Sirius doesn’t know any of the names borne on these altars.

An old woman with eyes the color of his own had told him they were names of the dead, of the missing - and the odd assortment of leaves, gourds, and candles surrounding them were meant to honor them. To keep them all from forgetting.

It had made little sense to him. How would incense and smoke help them to remember? But he walks amongst them anyway, stepping carefully around the gathered horses who bow their heads quietly and lay more keepsakes at the altars. There’s a strange hush in this corner of the markets, separated as it was from the dancing and the singing and the other festivities.

Their silence made him feel as though he did not belong here; he did not know the faces that went with the endless list of names, he had no memories of them to lay bare. He was an outsider, an intruder upon their grief.

And yet there was a tightness forming in his chest that he could not shake, reminding him all at once of a rope wound around his neck. Sirius came to a sudden stop, his eyes drifting away from the markets, away from the shrines that stood in rows like gravestones. The stars winked at him from above, bright and dancing. And he stared.

He knew it was his imagination, when he saw the pegasus with her wings like spun moonlight soaring amongst the stars. He knew it, because he had seen her fall - and he knew what happened to hawks who fell from the sky. But still he watched, as the silhouette dove in and out of sight.

”Hey.” The voice broke his concentration, and Sirius could only watch as the pegasus suddenly shattered, a thousand pieces of stardust floating gently to the ground. He flicked an ear back, flinching instinctually. ”You okay?”

When he turned to the man he thought he was seeing her again, silver and wingless. Sirius blinked, and the stranger came suddenly into focus, like the world shifting back into place.

A heartbeat passed, then another, and Sirius realized he was staring and such a question needed an answer. ”Yes,” he said, shaking his head slowly from side to side. ”I am okay.” I think.

He had to resist looking at the sky again then, to be sure the pegasus was gone - he swallowed past the tightness in his throat.

And then, because he felt he needed to say something else to fill the silence, and because there were lines of strain (perhaps grief?) on the other man’s face, he asked, ”You okay, also? Come you remember names?” And he gestured half-heartedly towards the altars that surrounded them.   

The candlelight casts a thousand interlacing shadows across the grey man’s face, so that each ridge and valley is thrown into sudden and sharp contrast. And in the places where the light touches him, it turns his skin a silver so bright Sirius wants to drown in it.

”Like starlight,” he thinks to himself.

He doesn’t notice that the man is taking too long to respond. He’s too busy tracing the lines of silver light down the side of the stranger’s face, and when he looks at the darkness of his throat for at least a moment he expects to see a miniature galaxy hiding there. And when there isn’t one, he imagines it’s there instead.

“Watching us?” he echoes, and tears his gaze away from all that silver to look out over the markets. But what he’s looking for, he isn’t sure - Sirius does not known any of the dead names here, would not have recognized them if they suddenly came back. He knows only one dead girl, and he knows too that she would never be here even if she had the choice.

But death is more permanent than all that.

“No,” he says decidedly, when he tilts his head to look back at Eik. “No, stars live not with us. Sky is home of their’s.”

It does not occur to him that the mane with the silver skin and the sad eyes may have lost someone, or that he should speak with sympathy. He doesn’t recognize the look in Eik’s eyes - he has not lost anyone, has no one to lose, he wouldn’t understand that sort of longing - and he stares, perhaps for a bit too long, while trying to puzzle it out.

“I’m Sirius.” The name echoes inside of him over and over, and not for the first time it feels more like what he is rather than who he is. He doesn’t know if there’s meant to be a difference between the two, but standing in a market full of dead pictures, where the burning incense starts to taste something like sadness when he breathes it in, he thinks there should be. Maybe there was more to him than what he knew, more than what the stars had told him.

When he looks around and sees how many people visit a single shrine, he hopes that’s true.

He hopes that one day someone might make a shrine for him, and miss him when he’s gone.

“Eik,” he says, testing the name and liking the way it sounds. And then he’s walking, gesturing for him to follow and trusting that he would. “Did you know-“ The name etched into the stone of the first shrine confuses him, and he has to try far too hard to make the letters make sense. His brow creases as he frowns down at it in concentration. “Mar-e-ska? Marihscah?”