and i must pour forth a river of words
or i shall suffocate.
or i shall suffocate.
S
tepping into the party felt like stepping into a ray of sunshine. Everywhere she looks she sees light, and laughter, and bodies dancing like gold-spun dust motes floating across the floor. It was as if the sun had grown three times bigger overnight, or had perhaps wandered too close to Novus; and oh, the thought alone is enough to make the blood running through her veins feel almost-warm.
There is a moment in which she just stands there, frozen, near a fountain — while the rest of the party guests part around her like water, and if they notice her at all it is only to laugh at the look in her eyes, so very much like a foal, seeing something for the first time. Has she never been to a party before? she hears someone whisper, skin brushing too close to her’s. But she only smiles, and tilts her head back to the sky, to the sun, closing her eyes against the warmth that spreads across her face,
The desert mansion was shining all around her, everything gold and bright and new and all of it calling out to her, demanding her attention, ordering her to look this way but also this way and that way too. And she wants to listen, she does - but all she can do is stand there and bask in the glow of it all. In a court of Solterrans — it’s still hard sometimes to think of herself as one of them — a court full of people who worship the midday sun, she imagines that she alone is the only one who truly understands it.
Because in that moment, it feel as though the sun is shining for her and for her alone, welcoming her home. Ice glitters like diamond dust against her skin, fracturing the sunlight into a thousand pieces that she wears like a cloak. She lets herself imagine — if only for a moment — that this party was thrown for her, all of its grandeur and light and romanticism on display for her enjoyment. It’s easier to think of it that way — to think of herself not as a stranger in a strange land, an outsider, an émigré.
It’s easier to pretend she belongs.
So she wanders through the rooms and hallways and courtyards, determined to remember the feel of the place long after she forgets the statues and the people. It is while she loops back around that she sees the other girl standing alone (like her — a rarity, when so many are in pairs or groups). It is, perhaps, the only thing noticeable about her, the one thing that keeps her from blending into the backdrop of the party. She is something dark against which all the gold is allowed to shine brighter, and after jotting a brief line down into her notebook, Maret makes her way towards her.
She plucks a wine glass from the same tray as she when the waiter passes her — a pale gold drink that she lifts to her lips but lowers abruptly, without sipping, when the smell catches her off guard. She fiddles the drink almost-nervously, as she stops next to the dark-haired girl.
A smile, just as nervous, and already she is feeling like an outsider again. And even when she has a notebook full of words pressed close to her skin, none of them come to mind when the girl turns her odd-colored eyes upon her and with only a look, has her heart turning back to ice. The frost creeps higher up her legs.
And the seconds tick by.
“Lovely party, isn’t it?” the first words that come to mind, while she shifts and lifts the drink to her lips again. She had never been one for spice. “Do they do this often?”
{ @Ruth "speaks" notes: <3 }
