Following his gaze to the children leaping like locusts around bonfires fading out into the noon sunlight reminds her of all the reasons why a star never wished to feel a wish forced into their belly. Each of their mortal smiles, and their fragile lashes blinking soot from their eyes, reminds her that this is nothing more than a tiny sliver of all the things she was born to watch (and shape, and create). One reflection of their joy, of his quiet joy, settles on the mirror silver of her eyes so deeply and so cruelly that she cannot blink away the scars of them.
This, this chaotic word of scars, this tiny little sliver of a shard, is all she has left to experience. And Warset knows that she will die here as another forgotten scar in the smallest part of the cosmic wonder she once knew.
It all, all of it, makes it her want to cry just as much as it makes her want to lay her teeth at the throat of a stallion and drink until he bows broken at her once-holy knees.
Her wings flutter at her side as butterflies flutter in the first frost when they have forgotten to migrate. Her hooves shift restless as the children are joyful and her teeth freet in her jaw as if there is a bar of metal between them. Somewhere her spirit, holy and blinding, strains for the flavor of his starstuff eyes upon her tongue and his wish to settle in her belly like a stone. Day by day the walls between girl, and star, and leopard are becoming more and more pitted with maggots and flies.
And someday, she knows as she turns her gaze to the owl as it leaves him again, there won’t be a thing in her soul that does not clamour, and crave, and weep as it shatters.
“You are a fool if you think that is what we do as we look upon you.” Each word is a scar carved into her own heart, an ache of her healing wings, a memory of marrow that grows black and rotten instead of strong. Somewhere a child screams as it’s toy falls into the fire and Warset, the terrible wreckage that she is becoming, feels her heart leap at the sound of a very mortal sort of agony. This time when she turns to him it’s to follow the trail of his owl’s shadow as she flies fast and far (but not, Warset thinks, fast and far enough that a leopard could not find her one night).
When she speaks again she does not look away from that small speck of darkness on the horizon. “Do you pray to your stars when you look upon them? Do you wish?”
Not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.
@Azrael
