“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS
WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
The sun is ticking out the death of an hour in golden rays of saltwater, brine, and the sand particles falling from their wings like burnt out months fresh from a flame. Warset, with her head angled towards the cosmos hidden in the light, cannot help but feel like another thing by which time is ticking, ticking, ticking out the sound of death.
She cannot remember how to feel time like this, like a quiet knell that should be screaming. There had been war-fields, and broken bone melodies, and her sisters laying their feathers across her cheeks to wipe away the tears left behind when the music stopped. For them there had been no hours, or days, or nights, or seconds whittling their bodies into the shape of death like deadwood. There was only-- forever.
But now she can see the seconds in the curls of his hair as it dries and in the salt on his feathers that looks like glitz instead of sorrow dried out. She wonders, so forcefully that it hurts, when time and death melded together to make something almost beautiful. And she thinks perhaps that there is an elegance in the noon, and the ticking clouds, and the way he asks for the simplest thing she has ever been asked to give.
“Warset.” She does not ask him to hold her name as close as a heart, but she hopes that this mortal man might. And in her heart she tucks the wish in close so that it might rest between the soul-song and the constellation-song like a shadow no light can touch.
Here a sister does not have to die to hold it and she is already a dead star, a fallen star, a lost star. There is nothing left to weigh down her old light.
She does not correct him. Warset is no ‘angel’ fallen from the sky but the way he says the word sounds like a sigh that her name has never folded into the shape of. And whatever an ‘angel’ is surely must be something better than a star tossed from the cosmic realm with no wish to cool her fever as the dying creeps closer, and closer, and closer (like an hour, closer). Perhaps it is better to be whatever he would shape her into instead of another lost thing with no compass to point her onward towards the right horizon. Into his shadow she tucks that hope, her lips twisted into something as secret as light bent and caught in a blackhole.
She follows him towards the cliff and in the silence, where his feathers brush against her own as their steps stutter and re-learn patterns, her soul (her tossed out soul and that wishless belly) starts to sing. Into the seconds, and the sunlight, and the clouds creeping overhead like death, it sings.
And it sounds like the home she lost.
@Caine
She cannot remember how to feel time like this, like a quiet knell that should be screaming. There had been war-fields, and broken bone melodies, and her sisters laying their feathers across her cheeks to wipe away the tears left behind when the music stopped. For them there had been no hours, or days, or nights, or seconds whittling their bodies into the shape of death like deadwood. There was only-- forever.
But now she can see the seconds in the curls of his hair as it dries and in the salt on his feathers that looks like glitz instead of sorrow dried out. She wonders, so forcefully that it hurts, when time and death melded together to make something almost beautiful. And she thinks perhaps that there is an elegance in the noon, and the ticking clouds, and the way he asks for the simplest thing she has ever been asked to give.
“Warset.” She does not ask him to hold her name as close as a heart, but she hopes that this mortal man might. And in her heart she tucks the wish in close so that it might rest between the soul-song and the constellation-song like a shadow no light can touch.
Here a sister does not have to die to hold it and she is already a dead star, a fallen star, a lost star. There is nothing left to weigh down her old light.
She does not correct him. Warset is no ‘angel’ fallen from the sky but the way he says the word sounds like a sigh that her name has never folded into the shape of. And whatever an ‘angel’ is surely must be something better than a star tossed from the cosmic realm with no wish to cool her fever as the dying creeps closer, and closer, and closer (like an hour, closer). Perhaps it is better to be whatever he would shape her into instead of another lost thing with no compass to point her onward towards the right horizon. Into his shadow she tucks that hope, her lips twisted into something as secret as light bent and caught in a blackhole.
She follows him towards the cliff and in the silence, where his feathers brush against her own as their steps stutter and re-learn patterns, her soul (her tossed out soul and that wishless belly) starts to sing. Into the seconds, and the sunlight, and the clouds creeping overhead like death, it sings.
And it sounds like the home she lost.
@Caine
