Once I had not thought it strange, the way we speak in looks and minuscule shifts of our bodies. It had not seemed unnatural when my bones whispered to her soul and her soul had whispered to my bones. To me, it had seemed in all my miles of innocence, that the entire world spoke in the same language of us.
Didn't the glass leaves of the church-tree talk to the roots in bell-chime lashes of green, gold and red? Didn't the river talk to the shore in bubbling hisses almost too soft for my ears to hear?
Didn't the sunlit places of sea sing to the black depth in melodies and tomes of froth and scale?
Now I know better. I can still read her looks, the graceful perfect curl of her lips and the flutter of her lashes, as easy as I can breathe. But I have forgotten how to whisper back, how to sing back, how to do anything but smile like a tomb of bones and stone pretending to be pearl and flower. And I want to remember how, I want to shape our language into the story of how I'm paying for our mother's sins, how I'm caged so that she can have her freedom.
I want to tell her that I'm suffering. I want to tell her that I regret dying, that I regret snapping my jawbone open to welcome the sea god in.
But all those words, all those horrors, live only in my language and I do not know how to shape it into hers. I try though. “Tell me all the things you've done that I would be proud of.” I would dash myself on the cliffs to remember how this tongue of mine is supposed to work when she's pressed against me. My heart flutters in my chests like a sparrow with broken wings. It remembers.
“I certainly hope they never grow to Fable's size. A normal wolf size would be just enough.” It feels like a blessing to lean my shoulder against hers, to share just a bit of this ocean-stone weight I carry now. Does it feel like chains to her? Or does it feel like another whisper in that language I cannot recall.
When I whisper around a smile my teeth ache like jagged, hungry things ache. “I don't think Novus would survive the two of them if they never stopped growing.” My laughter is a frail and brittle thing, a winter-sea thing. But it is laughter and maybe to her that is all that matters.
But below that laughter, when I blink my eyes, I see Foras on the battle-field with blood dripping from his muzzle.
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