[AW] The first round of the maze--

[Apolonia]

PRAY, WHAT SHALL I DO WITH MY SIX HUNDRED WINGS -

Apolonia thinks of herself a dog on a chain-link leash. Like any good dog, she comes when called.

And so it was easy to come when the trumpets found her and wailed a sad, low song over the darkness, and it was easy to follow the soft-crying flute across the steppe and through the close-clustered darkness of pine trees, and easier still to know, when she saw the maze in the gloaming distance, that she had followed the right path step by miserable step. 

The sky simmers with stars. In the low light Apolonia is gold and soot and ivory and the hurlbat strapped to her hip shines at every saw-toothed edge. She feels the night’s drinks in her head like a cloud of cicada, feels the cool breeze more intensely as it passes over where she used to wear her mask. But none of that seems to matter. She draws to a stop at the mouth of the maze, gap-toothed and yawning, and thinks that this is the only thing that has seemed right to her this whole night.

She watches Isra with all three eyes. Her hair is pushed back, but in the summer-night dimness that glint of blue against her forehead might very well be a jewel, a crown, a little piece of seaglass. Her gaze does not linger on the crowd around her except for catching, in one brief moment of weakness, on Elif, lupine and beautiful as she is. But O tears her eyes away with military ease and focuses on the way Isra’s horn shines in the dark, and Elif is forgotten as soon as Isra finishes speaking and O slinks into the maze and down the first path.

(It is neither day nor night.)

She is surprised when the woman grows from that flower like dew grows from a blade of grass, but it is not fear that strikes a chord in her heart - it is awe, it is envy, it is excitement - she looks up at the goddess with huge, unblinking eyes and something almost like a smile crosses her face, fleeting as it is faint, and punctuating by the sound of her hurlbat spinning, spinning spinning at her side.

Good evening, she says, though it is not a question at all.