[P] without you i am a lie

[Sabine]

sad birds still sing

She could see he felt out of place in this patchwork kingdom of creeping vines and bonewhite walls. Acton belonged in the wolves' den, choked dizzyingly by shadow and the broken promise of a forsaken goddess - his heart was cracked kindling and coal, it did not sit well against the quiet opalescence of Delumine. 

Still, that was why she cherished him. All that glitters isn't gold - but Sabine did not want gold, she wanted grit and life and a smile that would break the sun: Acton was all of that and more. Not that she wanted him for herself. The blissful innocence of youth sheltered her heart from lust and passion, filling her thoughts instead with something more tender, more soft and pale. 

The Denoctian politics they had left behind had been harboured from her keen ears, and so she knew only two things: that a dragon had perched on the mountainside to set bluefire upon Caligo's sacred earth, and that the ancient Raven Gates had closed once more. What else lay in the darkness of Acton's mind that troubled him so? Sabine pondered on whether it was her place to ask.

Meanwhile, he laid name to her mother and instantly it snared her attention. Sabi paused from her steady wandering to turn back toward her companion, an unreadable expression glazing over her porcelain features. It was the first time anyone had likened her to Rhoswen, and the notion felt like a foreign lie on the walls of her mind. Her mother was a cyclone, a forest fire - so unlike little musing Sabine, that it seemed almost frightening to consider the fact that Acton, of all people, recognised a part of Rhoswen in she.

She said nothing, her crystalline eyes shifting back to the lanterns overhead as the dark-haired man spoke once more. "This won't last forever." Sabine's heart recoiled like a hand burnt by a naked flame, regretful and dazed. She knew he did not understand - knew he could not see the way she fused into the wildflowers and newborn light, but that was okay, Sabi had always been happy with invisibility. "Forever..." a bleached whisper on the singing air.

Something was stuck, here and now, she couldn't bear it. There was no way to shake the metallic taste of blood as she bit down harder and harder on her tongue as a flood of feeling burst up through her gullet and onto the roof of her mouth until - 

"But I bet forever in Delumine looks beautiful."

@acton <3