caine
—« which is also an art »
W
hen he had learned that she was a star, Caine had spent many evenings in Solterra’s palatial archives breathing in old smoke and dusting off new ash from books that had survived three reckonings. Some had crumbled to pieces when he'd eased them out from the scarred shelves. Some were simply shrunken covers, the leather curling under flames while its insides burned. Most of the books that remained were damaged in some vital way, torn or burned or simply neglected. What he'd felt for them was almost grief.
But a Solterran library couldn't possibly have contained the knowledge Caine sought. Among the most eminent of what he'd found had been star charts stamped with the crest of House Nazaret, the ancient mapmakers of the solar court. They had been detailed yet scientific, sheets and sheets of calculations and constellations and dry, scholarly commentary. He'd inspected them before coughing out lungfuls of dust and sliding the scrolls back into their shelves. What he'd wanted was intrigue. What he'd wanted were stories.
Myths, folklore, flowery personal accounts. ‘Shed Star’ printed in bold calligraphy on an ancient scroll that unraveled into so many heartstopping secrets that it could only be destroyed, or stuffed in a shadowy eave to be forgotten, after he'd finished with it.
Yet if such knowledge existed it had not survived the fires, or it had never entered Solterra at all. In the dust and the dark, with only a candle for company, Caine had penned his questions with a feather plucked from his own wing and folded the pieces of parchment into stars. Tossed the stars into the air and caught them. His hair spilled like ink as he lay sprawled across the floor.
Had there been any like her before? Toss. How could stars fall from the sky? Toss. Was she immortal? Could she die like he would, one day? Toss. Catch. Toss.
Was she truly like the angels of his own divine myths? At this the paper star had hovered in the air, his eyes slitting as he gazed at it, before—down it fell, to the earthen floor.
Angel. In the days and nights Caine has not seen the shed-star, he has taken a liking to calling her that. A whisper slid quickly over the tongue.
Caine holds a star in his arms and she is impossibly fragile, impossibly beautiful, impossible. As the star etches words like constellations into his skin, he tells himself that he needs to know nothing else but that she exists.
He tells himself that this is enough.
“The darkness was never warm,” Warset whispers. Caine shudders as she curls ever further into him. Electricity jitters down his spine and with a sudden, militaristic harshness he concludes that he is very, very drunk. He must be, or else he would not be thinking things like I don't want to ever leave and then believing gravely that he means it.
He doesn't. He doesn't. He repeats this to himself while Warset breathes words into his skin and because he is drunk, impossibly so, none of his words sink in while all of hers do.
Down to the bone.
“But I was warm enough, bright enough, that neither the darkness nor I ever froze or burned out.” Caine laughs softly into her hair. “You are.” He doesn’t quite finish. He can't figure out how to say it. So he only adjusts his wings to allow her to press herself neater against him (an action allowed because he is drunk) and lets air hiss out through his nose. You are very warm, Warset. So much so that I can almost forget the cold.
So much so—the paper star crashes to the floor—that surely, he cannot make her cold.
She listens to his story, of mothers and crying children, in wavering silence. He watches as she considers it. He watches as her eyes blink liquid and slow. Somewhere in between, as if he is sleepwalking, Caine pulls away. His heart is starting to tap out a rhythm that climbs faster and faster, horribly erratic, like a bird dashing itself to death against a cage. He is too afraid to name it; to give something a name is to give it life.
(Pain plus joy equals—)
As his ankles sink into sand, as he stumbles gracefully backwards, he catches sight of how silver her eyes are in the night and he thinks he wants to—
Her lips press softly against his cheek and want becomes surprise becomes sudden, caustic pain, a knife slash to the throat. He grows utterly still. A clock winding down, Caine thinks, half in desperation and half in madness-inducing-elation. He has pulled away yet she has followed, like a duckling or a bright-eyed doe, and as Caine thinks this his mouth quirks and his eyes blink, two pale moons waning to dark, mechanical reactions he tells himself, until her lips glide up to where tears would gather if he could cry.
His skin is too hot for him to wear. It is the liquor. (It is not the liquor.) It is a mechanical reaction. (It is a reaction. He doesn't know what to do with those.)
“You're trying to soothe me when you're the one in need of it.” His words catch in a breathy laugh. There is a heartbreak and a heartmend in it, all at once. Angel, angel—but he cannot quite say it. “You are too much,” he utters instead, his voice dying so the rest of him can start again.
Above them, red clouds mix with blue sky until a lavender dusk settles softly over their backs, like airy silk. The sun slides down into a bed of stars. Her mask has fallen away, giving company to the broken glass; she does not seem to miss it. He doesn’t, either.
If black feathers begin to tremble and shrivel from her wings, Caine does not notice it. If his cloak floats quietly down to the sand, its very presence forgotten, he spares no more than a glance to it. It is only the bloody glare of her ruby moon as he touches his mouth to her neck, so that she will not see the heat climbing up his. It is only her smile, a pure creature, burning down worlds in the fracturing light.
It is only the grudging, sober way he murmurs, “I think I am at my limit,” before clutching her tighter to him than he ever did before.
@Warset || this turned into a novel,,,,
