It doesn’t take long. Even as one couple disappears into the fog, bodies dissipating like a cloud being torn apart by the wind, another appears.She sees her horn first, a blade piercing the fog until water runs quicksilver down its sharp edge. And then, so pale she could almost be a cloud herself, the rest of the girl appears. And at first Maret thinks she might be a lance, or a sword, or some other weapon with a blade, because the gleam in the darkness of her eyes is something sharp. She turns to face her, but she does not see her, yet - Maret is looking past her, into the sleeping city where other ghosts are drifting, always drifting, and words are dancing around their heads, crowning them with lyrics. A thousand stories, a thousand poems, a thousand lives, and she wants to write them all.
One day, the fog whispers back to her as she stares it down, you will. And she believes it. She believes it the way she believes in the sunlight, the way it wraps around her like a cloak that was made for her and her alone. And in the same way she knows that the sun will bring it back to her come the morning, she knows too that when a cloud pauses to speak, she must also pause to listen.
Only then does she look at the moonbright girl and her wolf, at the paper and the quill she offers.
"They will." It doesn’t sound like her own voice speaking, as the scrap of paper and the quill still dripping with ink reach out for her. But even as the words are leaving her mouth, the quill begins to dance across the page, across the water stains and the tears as if they don’t even exist.
"They will -" the scratch of the point against the paper is reassuring, "-not go quietly into the morning, for at night is when the aritsts lift the veils from their faces and shake the dust from their instruments-"
The quill scratches away at the paper as she speaks, streaking across the page with a speed that rivals her own lips. Until it lays down with a sigh, and the paper dances an inch from her eyes. But she doesn’t read the words back to herself; Maret plucks the paper from the air, folds it once, twice, thrice.
"I’m Maret," she tells the girl, and one day I’ll be the greatest writer who ever lived, she does not say, although the words are already there, written in the sharp and hungry planes of her face. And for just a moment, she considers what her poem might look like hanging from the end of the night girl’s horn.
@avesta
