The reflections following me, from dead star to dead star, are not shifting images of my own face looking back at me through the stage of my life. These reflections, my reflections because even dead they are still mine, do not speak but scream. The worms rotting in the graveyard of this place are surely trembling with the thunder of their bellowing rage and agony.
And I know I should feel compassion at the sight of them. I should be ashamed when I tilt my horn and scratch it against their eyes and warn them again, and again, and again, that they are still not good enough to kill me. Dead things, rotten-sea brides, girls with horns instead of crows only know how to conquer. Until the world is nothing more than bricks with which we build cities and sink the dead we are made to conquer.
So I carry on like the tide along the cliffs of my kills. I echo their roars until I sound like I am laughing as darkly as the trilling bone mirrors around me. They crash, and crash, and crash, against me and I do not erode because a jagged obsidian cliff does not give to a bit of weed.
But they catch in my sharp edges anyway and I try not to feel like piling up like stones instead of weeds and diamonds of brine.
When I come across the child (because she is a child in a way I was never allowed to be one when my mother took me to war) I have long grown tired of the roaring dead and the itch of my laughter on my lips. Everything becomes boring now, when you’re a dead thing, everything. And I wonder if she’ll be another bit of diamond brine or another brick in the city that I am building.
“Avesta.” I say. And I do not say I am, because I am too dead to lay claim to things as simple and brittle as the name of a once living girl who was named after the dream sea. I am dead and I am…
I am hungry.
My stomach roars like the dead against the forest of my ribcage. I wonder if she can hear it when I lay my horn across the eyes of her reflection. But I do not wonder at that soft hiss of pity in the shadow of my hunger. It is not as loud as the screams, and the hunger, and so I tell myself just as I always do:
I will not listen. I. Will. Not.
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