[P] nainsook

[Sabine]

She falls like hail. Colourless and pinched.  The vacant air holds her the way a priest might hold a child at the altar: baited, celebratory, faithful.  Did her mother take her to the church table and lay her before the dawning sun? Did Solis kiss her forehead and wrap her in gold? Did her father comb out her spiderspun curls in an offering to the darkness? Did Caligo think to shelter her the way the moon guarded the stars? No. They couldn't have. Because when she falls and her stomach drops through the delicate webbing of her abdominal skin, there is nobody to stop her ugly thunderous descent.  Black.  It is all she can see, all she can feel, all she can hear. A deep oppressive black that swallows and gags on her limbs as they thrash against the great nothingness. And she cannot stand the sound of the black-brick void choking on her bones as she plummets closer and closer to the flat earth beneath.  She wants to say that her memory of near-death was clarion. That each second stretched on into individual, perfect lifetimes whereby she might hold her demons accountable; but life is never perfect -- it is messy and all-too-quick and the gritty flank of the mountain flashes past her before she can even think to scream.  When she collides with, what she comes to realise as, the shadow's wing, Sabine thinks she might have hit the edge of Hell (it could never have been heaven) but she is still falling -- they are still falling? The wind whistles in her ears to a tune she cannot forget and she can feel the THUD-CRACK-THUD of the winged beast's heart.  'I'm going to drop you.' She had heard those words before. I'm going to drop you. Hadn't she?  Or maybe she had felt them, in her bones and her lungs and her stupid-fucking-heart that wouldn't stop crying for someone to love it so and-- She isn't falling anymore. The air had become dizzyingly still. Sabine tries to blink away the stardust that clings to her eyes as she realises the world is rising; no -- that she, they, are rising.  Oh, now she has definitely reached Hell.  The ledge is upon them before Sabine can console the muscles that ring like unanswered telephones. Breath does not come easily; her lungs contract in short, sharp bursts as though they wish only to punish their Mistress for jeopardising their sanctuary. And so they lie there, ankles splayed, heads crooked, waiting for the world to right itself. Until quite suddenly the Shadow speaks.  Unsure of reality, of her own goddam sanity, Sabine dares not to turn her head in the direction of that opaque accent. She can only gasp a short reply that echoes her hope that if he is real, he does not hate her as much as he should for risking his life to save her own.  "I'm sorry -- yes.. I am so sorry." ♣ -

art by rallidae | table by kezz

@caine