summer is past, and we are not saved
When O leaves the cliffs—sparking bright with the orange flames of bonfires eating at the air, packed with the warm bodies of the festivalgoers; the air up there heavy with the smell of smoke as all these mortals’ worries, written down on carefully torn papers, are eaten up by fire—it is not quite dark yet.
Instead, the sun is still smiling from the horizon in a thin sliver of god-teeth. What light does seep over the churning ocean is weak hues of yellow and orange, or rosy like the skin of a ripe peach; it is barely enough to illuminate the sheer steps cut into the cliff that O traverses down to the beach, slick with mist and too steep to do more than crawl down. (It requires more patience than she was born with, and the fact that she is willing to climb them to see Andi is something of a compliment in and of itself). Off the sea comes a bright-white wind made sharp with salt; and the sky above is a colorless kind of dove gray, mottled in some places with the thin cotton clouds, and in others left smooth as a stone from the bottom of the river.
It is a kind of peaceful drollness that almost never resides in the desert. And despite the subtle ache in her chest and the insistent whisper of Tuchulcha to go home, go home, go home—when O glances down and sees the gray beach so far below unfurled like a scroll, the gray sky so far above resting over everything like a blanket, something in her is soothed by its infinite repetition: different visions of smoke, fanning out in every direction.
But there is a spot down below where that repetition is interrupted. O realizes it with a start when she is halfway down to the copse of sand, still perched on the narrow staircase like a bird, and even that mild jolt of surprise is enough to send her uncomfortably close to slipping on the salt-stained rock.
There is someone already down there.
She pauses her descent. For a moment, too, she debates turning (carefully) around and heading back up to wait for Andi on the safer part of the cliffside. It might be easier to find me there, anyway, is the attempt O makes to justify her dread at finishing the climb. But she knows it is not true; the emissary had specifically requested they meet down there, on that crescent moon of white sand. And she’s come this far. Giving up here would be weak. O is not weak.
I will be anything, she thinks, but weak. So the girl—woman, now, almost—ducks her head closer to her chest, turning away from the soft nip of the wind as it pushes her against the cliffside, and slowly, carefully, continues her descent.
By the time she steps off the staircase the sun has disappeared almost completely, and a new family of frothy white clouds has formed across the length of the sky. Her limbs are stiffer than she expected them to be, and she hits the ground with more weight than she means to, spraying up a small shower of white sand around each hoof. The air down here bites harder than it did a hundred feet up. Thinking with envy of how warm it might be at home, O can't help shivering as the breeze washes over her; it tousles her dark hair into a salt-toothed knot, pushes her hackles to rise like a wolf's. Tuchulcha's metal arm against her skin is bitterly cold, and briefly she wonders if it might leave a freeze brand against the dusty gold of her skin. (Not that anyone would see it: the holster has not left her side since she picked it up that day at the oasis. Years ago, now.)
Too distracted by picking her way down the cliffside, she has missed the spectacle made of drinking seawater. So the only thing that crosses her mind when she glances over this stranger is that the girl looks young—young, and lost, and magical; two wide wings pressed against her side, significantly taller than O is but not intimidating in the least, perhaps because of how obviously out of place she is.
O has heard stories of girls falling out of wounds in the sky, or falling up from holes cut into the earth, unconcerned by the rules of gravity. She knows there are not only other lands but other worlds, and that Novus has a penchant for collecting these travelers, whether that is by chance or fate or the will of the gods, and that this girl—as unique as she is or isn't—is not the first to arrive here on accident and certainly will not be the last.
The Solterran clears her throat, and says in a voice that straddles the line between cold and skeptical: "Unless it's death, whatever you're looking for probably isn't in the middle of the ocean."
