[P] til the day you cast a shadow;

[Sabine]

Sabine,

Her eyes shimmer and spark in fear of what he might say, how he might feel, where he might go in light of her lineage. Sabine knows her father is a hated man. A miscreant. A villain made from marble. She has heard their scared and vengeful voices on the wind and she cannot blame them for wanting his head. Who could? If the crowd's clamour was true, Raum was, at this point, more monster than he was man. 

In every too-long moment, it is becoming easier for Sabine to accept what she knows is now true. He had killed Acton and he had kidnapped Isra amongst many other terrible things. They are two entities: her father and the Crow Beast and there are galaxies between them. Her father is not the murderer of innocents and that wicked sinner is not her father. It is the only way she knows how to reconcile this vast impossible reality. 

So in the moments after her confession, when the sky leans in a little closer, Sabine braces herself for a frown, a flinch, a snarl -- anything that would marry the image of Solterra's king to the savage brute ripping throats from people she loved. At this point it is not something she wants more than something she desperately needs. 

But he does nothing. It is a paradox. Days, even hours, before Sabi would have felt a wave of relief at his muted reaction, but now... it feels like a penultimate nail driven into her coffin. 

Abel does not look away and she wants to wilt like a drought-driven rose left out to die. He swallows and she watches the swell of his throat too closely, too intensely, as if waiting for a colony of bats to come thrashing up out of his gullet. Sabine's gaze travels back to the boy's and she cannot bear the anticipation that hums like a hive of bees behind her ears. Tell me he is a murderer, tell me the truth of it all. Tell me the crimes notched against his name. Please--

“Your father saved my life,”

Wasn't life absurd? The beautiful inconsistency of it all. Sabine might once have paused to consider the tragic irony of Abel's words, she might even have laughed. Such sagacity is robbed from her now. The infinitesimal grains of sand shifting beneath her feet sound suddenly deafening and she takes one long step back from the coyote her father had saved. Photographs bleed like wounds into the scrapbook of her mind. Venerable images of her father's face that make her heart shrink and swell; he had saved this strange little boy, he had saved him.

Monsters don't save people; not from others, not from themselves. Hell is not a place for those who dare to shed light onto the darkness of those less fortunate. 

By the time Sabine looks up, she knows she cannot continue. Not now, not today, not with a child carrying a piece of her father's good-heart. Her lips part gently, achingly, fearful of leaving Abel in case the world swallows him like the world was swallowing her. She wants to say something, anything, but the words, at first, do not come.

As the desert begins to rise up around her small frame, Sabine leans toward Abel so that she might press an endless farewell onto the hollow of his brow. The day feels almost feverish as she turns back toward the coast and curves her cheek back toward him one last time.

"Promise me we'll meet again?"

(sad birds still sing.)

@abel | "speech" | notes: excuse me while i cry

rallidae