[AW] [festival] to someone looking up

[Virun]

CHERRY TELLS ME SOME THINGS I DON'T WANNA KNOW
and I can't see the light at the end for us anymore

--

Virun doesn’t know how to breathe here.

She feels like she should be accustomed to stumbling through the darkness by now, but she has forgotten how it felt to be without Celes – and now she is alone again, forced to make her own way. If it can be said she makes her own way at all; she struggles through the mass of bodies and booths by touch, scrambling towards the edge of the crowd and whispering frantic apologies each time she feels her violet feathers brush the skin of another. The scents and sounds leave her dizzy and nauseated, and she wishes very desperately that she hadn’t come. There has never been a place for Virun at parties, even when accompanied by her friends. (Thinking about them sets the fresh wound of abandonment bleeding anew; she hangs her head.) She isn’t sure when she forgot that the world didn’t belong to someone someone so pitiful and exhausting, someone who… like her, but now…now she doesn’t have a choice but to remember.

She finds her way free of the main grounds of the festivities by some miracle, wings extended awkwardly to help guide her way. (She doesn’t want to be helpless, least of all in this new, lonely world.) Cool night air floods into her lungs, and she drinks it up desperately, relishing the sensation of autumn wind rustling through her feathers and fur. Here, she feels thick grass bob and brush against her legs; small insects, perhaps fireflies, light momentarily on her coat before they take their leave again. The sounds of the festival fade to a dull hum in the distance, and she puts them out of mind. She tries to remember what nighttime looks like. She tries to imagine a dark sky alight with little flickers of glowing silver, but she can’t remember what they sky looks like, or what color silver is. She has to swallow before she chokes. As Virun settles in the grass, her wings come to fold neatly at her sides; she thinks that the feathers feel like a warm embrace, and, for a quiet moment, misses Eydis and Lief desperately.

She’s tried not to think about how alone she is in this strange new place, this Novus - when the thoughts come creeping up, she stuffs them back down, but it’s gotten so hard to breathe. (She sucks in more clean night air; it doesn’t free her of the perpetual blackness, but it feels like something.) It will get better, she tells herself, because it always does, but-

She tells herself to enjoy the small things, the wind and the fireflies, the low hum of distant festivities, the feeling of the world spinning beneath her hooves – time heals everything, but not her eyes so time will fix this too. It’s just a matter of waiting.

She lingers in the darkness, blindfolded eyes pointed towards the stars.

@

open - I just felt the need to space out all of these Seraphina posts with a Virun post. also, music