caine
—« this year we devour »
S
he steps so quietly—as if the star-blood in her veins ate every sound she made as she made it—that if she had not chosen to reveal herself to him through a warbling soft whisper, Caine would not have known, would never have known, that all this time she had been so close to him.(Hearing her voice puts a piece back into the hole in his chest. But he will not know this until later.)
The cloak and the broken glass flop to the sand, besides a gentle swell of detritus he has already dug out. Caine turns to Warset slowly, like he is afraid of frightening her away. His breath streams out in white clouds.
Really, he is just trying to steady himself.
"Maybe. But they're eager to leave me, too," he says, unsure if he is making any sense. He feels as if, the moment she had entered his orbit, he had unknowingly stepped into a dream. And now the dream is growing sentient.
"They're not very fond of me." His eyes skim over the downward swell of her wings, midnight incarnate, yet softer than a dove's. There is something about the way she holds them that he has yet to see, yet to know he is waiting to see. "Though I like them enough." Caine's lips quirk a little, when he thinks about what he is saying. How he refers to his shadows as them.
Quietly he continues his careful perusal of her, pausing at the diamond-and-ruby mask (strangely, he is disappointed. it casts her eyes in shadow.) and furrowing—though it is not visible beneath the cast of his own mask—when he sees the tears. Silver in the dawning night.
She steps closer, and he meets her halfway. The burial is temporarily (permanently) forgotten.
"Warset." It is then that Caine realises what about the way the shed-star holds her wings, the way she holds herself, he had been waiting to see.
(He is slow to see what he has never been taught.)
She has not reached for him.
So, hesitant, wary, Caine reaches for her.
"You are crying." His forehead brushes against her mask, scars to feathers to jewels. His voice is flat, almost forcibly so, as if he is afraid of upsetting her.
This time, it is split: half fear and half the need to be steady, steady, steady.
Long ago, he had read about a prince who had wished upon a star. After he had finished with the book he had walked uncertainly to his window, peeled back the curtains, and looked for the brightest star in the sky. Then, he had looked to the one right below it, the one that was dimmer and smaller, because the brightest one (Polaris) belonged to the prince, and he was not one.
'Do you really grant their wishes?' he'd asked it, skeptically. It had felt faintly ridiculous. He had been an un-childlike child. 'I would grow tired of it. Is that why I was not born a star, but a boy who was not even given a name?'
Does Warset shudder at mortality? Does one who was once a star, the most holy and detached of vessels, despair at such an existence?
He shivers when his shadow cloak glides along his neck on its way to Warset's side. The glass shards it had left behind when Caine's telekinesis had shaken them out glint darkly at him from the sand, vaguely accusatory.
"When mortals cry," he says, "we like to wipe our tears away with something soft. Like a sleeve, or the edge of a cloak." The shadow cloak, shimmering faintly, gorged with shadows, and soft as a moth's wing, hovers docilely next to her.
Waiting.
He does not ask her why she is crying. Perhaps she does not know, herself.
@Warset | <3
