[P] opened up his little heart;

[Sabine]

s a b i n e who are you when nobody's watching The great ruckus of the docks feels like nothing more than a distant dream.  A sailor, pale and scarred, barks thunderous instructions to a crew that scramble like obedient dogs to his heel -- but Sabine can only hear the sigh of last summer's breath. The barrels, the gulls, the hammer-pulse of stern against bow? They dwindle and die in fragmented echoes, just like everyone she'd ever loved. For there are acres and lives between she and the world that grinds on in her absence; a world that cares not for the heart of a single child. It is a machine that coughs and splutters but never ceases. It consists of more cogs than a girl like Sabine could comprehend. It is alien, it is foreign, and it has only ever shown her apathy.  Did it blink when Raum turned sand to stone? Sabine turns suddenly, seeing beyond her ankles for a brief aching moment, and knows that she has forgotten why her legs shepherded her here -- though unequivocably it is not the only thing she has forgotten. Her ribs, bulbous and wrathful, scream at their host to feed them so; her throat, parched beyond repair, begs once more to make an offering to the lake; her eyes, sunken like rotting fruit, peer out of their hollow sockets in the bitter hope that there is light beyond the dark cloud across the sea.  And then she sees him. It doesn't matter that his wicker-thin shoulders are sheltered beneath modest fabric or that his hair looks darker under a Denoctian sun. It doesn't matter that her heart is too weak to stand because he is moving, fighting, aching his way toward her and she knows he will catch her if she should fall.  She knows, she knows, she knows.  Because he is here! Standing suddenly before her like a wraith she might have fashioned from the knife Raum had promised to protect her with. Or the little-girl-love her mother had sworn to dress her in all those lifetimes ago. Or that magic trick Acton had vowed to teach her the last time he waved goodbye, as the dying light shifted across his smile.   Each broken oath was a dead-black tooth in her mouth and there they fermented, lodged in her flesh until one by one they fell loose onto the dirt. She buried them all faithfully beneath the unending sky and if you knew where to look you would still find their epitaphs engraved into the earth. So when she had asked Abel to make her that solemn promise, it had been only to fill that too-dark hole where the last lies had lived. She had not expected him to keep his vow; she knew better than to hope. But here he stands and she is not dreaming -- the feel of his breath on her chest is too real -- and she does not know how to stop her tears from falling as his words fill the morning air. She nods in tender reply, wanting to say that of course she came, but can only whisper a soft proclamation that sounds almost like a prayer. "You kept your promise..." She couldn't quite bring herself to say that nobody had ever done that before.

art created by The-Day-of-Shadow | table by kezz

@abel