Climbing from the darkness is easier than climbing from the sea. Each time my lashes flutter, light to dark to light, there is more than black water and salted weeds filling my vision. It does not hurt, not in the way that water in the lungs hurts, as I scrap my way back into the world where my sister lives bright, and innocent, and everything good I have forgotten how to be.
I see her, of course I see her. But when I feel her, touch to touch and that strange soul-sea where we are the tide, I think that for the first time my sister, my Apsara, understands me. I feel like a painting lit by the moonlight whispering to her.
I have never looked in her eyes and saw all the things living in my bones, and gaze, and blood, reflected back at me. But I do now. I do now! My tongue is a fat, dry thing in my mouth when I try to tell her the words (the praise, the love), but nothing comes out but a moan. Perhaps though, when Foras settles like a demon come to heel at my hip, and gazes both at and through her, she will see all the words I cannot form there.
Later I will press my shoulder to hers, my hip to hers, and I will give her all the stories I haven’t shared yet.
Later I will go to war not without her but side-by-side with her.
Now though, I raise my head like a lamb instead of a unicorn. I quiver when she whispers into my cheek like a silken pillow shivering out all my secrets for only a kiss from her. Somewhere, where I am still in the black, I wonder what she hears in my skin, my bones, my tide-blood where the sea roars.
Does she know, when she whispers wake up into my skin like I whisper into the trees and painting, that she is the only thing I will ever allow to animate me. And like another demon-wolf brought to heel I tuck my legs beneath me and try to come alive for her. I do not succeed but I try.
“Only for you Aspara.” I bleat like a lion turned lamb. “Only for you.” I can only hear blood and only feel heat when I lay my lips against her knee. That too is a comfort.
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