The sad lament of a broken love song rings in her ears long enough for her to piece meaning to the words At fist there was only the hush of a voice, salted enough that it made her think of the sea. She had danced to that voice, swaying back and forth like a gull caught on a current. Her eyes, her spring-green eyes, never wavered from the embers drifting up like mist. She could feel them landing on her spine when the wind turned. It felt like the fire was crying out the last laments of its life across the young curl of her bones.
And as terrible as it was, to love the way the wood was dying, dying, dying around her, she reveled in the monstrous burning of the dead-wood.
This wood didn't talk to her anyway.
Red is far enough back, encased in jasmine and citrus smoke, she cannot see the singer or the harpist. She cannot see anything but ash snowflakes falling and flames flickers strangle over the bodies around her. But she can still hear the way the poem starts to turn, the way it starts to sounds like a strangled death knell more than notes of sorrow. It runs like oil through her veins. It slows her down until there is only the blink, blink, blink of her eyes to show that the girl with wine and sea-salt in her soul is alive at all.
Someone bumps into her. She blinks. Her blood speeds up.
When she looks there is only the flash of bone-white feathers behind that stumbling voice. Red smiles, because she understands. The smile on her lips says, I know. I know what it's like to be the only one alone in a crowd.. It's a smile that's followed with a touch, nothing more than a brush of her muzzle against the girl's hip.
It's the same touch that seals give each other when the sea-weeds press them into great knots of flesh and sun-warm skin.
“Don't.” The word rings of her tongue like a bell, like ice falling off a vine on the first morning of spring. There is sea beneath it, there is always sea, but it's a sad sea (never angry). Because she's forgotten, oh she's forgotten, what it is like to be touched in any way her heart sparks and smolders like those embers floating away with wishes. She steps close enough to feel the brush of a feather against her rib-cage.
“I'm Red.” And she wonders how it feels to fly.
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