This place begins to endear itself to her. She opens and closes, like the push and pull of a tide. Maybe it is what Hraefn had settled back down inside of her, the calmness of oblivion—the knowledge, at least, of impending doom. It has allowed her to begin to let go of all the things that had been caught inside of her like animals in a trap. All the insecurities, the loss and the disillusionment. 

She is comfortable at the sill, on the margins between here and there. She is most familiar with the spaces between. He is the hinterland; the ultimate edge of the earth and she had found him once more, beside a mirror-still lake, and consigned herself, again, to the breathy existence of waiting for the stars and the darkness around them to take her. To hold her to their stygian skin like kin and kith.

She learns their names. She calls them Tigris Cauda and Cithara. She draws them in formations and illustrations on the calf-skin parchment that shifts gently inside its holder as she walks in graceful, careful steps between islands of firmer ground. Where once these new stars felt like strangers, like a compass she could not read, now she has started to understand their navigational pulls.  She orients herself to them—knows what constellations settle in the western sky in Spring; what settles in the east by Winter. She finds her way back to familiar places—the mirror-still lake, the quietude of the mountain’s peaking observatories—by way of the night sky as much as by the paths she confirms to memory.

Her mane and tail have been braided and fixed up in buns. Still, wayward curls of bright-white hair shake loose, drawing through the green-brown mud and bright-green algae like a paintbrush loading colour. She doesn’t try to remain clean, muck spatters her belly and chest; she’ll have to wash herself and the wolf-pelt that lays along the length of her back. Each squelching, sucking footstep reminds her of her childhood, of back home in the north where the thick pine stands were occasionally interrupted by dead-tree bogs. And though they always did seem a bit eerie—like graveyards marked with stark, dead birches for tombstones—Kyrr and her always found ways to make these places beautiful.

Kyrr would point out a mushroom growing on a fallow, sodden log—Stella would say, look how the stars reflect, even in the mire. Lovely, still.

She curls around the smooth-barked giants, shifting past clutches of cattail that sway and tickle her ribs. Now and then, she glimpses up to the darkened sky between the spread of the canopy, and the quiet here—the squish of mud and mire, the splash of water, the sway of plants—is hers and hers alone until, as it goes, it is not. She sees him, earthy-toned and content, at the centre of a small, marshy galaxy. She stops—the chains on her harness jingle gently for a moment; her documents and telescope sway to a still—the water ripples from her sunken feel, distorting the mimic stars and she is almost apologetic when she finally speaks, soft and brightly curious, “lovely, isn’t it?”

She shifts her weight, deep, blue gaze moving around him, to the settling night sky as it reflects back, like a mirror to an ancient and extinct world, “even here…” on earth. Her eyes return to him, sturdy, like something rooted—it reminds her of Kyrr, ponderosa and earth, and she settles into that in-between, “I’m Stellanor—Stella.”

Voice | @Willfur