[Quest] this is how we keep them alive--

[Sabine]

the stars melt like sugar The girl was awake long before the dawn. And when it rises to meet her, she does not offer the lilac smile it has grown to know so well. The girl does not know if she can ever smile now at the waking earth, knowing her favourite sun will never rise again.  Loss is a black hole yawning in her chest, eating her lungs with every slow breath. It feels like dying and living and -- she never knew the world could swallow a life whole; erasing existence, silencing the very permanence of a soul's song. His absence is deafening.  She has watched trees grow, and never once considered how easily they might be felled. She has treasured the first flight of a fledgling, only to miss the hawk delivering death behind black clouds.   She has felt Acton's laugh in her hair and between her fingers, not knowing that it would be the last time.  When Sabine dreams, it is only of him. There, in the milky hush of sleep, he lingers: close, but not close enough. Nothing would ever be close enough. She aches to press her small, impish hands into his skin; then deeper still, into the maze of his flesh and bones and blood and soul so that she could hold him to her breast until the world began to close. She cannot bear it. She cannot bear it. They were wrong: grief is not faceless. It is not elusive or nebulous. No, grief wears the face of everything her eyes touch: the first kiss of honey-gold light over the mountains, the splitting smiles of strangers, the way the birds sing louder in her presence as though they could feel her anguish on their wings. For all the beauty in the world could not bring him back. She cannot not sleep upon this night, not when she can hear something like a psalm humming in the bleak-blue morrow. It had started with a breath: an imitation of sound that bled into the black; too abstract, too bodiless for her to catch. But it had grown and bloomed and dilated into a spectrum of hidden voices that willed a strange current into the once-still air.  And when the wind reaches her, riding on the Shakespearean break of day, she can feel the grief in the gale that pummels her thin ribs. The mortal world falls silent. Sabine stirs (slowly, wearily) to lean into the torrential air that engulfs her so violently, for her tender sorrow yearns for penance, for somatic pain -- if only to distract from the crucifixion of her heart, nailed to a cross fashioned from Acton's bones. This wild wind weaves between her wintertide-horns and tugs at her hooves, and suddenly -- Suddenly, she can hear it. That prayer, that threnody. The quiet hum that had eluded her through the night. It is a liturgy written by the wind that pulls frantically at her heels, a sermon read by a voice unearthly. It does not belong to this life. It warbles long and low, and births a blood-bloom of transcendental warmth that penetrates her chest and infects every molecule, every cell until Sabine feels herself a host for something celestial.  In this moment she knows only one thing: where the wind drives, she must follow. It is her shepherd, her northern star. The Prairie wanes beneath her feet as she skims across it's frost-capped hide. The voices of the wind sing clearly now, and their song pleads for her to hurry, though she does not yet know why. Faster and faster she sails like a ship heeding the pale glare of a lighthouse's omen, listening to the haunted tongues as they urge her on. It is a quest that feels as ancient as the dark sky overhead; as vital as the organs breathing life into the passages of her flesh.  And when she sees the ruins of Isra's great maze on the fast-approaching horizon, Sabine's heart begins to crack. Shards of beating-red-glass lodge into her arteries as her eyes consume the viridian labyrinth that lies dead upon the hillside, and she begins to realise just where the wind is leading her. Her fragile legs might have faltered if were not for the godly flush in her chest or the pitch of the voices lilting higher with every passing moment.  By the time she reaches what is left of the entrance, once menacing and brilliant, the voices have become a crescendo in her head. They are a choir upon that blistering, begging wind. And she cannot see for the tears that begin to well in the smallest corners of her eyes, because she knows. She knows. She knows why the wind chose her, she knows why the voices set the dawn alight with prayer, she knows what this place holds and she knows whose blood was spilled onto this holy earth.  And she cannot stop the tears from falling as the wind thins into an aching breeze that carries its guardian the final few steps. The blue of her eyes glitters wet and bright and broken as they rest upon the scared ground that sings to her so. Flowers. Yellow and Black and Acton-ite. As the world spins and cracks, unable to nurse the supernova that grows within Sabine's hallowed heart, she gazes upon the grave of the man who had taken with him a piece of her soul.   The man who had taught her that the wrinkles around her smile were not flaws but memoirs of happiness, the man who had shaped her dreams upon the air, the man who had held her hand throughout the everlong night defiled by her parents' war. Her salvation, her best friend. And the cosmos whispers of all the ways her father broke the great laws of this world when he ripped his brother's throat from his neck. It is a sin that cannot be atoned. Sabine has shattered in the blackness, over and over again, breaking herself into tiny pieces so that she might be resurrected as a God that could dismantle time. Anything to undo the events of that fateful day. But she is no God and she cannot erase her father's debt. All she can do is stand guard at the gateway of another world.  And when that other world rises up in the voice of the wind and the flowers and the earth, Sabine is ready.   He has been waiting, but so has she.  Tears kiss courage upon her cheeks as she closes her eyes and listens to the sound of the flowers as their melody touches her flesh, drawing her nearer still until she is close enough to hear the words of their song. Eat me. Eat me. Eat me. And just as she takes that soft silent bite, the universe disappears. Everything falls away.  When Sabine opens her eyes, it is not an outcrop of flowers that glimmers before her, but a man with eyes like the sun and a grin that holds all the secrets hidden within her heart. She breathes, she weeps. For even in death, Acton outshines the dawn.

art created by niftyboi | table by kezz 

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