The candlelight casts a thousand interlacing shadows across the grey man’s face, so that each ridge and valley is thrown into sudden and sharp contrast. And in the places where the light touches him, it turns his skin a silver so bright Sirius wants to drown in it.
”Like starlight,” he thinks to himself.
He doesn’t notice that the man is taking too long to respond. He’s too busy tracing the lines of silver light down the side of the stranger’s face, and when he looks at the darkness of his throat for at least a moment he expects to see a miniature galaxy hiding there. And when there isn’t one, he imagines it’s there instead.
“Watching us?” he echoes, and tears his gaze away from all that silver to look out over the markets. But what he’s looking for, he isn’t sure - Sirius does not known any of the dead names here, would not have recognized them if they suddenly came back. He knows only one dead girl, and he knows too that she would never be here even if she had the choice.
But death is more permanent than all that.
“No,” he says decidedly, when he tilts his head to look back at Eik. “No, stars live not with us. Sky is home of their’s.”
It does not occur to him that the mane with the silver skin and the sad eyes may have lost someone, or that he should speak with sympathy. He doesn’t recognize the look in Eik’s eyes - he has not lost anyone, has no one to lose, he wouldn’t understand that sort of longing - and he stares, perhaps for a bit too long, while trying to puzzle it out.
“I’m Sirius.” The name echoes inside of him over and over, and not for the first time it feels more like what he is rather than who he is. He doesn’t know if there’s meant to be a difference between the two, but standing in a market full of dead pictures, where the burning incense starts to taste something like sadness when he breathes it in, he thinks there should be. Maybe there was more to him than what he knew, more than what the stars had told him.
When he looks around and sees how many people visit a single shrine, he hopes that’s true.
He hopes that one day someone might make a shrine for him, and miss him when he’s gone.
“Eik,” he says, testing the name and liking the way it sounds. And then he’s walking, gesturing for him to follow and trusting that he would. “Did you know-“ The name etched into the stone of the first shrine confuses him, and he has to try far too hard to make the letters make sense. His brow creases as he frowns down at it in concentration. “Mar-e-ska? Marihscah?”
the sun watches what i do
but the moon
knows all my secrets
@
<3
