why would she? Why would she?
Euryale has always been a maiden of the moon. She, who so loved the earth, the wilderness, the forests. A priestess of feral perceptivity, and the iron breath of her predatory intuition, always, seeking its spectral blade against the warmth of her blood-red curves. O, and is she not the devil's mistress? Does she not dance in the curves of a serpent; hourglass curvature, and come-hither, womanly prowess laced in elegant beryl. All that femininity; all that crimson. Her visage, angelic; and yet, her heart is all hunger - all demon.
Enter, the red queen; "Come away with me," Her voice is swan-soft and ethereal. cooing against silken lips in their heavenly lull. She sings, softly, ushering lyrical melodies past her lips with every sultry hiss of indignation. "Come away with me, into the water," Silvery purrs, croon from her tongue. Singing honeyed notes, as she descends into a shallow pool, languid and languishing. Her long hair, trails against svelte limbs. Their tendrils, fanning upon their sleek, onyx surface, as she saunters yet into their moist depths. She pulls a bone comb from the swell of her lilac curls, running its ivory teeth through the tangled lengths of her mane; brushing each unearthly strand. Teasing their ends, delicately.
There is a fire inside of this heart
and a riot about to explode into flames
There are days when I visit the Terrastella hospital, to listen to the medics as they speak, as they save or dispose of tattered lives. I sit in the back of lectures and the one that comes to me in the dead of winter is when, on a cool marble slab, they dissected a heart. As the heart beats, it utilises a circulatory system to pump blood through the body. Blood enters two large veins; the inferior and superior vena cava, where it then empties blood with very little oxygen into the right atrium.
The anatomy of the thing that keeps us alive was dissected in cool, scientific intonations. Apathetic. Distanced. Superior and inferior vena cava.
And then: the pulmanory vein empties oxygen-rich blood, from the lungs into the left atrium.
Blood leaves the heart from the right side. From the pulmonic valve, into the pulmonary artery and then the lungs. On the left side, it departs through the aortic valve, into the aorta and to the body. This is a repeated pattern, they say, as hard and simple fact.
Is that how your heart stopped, Capella? Was it the right or left side that went out first? Those same doctors—I recognise the one who, as a young man, delivered the news that you would die—listened as your lungs filled with liquid, and said in that clipped tone (now dead, now compassionate) there is nothing more we can do.
I can feel something changing in me. I walk through Terrastella’s snow-choked streets. It is too early to be awake; but I cannot sleep without dreaming of a sky full of the eyes of dying gods. I went to look for you there, i cannot help but think. I stare up at a cloudy dawn-before-dawn, where everything is the blue of veins beneath the skin, where even the air seems thick with it—
And even now,
Capella.
The brightest star within a constellation.
She is not there.
She is never there.
And I can feel something changing in me; a love that twists into hate. My breath feels constricted in my lungs.
I am the only one awake—
or am I the only one dreaming?
The streets are empty; they feel haunted, and perhaps that is because I am haunting them.
I could venture to Susurro Fields, or stand on the edge of the Praistigia Cliffs, but I know the feeling will not abate. And so when I stop my aimless wandering, it is in a courtyard that during summer months must be a beautiful garden. The fountain in the center is frozen and the trees leafless; the grey branches scratch against the pre-lit dawn.
I stop there, staring.
Snow begins to fall soft and quiet. As it does, I realise I am not, in fact, the only one awake. But I do not break the silence. I do not say anything to the girl with a crow’s head that looks more like a statue than the living.
he truth is, Adonai, parties have never been my thing.
I might have written you that. But writing is not within my forte, either. No. I have always been an individual of incredible, decisive action. It is what made me so successive as a captain; and what condemned me as a man.
Tonight, my actions are simple. The best ones typically are. In war, the over-complicated strategies are destined to fail; only the most clever, the most straightforward, have any chance of surviving first contact. So, the course of action:
Talk to Adonai. There is no requirement for the conversation. The memory of our first interaction remains enough to make my flesh burn and my mind to prick with intrigue. A cursed prince.
I know nothing of princes, and my ignorance is something I cannot stand. Tonight, if nothing else, I may come to understand the dual coin of royalty and soldiery—a lifelong knowledge that I have nursed since boyhood and only now may comprehend.
I walk through the Hall of Statues and am reminded of Delumine’s garden.
But those statues had been immersed in bursting, vibrant foliage. These stand alone; I find them haunting. I have never been exposed to art, at least not in this magnitude. The only place in Oresziah decorated with any degree of refinement had been the church, where the stained glass had bled with the setting sun.
It does not take me long to find the golden Prince. He shuffles—doing his best, I suppose, to hide the lethargic gait—among patrons, and smiles politely when they ask questions. He looks as if he belongs there; as if an artist, perhaps the De Clare fellow I continue to hear whispered, could transform him into a gilded statue with a single touch. With that kind of beauty comes a certain fragility; a certain inescapable essence.
In that moment I decide he is better than the rest of us, and the decision nearly makes my approach impossible—but I cannot refrain from touching someone so dove-like, so brilliant, as if that purity might rub off onto me. If only I can touch it; if only grasp it, for a transient moment... I know the long road of suffering; I have walked it many times. And seeing Adonai excites in me the same excitement as a man drowning who sees the shore; even the idea of touching salvation is enough to salvage my misery, transform it into hope. Perhaps he could take the pain away. Perhaps he is different.
And so I delve into the crowd, taking two bubbling drinks from a tray as I pass by a server.
I approach from behind, as lions do; and stop close enough for my breath to gust against Adonai’s ear, fluttering the fur of his cloak.
“My Prince, you have quite an impressive… hawk.” The innuendo is utterly brazen and inappropriate. I pull away with a smile that belongs to Lucifer as he fell. “You invited me. Hopefully you don’t regret it, and I don’t disappoint.”
§
True it never was, Yet because they loved, it was a pure creature.
They left it room enough. And in that space, clear and un-peopled,
it raised its head lightly and scarcely needed being.
They didn’t nourish it with food, but only with the possibility of being.
And that gave the creature so much power.
☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "Will you rescue me? / What kingdom will replace my bounty / of leisure, what tether of care and nurture / do you wish to rope my neck with?"
The blossoms in my hair have only been braided in for a day, but they are already wilting. As I stride across the threshold that separates the hall from the courtyard – out into the night air -, they shed petals in a trail of soft pink behind my hooves. The image is far too delicate to suit me, and soon – quickly – the petals are crushed beneath the hooves of partygoers, as unnoticed, I think, as a fly on the wall.
The evening has only barely begun, and the crowds are still small, quiet, and mostly-sober; the sun hasn’t even slipped entirely over the edge of the horizon, and the – faint – breeze hasn’t grown cold just yet. That is to say: the party is still utterly palatable. No chaos from my siblings, no sordid whispers, no drunken partygoers to pull aside and care for after they’ve drunk too much, because Solis knows, someone dying of alcohol poisoning at one of our parties is the last thing that our household needs right now. It is still, in a certain way, serene.
I am not sure where Ishak is. I know that he is nearby; chatting with one of the maids, I suspect. (Much as he has complained about hearing too much about this party, how he only, desperately wants to get it over with, how the servants can’t seem to come up with anything more interesting to discuss – he is still collecting more information about the specifics. Ishak is particular like that. He is never quite satisfied that enough as enough; no knowledge is too much knowledge.
I am, I’m sure, the opposite. I don’t want to look. I don’t want to know. I think that is why I keep him in my company, or- that was the intent. Sometimes, now, I’m not so sure, but that is another thing I don’t want to look at too deeply.)
Corradh and Hagar are in the courtyard, each preoccupied with their separate poisons. I glance, for a moment, at the finished result of Hagar’s work, and then at Corradh, among a flock of artists. I consider, for a brief moment, participating – and then, almost immediately, I think better of it. (Or maybe I run from it.) I love them both, of course, in very different ways, but I am sure that I would have no patience for their games – they do not ignite the barest flare of interest in my chest. (That is hardly unusual.)
I am not interested – and obligation can only carry me so far on its own.
Still. I stride through the courtyard, towards the center, where I can see the sky – and I try to make sure that I am carrying myself like a proper Ieshan, even with wilting, dripping blooms in my hair, even without anything interesting to do (like my siblings). I am not sure if I am praying to go unnoticed (because it would be troublesome to speak with anyone) or praying to be somehow eye-catching (because I am so hungry and so envious, so desperate for something I can’t put a name to), though I know better.
I need only look in a mirror to know better.
Over the haze of light, I can make out the soft blush of sunset, interrupted here and there by branches and building and string of decorations. I wonder – and the crowd swims around me, as I do – how long it will take for the sun to disappear entirely, how many precious moments of peace I have before trouble, inevitably, sinks its dark and jagged teeth into the lovely atmosphere my brother has seen fit to manufacture.
(It will crumble, certainly – this sort of thing always does.)
@Dalmatia || aaaa, a thread with you again <3 || Jeannine Hall Gailey, "Rapunzel: I like the Quiet"
