My wolf, our wolves, the feral winter-frost parts of our souls, tangle about each other and forget so easily the grit of sand between their teeth and caught between skin and fur. I wonder how it can be so easy, to go from furious howling to youthful yips, and never know the blackness of a lament between the two.
I wonder when I forgot how to press my cheek to my sister's and breath in stardust and frost instead of brine and salt. My throat grows fat with air and my tongue heavy with the weight of all the sounds, the words, the promises I have forgotten how to make. My lungs ache as I try and fail. I pull myself away from her and blink away the dark shadows of my inability to remember.
I do not notice as Foras's edges blur against his brothers as he starts to hang in that place between the real, death, and winter.
The roar of the sea echoes in my ears like I've pressed my ear into a hollow shell where something has died. My heart thrums, and purrs, and stumbles in my chest at the sound. And when I open my eyes I look only at my sister, at my soul, at a bit of root like our father. (I am smoke, and spectral, and black-death where a girl with dreams once lived).
I was dead.
Or is it I am?
I have forgotten.
Sand whispers at my ankles as I move towards the dunes blooming the last beach-flowers of the season. It sounds like links of chain woven into hair, or flesh, or satin (like it's not bloody in all my dreams). “Come away from the tide and I will tell you.” Everything but that, because I know the sea is still hungry. I know it plucked out names out from our mother's heart like offerings plucked out of a bouquet of sacrifices.
My soul, my innocence, was not enough to fill the sea.
I look back to see if she has followed (I know she did, she always does, she and I are tangled in a way deeper than the roots and magma in the center of the earth). Her shadow catches my gaze, black and golden-sand, and I try not to see blood and gore gathering in the edges of it like sun leaking though the night. I blink, and blink, and blink.
I tell myself I only see Aspara, our wolves, and nothing else.
“We freed them all.” My skin feels like winter when I press it back against her shoulder (now that the roaring sea is a whisper of nightmare instead of the deep of it). I try not to think of the cost when I paint patterns on her skin and pray that she will not ask me for more than that. “I wish I stayed here with you.” I say into her mane.
And it is the first lie I have ever told her (but I try to tell myself it's the truth).
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