and i must pour forth
a river of words
a river of words
T
he castle echoes with the sound of the rain, tap, tap, tapping against all the glass windows like it’s begging to be let in. She can hear it calling to her, like deep calls to deep, and it is the only sound echoing against the stone walls. But every window is shut and locked - and it feels to her that they’re meant to trap her inside, rather than to keep out the wind and the rain. Maret presses her muzzle against the cool glass, but it doesn’t budge. Her breath fogs up the glass, until the already-gray world outside is obscured, until she can no longer see the streaks of raindrops running down to pool at the windowsill. Only the sound of it persists, knocking on the window, drumming against the roof. Threatening to tear the entire place down, brick by brick, root by root.
For half a heartbeat, she wishes that it would.
And she wishes it would flood the gardens, drown the castle - and her - along with it. She wishes the Rapax rushing past the court would change its course, or overflow enough to sweep them all into the ocean.
What does the bottom of the river look like? she wonders idly, drawing shapes in the fogged up glass. Are the kelp forests of the sea as grand as Viride? Do they have their own monsters lurking the shadows? She had read once of a city, buried far beneath the waves; with its castle made of living coral and carpets woven from seagrass. There the horses had fins of every color and fish took the place of birds (do they sing the way birds did? Fill the air with music? Or was there only the song of the ocean, the crashing of waves, the dance of the currents?) Even if text, even if only in theory, it had seemed to her a thousand times more interesting than Delumine.
But then again, Maret was always losing herself in stories, and each of them had always been more exciting than the real world.
She loses herself now in the sound of the wind as it picks up across the meadows, pressing storm-whipped flowers deep into the ground and screaming through the hollows of the castle. The sky grows darker and darker as the strength of the tempest draws closer, until the light in the sitting room grows too weak for her to bend. She draws fish on the glass, and horses with fins for legs, and wishes she could paint the mist with colors.
And the longer she sits pressed against the window hoping to see a new world emerge from the rain, the longer she spends listening to the rain beat itself like something desperate and dying against the closed doors - the more she wants to break the glass and fling open the windows and invite the rain inside.
A cluster of ice crystals leaps from her skin to the window when she finally pulls away.
{ @any "speaks" notes: text }
