In this world she is reminded, with each word he speaks, that the stars appear as nothing more than dancing specks of light in the dark night. Here they are constellations instead of battlefields, and stories finished instead of stories still racing to some nameless end the cosmos have yet to discover. Here the world is full of shed things, so diluted that they are no more a star than she is a dragon, and none of them can understand all the things to which they pray.
Warset knows she should be gentle instead of cruel, understanding instead of hateful. She knows so many other things that to wear gentleness now seems like a lie of magnitudes that no star will ever lie by.
And so she turns her gaze to him and swallows down her stories of all the things that stars really are. She wants to snap her wings wide as a warcry and ask with violence instead of curiosity, do I look like light and nothing else to you? The night is not so very far off that she cannot feel, below the stab of his ignorance, the hunger of the leopard as she wakes and starts to walk.
But the child in the distance is still crying and his gaze is still heavy as a thing looking into her very soul (and she wonders how a gaze like this can see nothing at all, nothing). The world, this pale echo of a world where stars are only light in the darkness, is pressing in too hard now. And she is trembling with the weight of it when her memories take her back to war-fields, and singing dragon wings, and harpsichords spun out of the moonlight of a million universes that sung so sweetly each time she breathed upon their strings.
Somewhere, in the darkness when she blinks away the image of him, she can see her sisters gathered around her as they all wept for the carnage of a war they had all long forgotten the reason for. She remembers too, the strange sensation of a desperation that drove her to rage, to violence, to anything to dry the tears of light-dust from her sister’s eyes. But when she opens her eyes the memory is gone and there is only Azrael with his god and religion that hopes and prays on the distant light of which they understand nothing.
Warset cannot help the way she snarls at him when he says, wish, like it is prayer instead of funeral dirge. “You talk to light and never wonder at the real source of it. You wish and pray and never pause to wonder what it makes of the stars.” Perhaps in the months before she was bled for the magic in her light, in the wonder that her blood can carry a wish when it is outside of her instead of it, she would not have been so eager to lump him in with the other diluted shed things.
But she is not that star, that Warset, that cast out thing that was never chewed.
She hums. The melody is as tragic and full of heartbreak as the child’s cry that has still not fallen silent. She hums and hums until every star-dust tear on her skin shines brighter than the daytime fires around them. Until she is a galaxy of light she hums, and sings, and carries a eulogy with only sound and not a single mortal note of language.
And when the first star falls at the boundaries of the meadow and sets the crowd to screaming, she only turns to Azrael with his deep gaze that sees hope instead of truth, and light instead of the soul of a star. “Look shed-star, look and see what your wishes make of us.” When she leaves, her anger leaves with her, and only three stars fall into the forests.
But three is still too many and when she is alone, in the hour of twilight, she mourns for them.
@Azrael
