the sun shines low and red across the water,
Bits of coral are starting to wash up around their hooves long before Avesta looks away from the golden pyrite peaking through Aster's hair like bone. The coral is white as sea-foam and each piece cuts at her ankles when the waves dash it against her skin. And if there is blood blooming between the black scales of her legs the sea takes it back before Avesta realizes she's sacrificed anything.
She's looking at a shard of coral that looks brighter than the others, sharper too, when Aster breaks the silence between one roar of thunder and the next crash of the sea against the cliffs. “Oh,” she says. It sounds like a sigh, like the beginning of a dream (oh, there was the sea or oh, there was the wind howling through my ears). Maybe it sounds a little like a kiss too when she turns and presses it into Aster's downy feathers that are still catching salt stories.
There is no pity there because she cannot feel it.
Avesta whispers her own story there when she worries a feather between her lips in an instinct so much older than the marrow filling her bones. She hopes Aster will listen to it later-- later when the sea and all this warmth between them is quieter.
“It sounds like the perfect way to live.” When she pulls away, just enough to see those golden bones peeking through, it feels like cutting her skin open. “I have a sister.” It sounds no less proud and no less fierce than the way Aster spoke of her brother but something in it seems protective in the way the sea protects the sharks, and the whales, and the rotting ships. Like she'd cut open the world for her sister, like something blacker than loyalty, more violent.
Up on the cliff Foras starts to howl and somewhere further than that she can hear the bellow of a dragon calling her home. She doesn't look back towards her city that she knows is waiting, instead she looks at Aster in the way that a wolf might look at a deer when its belly is fat with voles and sparrows. “If you follow me home I could show you another way to live.” And when she turns away, and starts to run towards her wolf and her mother's dragon, the clever tilt of her horn promises that her way is no less wild.
@Aster
