Cardinal shadows gathered like loose honeycomb fabric around the girl's ankles. The day, soft and moribund, fell all around her; weeping lilac-milk tears into the darkness that haunted every cavern and wrinkle like the bloodhound that it was. Sabine was not afraid of the dark, but sometimes she wondered whether she ought to be. For eventide was imbued with an organic violence that both dazzled and dizzied her; elevating her senses to an existential high that chased away the sadness clinging to her bones like pine resin. It seemed to her a miracle that the sunlight's butcher did not seek to add her own scalp to its collection, but time and again it passed her by, leaving only the fleeting stain of his bloodshed doused across her marbled flesh. 

Sabine moved with birdlike grace across the steppe, caught low in the throes of her malaise. She was not a girl without peace; she woke each dawn to hum the song of swallows overhead and faithfully carried the weight of the sun upon her back, but, still, there was a great sadness living in the machinery of her heart  - rusting the cogs until they could dance no more. Her mother, her father; what had become of the two greatest creatures she had ever known? For does not every child see their guardians through only glass made from gold? Time had shifted into a dimension she could neither resist or understand, and into the heavy night she moved, bearing a satchel filled with a thousand different ways to say 'Papa, I miss you.'

Sabine missed the rain. 

She missed the way it raised angels from the earth in the hemlock and the yarrow and the clover. It spoke to the Great Mother in soft riddles; keeping her from dying a slow death beneath an unconquerable sun. Sabine was, still, a child, but even children could understand the cyclical nature which flourished above, beneath and within themselves; especially those as kaleidoscopic as she. As twilight faded into obscurity, the yearling settled herself into the nook of a gentle incline, shifting her weight backward as a looping fatigue wound its way around her skull. It had been a long day within a short life, and if Sabine was to tell her truth, she would have prayed for it to end.

Alas, the death of this day was not yet nigh. 

There was a flare of summer-orange staining the brow of the hill that rose languidly behind Sabine, but it did not catch her eye until the flare had grown legs and eyes and a voice that burned like a cigarette amongst straw. It caught her off-guard, this creature forged from a hundred embers shot down by the sun, and as the stranger's words rolled like a string of dark pearls into the night, Sabi found herself paralysed by surprise. Bolting emotions dashed across her fragile roseate features; an amalgamation of frustration and disappointment. Had her fathers lessons fallen on deaf ears and blind eyes? Had she learned nothing from the hours they had spent rehearsing all the ways in which she might die by the hand of those who read her weakness with ease? Even now, with hundreds of miles between them, she was forsaking the only man kind enough to love her.

Nevertheless, it seemed she had been lucky tonight. The woman's voice seemed to hang in the air, daring to endure longer than the laws of this world allowed; oh, how the darkness seemed to blanch from such gilded valour. Sabine studied her silently behind eyes that resembled ancient glaciers, echoing the smile that had been gifted to her by this beautiful siren. She had never seen anything quite like it. 

"Salutations, Miss Tonnerre," she paused (shy, aching, unsure) "I am Sabine," a second pause, longer this time, "... just Sabine."

Her tongue scraped like sandpaper against her teeth and her cheeks flushed with scarlet embarrassment; she had never been good at this. Moira's awareness of her melancholy only deepened the flood of shame that purged her veins, and desperately she scrambled to recover.

"Denocte, you say? You are a long way from home, ma'am." 

@Moira

If Sabine had known of the healing artistry within Moira's hands she might have faltered farther than she already had. If she had seen her talents written upon crisp paper she might have looked back up to the phoenix with eyes that knew only of her own inadequacy. 

There was once a time when a small sparrow-boned girl had watched the swift knowing hands of her country's craftsmen, and wondered whether she too could create form out of something so crude. It had taken one sweltering summer afternoon, two overpriced chisels that had cost her every penny in her already malnourished purse, and (most crucially) three blunt wounds on her legs harvested by her incompetent efforts, for Sabi to realise that craftsmanship was not her forte. Nevertheless, the experience had not dampened her enthusiasm for unearthing ingenuity within herself. Weeks later the flower-child would find herself in a similar predicament: this time the victim was an innocent oil canvas. It's surface, once brimming with potential and yearning for the touch of artistic genius, lay bruised and violated by a hand that knew less of creative prowess than a beetle in a dung pile. This pattern of events fell into a steady rhythm involving: singing, archery, dancing, and even healing. 

When at last her mother intervened, winter's first snow had fallen. 

Just who are you trying to impress? 

Now, those words did not seem like words at all but a mantra branded into her brain. It was the first time Sabine had ever considered the notion that her self-worth might rely on the conviction of others, that these others might be watching her failures with derision and ribbed disappointment between their teeth.

Sabine never tried again.

"Make a wish and I'll tell you a story, Sabine."

It occurred to her, as she stood watching her companion with a gaze that was as curious as it was lost, that nobody had ever told her a story before. Her mother's bitterness had been too wide to fit into the elfin composition of a tale and her father's tongue was more a coat of armour than it would ever be a storyteller. By word of mouth she knew Isra, Acton's friend (and now queen), to be the great narrator of the sea and the open sky, but Sabine had always been looking too long at Acton when she could have been listening to Isra.

So now, she closes her sapphire gaze and leans into the breeze until her body sways with the warm undulating air. And though she has not known Moira for longer than a fragmented moment, something in the darkness tells her (strong and true) that it would be okay. When she opens her eyes again, her wish is made; it lingers in the space above them until it is called on by a force they will never see. Sabine watches it pass on into a realm she has only dreamt of and feels the sundering of her ribcage as a piece of her heart breaks loose, following her wish on into another life. There is a sad smile on her lips and an eternal wound bleeding from her chest, but she turns back to Moira all the same, hoping that tomorrow will bring the happiness she has forever sought.

A whisper breaches the air between them, holding onto something that didn't yet exist: "I would like that very much."



@Moira