Her grief, her endless grief, waivers before her like a lamp of moonlight in the dawn. Trees are turned silver as she turns her gaze towards them. Roots, when she images the moonlight has turned to a basilisk stare, turn to stone that presses up hard as a spire against her hooves. Her wings feel lighter, light enough to eat of the clouds, when she feels how hard, how cold even in the spring, the world feels.
It is a wonder, or no wonder at all, that mortals must sleep away the pull of gravity in a sea of silk every night.
But for a star there is no rest in the day. For a leopard there is no rest in the night either when hunger is as driving a force as a whip laid to flank. Her feathers flutter against her sides, catching the spring wind promising a storm, as she tries to lift her hooves from the hard touch of earth bloated with rock. Even the wheat-grass and willow branches do not comfort her as she passes through.
She was not made for this, she thinks, and she casts her mournful and baleful quicksilver gaze to the sun. All the parts of me, deeper than flesh, were not made for this world. And like all trapped things, all cursed things, all torn-out and lost things, the thought is a fleeting as her memories of the taste of star-tears running cool down her glowing throat as she and her sister's had licked tears of sorrow from their cheeks.
Like everything else that is slipping away from her.
All she has left is a song, a song made of a hundred discordant notes of a greater history. No note makes a story on its own and she does knot have enough of them thundering behind her eyes to remember the beginning and end of that tale. All she has are slivers of a middle, faded and bitter, to comfort her when her own tears cool to frost behind her gaze instead of down the throat of another star.
All she has is discord when she hums and a star does not come down to greet her but to die.
But she does not fall to her knees, not even with the sound of someone else joining her to watch the star fall, and there is in that (and that alone) a small victory that is not as bright in her heart as victory had once been.
It is a wonder, or no wonder at all, that mortals must sleep away the pull of gravity in a sea of silk every night.
But for a star there is no rest in the day. For a leopard there is no rest in the night either when hunger is as driving a force as a whip laid to flank. Her feathers flutter against her sides, catching the spring wind promising a storm, as she tries to lift her hooves from the hard touch of earth bloated with rock. Even the wheat-grass and willow branches do not comfort her as she passes through.
She was not made for this, she thinks, and she casts her mournful and baleful quicksilver gaze to the sun. All the parts of me, deeper than flesh, were not made for this world. And like all trapped things, all cursed things, all torn-out and lost things, the thought is a fleeting as her memories of the taste of star-tears running cool down her glowing throat as she and her sister's had licked tears of sorrow from their cheeks.
Like everything else that is slipping away from her.
All she has left is a song, a song made of a hundred discordant notes of a greater history. No note makes a story on its own and she does knot have enough of them thundering behind her eyes to remember the beginning and end of that tale. All she has are slivers of a middle, faded and bitter, to comfort her when her own tears cool to frost behind her gaze instead of down the throat of another star.
All she has is discord when she hums and a star does not come down to greet her but to die.
But she does not fall to her knees, not even with the sound of someone else joining her to watch the star fall, and there is in that (and that alone) a small victory that is not as bright in her heart as victory had once been.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
