I had many things to learn about sadness.
I knew this because most of the stories I heard were sad. Not just mother’s stories, but the others. The ones told to me by old willow trees, hunched over like they had great secrets to hide (they didn’t, not from me), or the rough-hewn stone streets of home, the ones not studded with moonrock and precious stones. How could I explain to anyone, let alone ‘Vesta, that as far as I can tell, everything is woven of sorrow? Even joy, and love, and laughter. Even the tallest, oldest, proudest of trees has roots that dig deep into soil that is dark, and lush, and full of sadness.
No, I must be wrong. There has to be something more, I’m just not hearing it. I need to listen better. Deeper. I need to empty myself until the stories fill me so pure and clean that the sun shines right through.
I wish I could tell my sister that these stories were not as sad, but they are. It’s a different kind of sadness, and I don’t know how to distinguish it from that of the church-tree so I just say “yes,” because I’ve never lied, I don’t even know if I can. Why would I, even if I wanted to? “They’re just as sad.” I leave it at that because we’re running again, with the summer night huge and endless above us, around us, and my heart on my tongue, and when a wolf howls, somewhere further up the mountain, I don’t think to be afraid. I lift my head to the sky and I howl back, “A-wooo!”
I don’t know anything about the way a wolf howls. Not yet. I don't know it's a mourning song.
When I'm done howling at the ripe summer night, I smile just because it feels good to bare my teeth and pretend I’m something more than what I am. I’m still smiling when I fall, although I’m listening too. The mountain MAKES me listen, even if it hurts me. But the pain of the fall does not hurt me as much as the look on Avesta’s face, full of vicious rage, like she’s gone somewhere I can’t follow without losing some part of myself. I press my cheek against hers in gratitude, and apology, and I love you. Needing no words except the ones I can't say. ("come back to me")
It’s hard to keep pace when we’re running again and the mountain is whispering things like the black ink between the stars and my sister’s wild magic is breathing life to little friends that follow. I'm not even thinking of Fable anymore, I'm not running from something but to it, whatever it is, and I'm not fast enough. Why am I never fast enough?
I hear mother’s words, too. I try to feel them in my bones, the way her stories set my whole body on edge, electric. “Run like the world is burning, like you are a ghost, like you are nothing but a unicorn full of fierce magic”
But I never much wanted to race the wind. I just wanted to talk to it.
I know even less about blood than I do about sadness. I don’t know the smell of it, not like this. This is death’s blood, this is a candle snuffed out. This is the way the world works and I know it is but, at the same time, I don’t. My heart is pounding in my head, and I think I can smell my own fear, and it smells a lot like the iron thick in the air.
I would not go into the cave if Avesta was not here. At least, I don’t think I would. But she is, and her shoulder is solid and warm and ALIVE. And we can do anything when we’re together, it’s the one thing I think I know for sure, the one thing more certain than the sunrise itself. “Yes, this is it.” we step further into the darkness. My everything is on edge. “I’m afraid.” I don’t know why I say it out loud– I’m sure she can feel it in the way I tremble. I think I just needed to fill that horrible silence with something other than the smell of blood.
I fall to my knees for the second time tonight when I see them. I think I may some sort of noise– crying or choking or something. I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. On the hard stone floor before us are wolf pups, smaller than I ever thought wolves can be. Impossibly small, impossibly still. The dying children the mountain told me about.
Dead.
We’re too late.
I hear myself say "No." I think I say it again, and again. It becomes just another thing I don't remember. We're too late and it's my fault, I slowed us down, and the crumpled bodies are so small, so very small, and so very still. I look to my sister as though she has an answer, because she always has an answer. I show her my helpless, broken heart, because she always knows how to piece it back together.
@Avesta pardon my experimentations <3
