Mother told us a story once, on a night just as moon-bright and star-glitzed as all the others, about a door carved into the side of the mountain. I remember her talking about that doorway and how it was so strangely shaped, so incorporeal, that no creature could fold down its flesh and bones into the right shape to fit through. She had told us how it was a trick of the gods, a curse that was coated in the gold-leaf of a story and a magical doorway into a place that no one could understand.
This, this homecoming with my sister's shoulders and our wolves and our different stories, feels like looking at that doorway. I feel like I am trying to whittle my bones down like I might whittle a sparrow with my horn. My skin itches like I am tearing it off with teeth inside of saltwater or magic. My lungs feel heavy as two stones caught in the belly of hawk. I am falling, and stumbling, and breaking my bones, to fit through that cursed doorway in the mountains.
And I am not made for the earth, and stone, and mud thick enough to devour.
I am the winter-sea, and brine, and rotten ships buried fat with treasure hiding in the belly of the ocean. I am the doorway instead of the thing begging entrance and magic. I am a million different things that I was not born to be.
But I am still a twin. My heart still trembles in my chest with love (although the tremble and the sigh of it is weaker than it once was). My horn still tangles in my sisters mane like she's wood holding a sparrow inside. My breath still makes dragon smoke with hers as our words tangle and rise, rise, rise like lions and eagles into the noon-sun.
In her voice, her stories, I am reborn as much as a dead thing can be born, or rise, or do anything but rot. I shed my hunger for hope, and my silence and wave-froth for tea and spun sugar. For her, only for her, do I become a civilized thing with smiles instead of a snarls.
And when our voices, our stories, waiver off into slumber and dream, I fall into the dream-sea. But all I see is black speckled with crystals of salt instead of stars.
I don't think I'll ever see the stars behind my eyes again.
They're all dead--- dead like me.
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