[P] claw marks and clouds

[Marisol]

heaven talks
but not to me

Amber, sea salt, cinnamon. Even post-disaster, life still thrives in Denocte’s dark. 

Lamps glimmer weakly from their sconces, wet silks drape the stalls. Coins flicker in and out of sight from wallets and gold shimmers like sunlight off strangers’ necks. A lonely kind of string-sound wails from somewhere down the street, beautifully silver and awfully sad, and Marisol slips through the dilapidated markets with all the grace of a rabbit in water: uncomfortably stiff, too unfriendly to be Terrastellan, too awkward to be a Night Court native. She wears the otherness like a second skin.

Those gray eyes watch the world carefully, distrustfully. Constantly she is watching Denocte’s dark corners for the wrong silhouette, for a stranger wearing blood. Rarely does she even think of looking out for her fellow Terrastellans, too distracted by her fears to be concerned with those she halfway-trusts, and so it almost shocks her to find a familiar face in the markets.

In the deep-dark, in the throng of people, in the softly-whispering crowd, Mari sees the shining of a star and almost turns away. Where a month ago she might have gone up to the sovereign with a smile, now she fights the urge to spit at his feet. The only thing that keeps her moving is the sense of duty that follows her as closely as disaster seems to follow Asterion, a concrete weight in her chest that she dreads for the way it drags her toward him, nagging, insistent.

Knitting her eyebrows in half a frown, she extends a wing in a little bow, as contained as it is sarcastic.

Asterion, she says coarsely. Even for the commander the tone seems a little sour. 

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