[SWP] ACT III: how reality collapses

[Sabine]

S   A   B   I   N   E It was the birds, of all things, that woke her from that short, fitful sleep. Not the throbbing of an alien heart nor the tepid rumble of kindred hoofbeats against the soft soft sand, but the blood-cackle of crows that rang like irony in her ears. She knew their screams like a bat knew blood -- and once, they had even sounded like home.  Beneath heavy lids, her eyes spun toward the corvine shadows circling overhead and she wondered, for a moment, what life might have been like had she been born a crow. Corpses, chalk clouds and canopies. Such uncluttered simplicities might make for a sanctuary if the circumstances were right, and for Sabine, the circumstances could not have been much worse.  As the feathered creatures grew at last bored of the little red girl lying beneath the pear trees (perhaps they had realised the precious moon-blue radiating from her horns could not be harvested) she rose from her feet to watch as they disappeared into the horizon's chelsea grin. The mordancy of their fleeting arrival and departure was not lost on Sabine, for she had seen too much to miss the small bitter nuances woven into the universal fabric of life.  And yet, all of this does not stop her from following them.  She has nothing else. Nothing but the feeling of salt stuck in her lashes and a measureless black void snapping at her heels.  Sabine does not care to wonder whether it is by nature or design that she finds her march broken by that strange, sick island. What she does find curious, instead, is the ire that builds like bile against her tonsils. Should she be surprised? That for once she bubbles with anger over sorrow? Upon that first dawn, when the sky sang black, she had spurned the crowds and the heat and the queerness. The days had since whiled away and she had not thought once to heed its call; did it think her a fool? Perhaps she was. After all, was she not stood upon its doorstep like a little lost lamb? Motherless. Fatherless? -- that was all it took. One ounce of weakness; a virginal drop in an ocean of faux-strength and the choir starts to play in her mind like a secret she cannot not keep.  ♣ -