the sun shines low and red across the water,
This feels nothing like the first time she used her magic. Then it at all be dream-stuff and whispers shared between her and Aspara as they pulled blankets over their heads until the moonlight was pale and cloudy and the white around their eyes bright. It was like a itch under her skin when she first looked down at the small wooden carvings her father made for them (thinking of it now she can't remember of it was the dragon laying between them or the lion). The itch told her that the world was only slumbering and waiting for her.
The first time her magic felt like a game. The way she could breathe life into the wood and command those small eyes to blink and those tiny legs to dance across a pillow seemed only like a clever little trick her blood knew. And if had made her any more tired than she already was she never noticed because it was bedtime at all and exhalation can do wicked things.
But this feels like war, like dying, like her bones are trying to make a map across the surface of her skin. If this is magic how can her mother ever bare it and still understand how to smile? Her lips pull back at the taste of blood that's all sea and nothing of winter. Her lungs heave and it feels like she's still running, running, running up the mountain determined to beat the wind and whatever whispers her twin hears. And she tries so hard to answer Avesta, she really does, but in the end all that comes out is something like a whimper as she learns her weight against the comfort that she's known forever.
It's only the touch of a small nose against her ankle that rouses her from this map of pain. His nose is colder than the lake at winter, colder than Fable's skin when he sings them to sleep with the song of the sea. But she can feel the touch of the wolf's nose deeper than just skin, it feels like that small almost-dead pup is tracing pathways down her soul. Avesta shivers but this time it has nothing to do with terror or the blood in the air.
It has everything do with with fate.
“What do you think they eat?” She asks as she curls her nose around the wolf's body trying to give him what little warmth she has left to give. It feels like wrapping around a glacier that hides in it the bones of the earth. It feels like home.
Avesta closes her eyes and licks her lips and it all seems tainted with salted blood and sharp twinges of pain. “Let me rest for just a moment”, she says into that white, hardly breathing wolf. “And then--” She never manages to finish whatever it was she was about to say. All she can see the blackness of exhaustion. In that empty place, that's almost sleep, there are the small hardly formed images of the wolf's thoughts. And even in the darkness her weary heart knows that now there is all the time in the world.
They'll never be too late again.
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