the sun shines low and red across the water,
When the scratch of the quill on the paper starts to sound like the shush, shush, shush of the sea Avesta closes her eyes. The sound carries her away more than the words. Something about the girl's voice reminds her of the shore, endless. And it could be endless against the crash of her when she opens her eyes to really watch the way the girl is here and not here all at once. Avesta wonders at it, as much as she wonders how she would feel to be a part of two worlds instead of ones.
Maybe later, she thinks. Everything is later now, tethered by the youth caging her in her sea-storm soul.
At her side Foras is listening too, but he's hearing the words instead of the sound. It's all strange to him anyway and the fog is calling, calling, calling to him like the woods. Maybe later, he thinks at the same time as Avesta, but it's blood he's thinking about. Blood and hunger, things that girls will learn to love after their moment, their first moment, has settled and passed.
“Does anyone ever go quietly?” Avesta knows she wouldn't. She's too much a storm-girl to do anything quietly. If the girl can see it in her gaze, the hunger, the thing too like the sea to be in a look, she does not pause to worry about it. And there is a moment (always moments) when the girl tucks the poem away, that she thinks about taking it back. She didn't put it back to sleep and it's her paper now, hers to shape into anything, even something larger than a poem. But she lets the girl keep her poem--- for now.
The distance between them is an easy thing to take. It's gone with a single step and a touch of nose against cheek. A touch that's half seeking, half wondering. Avesta wonders what's different in their blood to make one of them a poet and the other a god. Fable flies overhead, lowing at the sea and a ship, and she stops wondering. It's all in the sea, and the storm, and the wraith at her heels closer than her shadows. “I'm Avesta.” And she doesn't say, and I will master all of this, but it's in the sharp tip of her horn that's an echo to everything unsaid in Maret's face.
It's all in the blood and the moments. Avesta already knows it, and she wonders if Maret does too.
@Maret
