[P] til the day you cast a shadow;

[Sabine]

Sabine,

She wondered how she ever dreamt of anything before the desert. How the phantasmagorical wonderland she had created within the confines of her imagination paled in comparison to the opiate-realm that stretched like a map beneath her earthenware fingers. She had become a marionette: uprooted and pulled by strings that sang hymns full of dunes and beetles and moth-eaten palm leaves. Her organs swelled with sand, leaking the ancient grains into her arteries until they stopped the blood and choked her brain; but, I suppose, she didn't mind anymore - anything to settle the chemical agony hurtling through her ribs. 

The rumours. The stench of change on the eastern wind. The silence that screamed like a derailing train. 

Sabine had not believed them at first; as a girl with no home or origin it was easy for her to miss the rabbling whispers from the courts, but this was no ordinary scandal. Of course, by the time word reached the ears of a girl sentenced to the road, it was stained by exaggeration and legend and Sabi could not decide where to pluck the truth from the lie. Her loyalty, her love, told her to deny it all: her father would never commit such terrible crimes. But as the hours churned into days her full stops curved into question marks, and then there was no turning back. 

There was one tale, however, which had drowned her heart in tar so thick and black it could have lived in Satan's smile. One that she would revoke until Raum himself told her to be true, and when that dreadful day should come, something within her would fall and never rise again. 

For now, Sabine kept to the outskirts of the Mors; too saturated with dread to dare seek out the monster she loved. It was quiet here, and that was how she liked it, for how could she smile or speak or breathe in the company of others when her bones were turning mad and her tongue bled from the way she clamped upon it to stop the scream that would bring her father running -- no matter how many galaxies stretched between them. Today, however, her solitude seemed to pine for distraction from the host it lived beside, for there was something macabre about a child filled with enough grief to drown a thousand good men. So when the boy came quiet and slow Sabine did not know whether she was relieved or dismayed, but settled on the fact that perhaps it was a mixture of both. They stared at each other for a moment, and the girl wondered how he could ever see the light through eyes so implausibly dark. 

"I don't know." She says simply, and it is the truth, for she does not yet know how to lie. "I've been wondering that myself."

(sad birds still sing.)

@tag | "speech" | notes:

rallidae