I breathe, I draw breath
”You’re right. She has left us to die on the land.”
Somehow, it is not the answer Saphira wants to hear. Somehow, she wanted to be proven wrong. She wanted him to say, “You are wrong, and here is why, and maybe she will take us back one day because she loves us,” but he doesn’t, and the sea has still not taken them back, and maybe never loved them to begin with. (Though she knows, in her heart, that you cannot be one with the sea without love and violence in equal shares.) Her lids drop low, tired, and she sighs.
He presses his nose to hers.
”She would do it because we are unworthy.”
Saphira pushes into him, just enough to feel held. Her loneliness in the wake of exile is overpowering, and he is too familiar for her not to want this. ”Perhaps she is unworthy, if she would abandon her people,” she murmurs. Seaweed tangles around a hoof and stays there, the surf pulling against it before heading back to deeper waters, then, pushing forward again, trying to bring it to dry land. Saphira picks up her hoof and allows it to float away with the tide. She looks up at his old-dream face with her lost-gem eyes and says, ”Tell me your name.”
