O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
She doesn’t know why she said what she said. It just...slipped out, all hurt and anger and fear. She doesn’t want to be alone. She wants somebody to be listening. Only a few people looked at her, expressions mixed with disappointment and disgust. “So sad,” someone whispered. But then someone else starts talking, and all of Saphira's bitterness is returned in kind. “You know who else isn’t listening? Them. Not to you, anyway. Even though nobody is listening, they’re desperate to believe that someone is.”
The summer-sleek mare can only stare at the girl. Saphira wasn’t like this when she was younger; she still remembered feelings like joy and pleasure. Before her stands a filly. And Saphira is glad to take the stinger of Charlie’s words into her mouth and swallow. “You know, then. That they cry to deaf ears. Because they are weak. Like children,” and she is talking to a child, but she doesn’t say or even think “like you,” because she is desperate, she is clinging to her hatred and it is with this desperation that she asks a child: Do you believe we are alone in this universe?
“You are never too young to realize that no one will pick you up when you fall from your nest. It is more likely that they will clip your wings.” She doesn’t even think about how this girl has wings, doesn’t even see them; she thinks only about being a gull over a churning ocean made of souls. A lone bird might fly over the ocean, circling, circling, and Saphira will watch and say: I know. I know.
