[P] so long as you don't mind a little dying;

[Marisol]

I will follow you down
until the sound of my voice will haunt you

When the letter first arrived, Marisol had not believed it was real. What fool would? 

But the writing was his, with the same enviable slant of elegance it had always had; and it was his voice, too, the right words in the right order, so specifically his that even an artful forgery would not have been so convincing.    The chances it was not real, then, were slim. 

It had taken her a moment to process—a few slow blinks, a mouth half-opened in surprise so intense it made her stomach curl and bile rise into her mouth. (Thankfully the castle was mostly empty by then. The only one to see her caught in the nightmarish silent scream was a servant who knew better than to ask about it.)

Perhaps also damningly; the letter was brought by a gull. But not Cirrus. For a moment she had hoped, beyond hope, that with the king’s return his bonded would be brought back to the world of the living too. But the bird’s eyes were as empty as the rest of its flocks’, nothing more than admirably polished stones of basalt in a skull Marisol was overcome with the urge to crush. 

But she had let it fly away, and did not follow it into the air.

---

The next morning Marisol is up at dawn, stiff and trembling with cyclonic emotion. 

Rage, then relief—horror, then yearning—her feelings form Vespera’s perfect circle, a snake eating its own tail.

In the cold, pale light she slinks out from the citadel and into the town center. No one has quite risen yet; shops are still shuttered, fires only beginning to be lighted; the cadets on morning watch are still bleary-eyed and distracted by the too-slow thumping of their hearts. Then the streets spill out into the fields and then onto the cliffs, and though Mari’s step looks certain, each stride feels like it will be the one to plunge her down,

down,

down, 

right into the core of the earth. 

And when she sees him—just as he had looked before, not a scratch on the starry skin, not even the healed web of a broken bone—the plunging of her heart only grows faster and falls deeper and then the whole world is smooth black silk and her body-numbing lost pulse. 

Mari stops sharply. Bluegrass rustles in the wind off the sea and scratches at her hocks.

In the silence, in the hard set of her mouth, in the furious cold gray of her gaze, there is only this to know:

I have nothing to say to you.
“Speaking.”

credits