Each whisper of a gemstone eye gathers with its siblings until the castle doorway is singing a dirge. Warset remembers the song. Deep in the depths of her almost-gone star soul, she remembers. When she blinks (with her eyelids that know no dirge to sing) she can imagine it caught in the tongues of the star-lions and the comet-foxes. Her own lips vibrate with the memory, although the notes are not made for mortal things to sing and so the melody sounds broken when she answers the doorway.
But they blink back at her, with the same sort of language her wings understand, and grant her the entrance she did not remember asking for.
Her shadow is just falling on the third step when the child (innocent as all things free of agony are) rushes towards her. Her heart, that frail mortal thing in her chest, stumbles and stutters like a dead-bird falling through a summer rain. Behind her teeth she remembers the taste of this same panic, this same fear of death and forever solitude.
And she remembers pleading for death instead of help (and she tries not to hate this child for the memory).
“Hush.” She hums the word because she remembers too, in brief flashes between the blood-silver of agony, how her star sisters had clamoured and screamed each time one of them fell. On the outskirts of the city, where the noose of it swings in a knot, the bones of a star fall from the cleaning and dissentrage in the streets like wishes. The trembling of the streets feels like a fourth soul sinking into the wreckage of her.
Warset lifts a wing, unaware of the way she glitters like a beast in the gloaming eye-light. “Breathe.” A demand, spoken almost unkindly, because she cannot find in the aftermath of captivity the empathy for lost foals in the belly of monsters and dead stars. With the tip of her wing she brushes a tear from the child’s cheek (because she must move to silence the purring of a leopard in her chest).
It is better, she thinks, than roaring at each memory of agony running in shards through her heart.
“I will help you find her.” Another star-corpse falls and turns to dust at the echo of song in her voice as she turns once more to meet the many-gazes of the castle doors in their chanting dirge of blinking. And this time, when her shadow falls upon the third stair she does not turn away from the welcome in the doorway.
A mortal might have waited for the child to join her. A leopard does not think to pause. And a suffering dead-star feeling each blink like a reminiscence does not think of caution or the looming fear of a forever solitude.
She thinks only a home as a lost thing thinks of it.
But they blink back at her, with the same sort of language her wings understand, and grant her the entrance she did not remember asking for.
Her shadow is just falling on the third step when the child (innocent as all things free of agony are) rushes towards her. Her heart, that frail mortal thing in her chest, stumbles and stutters like a dead-bird falling through a summer rain. Behind her teeth she remembers the taste of this same panic, this same fear of death and forever solitude.
And she remembers pleading for death instead of help (and she tries not to hate this child for the memory).
“Hush.” She hums the word because she remembers too, in brief flashes between the blood-silver of agony, how her star sisters had clamoured and screamed each time one of them fell. On the outskirts of the city, where the noose of it swings in a knot, the bones of a star fall from the cleaning and dissentrage in the streets like wishes. The trembling of the streets feels like a fourth soul sinking into the wreckage of her.
Warset lifts a wing, unaware of the way she glitters like a beast in the gloaming eye-light. “Breathe.” A demand, spoken almost unkindly, because she cannot find in the aftermath of captivity the empathy for lost foals in the belly of monsters and dead stars. With the tip of her wing she brushes a tear from the child’s cheek (because she must move to silence the purring of a leopard in her chest).
It is better, she thinks, than roaring at each memory of agony running in shards through her heart.
“I will help you find her.” Another star-corpse falls and turns to dust at the echo of song in her voice as she turns once more to meet the many-gazes of the castle doors in their chanting dirge of blinking. And this time, when her shadow falls upon the third stair she does not turn away from the welcome in the doorway.
A mortal might have waited for the child to join her. A leopard does not think to pause. And a suffering dead-star feeling each blink like a reminiscence does not think of caution or the looming fear of a forever solitude.
She thinks only a home as a lost thing thinks of it.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
