say amen, make amends
Here, the air is thin and gray. The wind off the sea is bitterly cold; it whips O’s dark hair into a flurry of knots as she picks her way across the beach. But she slips the tangles behind her pinned ears and keeps walking. Spring in Solterra would never be so sour. When the desert is harsh, it is at least harsh in a way that speaks of possible magic. When the sun beats down, one has some inkling of what it might feel like at its perfect height; sometimes it makes mirages on the white sand, and one remembers with a glittery kind of excitement how wonderful water might taste.
But this. This springtime, nighttime beach is nothing but cold and dark and damp. And O wonders, almost amusedly, what it is about this place that Andi loves so much.
The ocean beats up against the shore ceaselessly. Its dull roar rises and falls in time with the blood O hears ringing in her ears, in time with the slow, careless heartbeat that thump-thump-thumps in the lowest part of her chest. Overhead, the sky is not the eye-bright blue that O is so used to seeing, but a sultry, stormy gray that shifts in value as it rolls from horizon to horizon in thick bands of fog.
The mood of the moment is tired, and downcast. It’s almost enough to make her somber; to make her wonder if this is the same suffocating not-quite-misery that will tail her all the way back home, nipping at her heels for all the hours she will spend alone.
But then there is the clear black silhouette of a girl pressed up against the sea, and O perks up like a wild dog who’s just smelled blood.
