Around her, as the castle unfurls like a body, the hallways do not feel like a horror of weight pressing in. Each of her steps, as they echo like a bass-beast, do not feel like a eulogy but a sonnet. Her feathers, as they sweep worms, and diamond dust, and red-eyed creatures, from the walls do not feel like weapons of flight. She feels, as the castle gloaming wraps around her, like the dead star in the center of a blackhole.
Warset feels like gravity, like an eclipse, like a tiny memory of the formless and mighty things she used to be. And for a moment, one single moment of glory, she feels inescapable when she snaps open her wings from wall to wall and the golden firelight in the hanging lamps turns her into not a girl, or a star, or a cursed thing, but a constellation.
In that single moment she forgets the other lost thing following closely behind. At that moment she is home.
But as all mortal things do, as she has discovered, the child shatters the revelation of home. It dissolves around her in fragments of light when her wings settle back against her still-frail ribs. “The city will make everyone come to the castle eventually.” Warset does not bother to explain the meaning only stars know in the spiraling streets and the shops that do not scream but sing a song long forgotten by the children of god.
They hallway starts to pitch downward before she speaks again and it’s easier to bury the reality of all the dreams she’s come so deep in the belly of Novus. “You may call me Warset and I am from a place very, very far from this one.” But it’s not so far, she thinks, now.
Her eyes leave trails of silverlight on the walls when she looks back at Maeve. “Tell me of your mother. Will she look for you?” And she does not think the question strange at all, stars have no young to look for, or after, or sing too. They only sing to war, and dragons, and serpents circling the many worlds she still remembers how to name.
Warset has not forgotten the singing. Not yet.
Warset feels like gravity, like an eclipse, like a tiny memory of the formless and mighty things she used to be. And for a moment, one single moment of glory, she feels inescapable when she snaps open her wings from wall to wall and the golden firelight in the hanging lamps turns her into not a girl, or a star, or a cursed thing, but a constellation.
In that single moment she forgets the other lost thing following closely behind. At that moment she is home.
But as all mortal things do, as she has discovered, the child shatters the revelation of home. It dissolves around her in fragments of light when her wings settle back against her still-frail ribs. “The city will make everyone come to the castle eventually.” Warset does not bother to explain the meaning only stars know in the spiraling streets and the shops that do not scream but sing a song long forgotten by the children of god.
They hallway starts to pitch downward before she speaks again and it’s easier to bury the reality of all the dreams she’s come so deep in the belly of Novus. “You may call me Warset and I am from a place very, very far from this one.” But it’s not so far, she thinks, now.
Her eyes leave trails of silverlight on the walls when she looks back at Maeve. “Tell me of your mother. Will she look for you?” And she does not think the question strange at all, stars have no young to look for, or after, or sing too. They only sing to war, and dragons, and serpents circling the many worlds she still remembers how to name.
Warset has not forgotten the singing. Not yet.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
