[P] til the day you cast a shadow;

[Sabine]

Sabine,

What god could write a tale as sad as this? How thick was the blackness in their heart to justify the horrors they composed? Were they unable to see their hands were dipped not in paint but blood? Sabine wanted to hate them, she wanted to hate them just as feverishly as she wanted to hate her father; but creatures like she had never been taught how to carry loathing in their girdle liked a loaded gun. Long cold nights she had spent staring into the darkness, lying in wait for an intensity that would never come. The dawn would rise once more like a body from the grave to laugh in the face of a girl unable to hate the wicked and the sin and the man who had once been a home. 

The truth was, there would never be any room for hatred to come knocking at her door, so full with pity was her heart. 

She felt his metal gaze running over her skin like dull torchlight, obscure to a fault, and her fine limbs shifted uncomfortably beneath the weight of it. His body was draped in a deep sable cloth marred by the sand that had been whipped up over his frame, burying itself into his eyes and hair and nose; Sabine knew instantly he was just as out of place here as she was. They choked on the sand that the rattlesnake loved and burned beneath the sun that the cacti lauded. But that did not mean they were dying; never underestimate that which endures beyond all else, and no doubt those two young mortals, that stood like galleries of ancient art, had endured.

His words were not a surprise - "you are not the first to tell me so," her voice is formless against the putridly hot air and she cannot tell if she should smile or not, "Mother always said I was a fool and here I am, proving her perpetually right." Instantly Sabine feels the mines stacked with dynamite imploding within her body, and regret twists like a python around her eyes, blinding her over and over again. Rhoswen. Mother. Rhoswen, or Mother? Her heart tackled the question to the ground, beating it to a pulp so that it could not be asked again. She cannot broach the thought of what that red roman might be doing now, thinking now, feeling now. The world was upside down and nobody was screaming. 

In eager distraction Sabine mulls the boy's statement over once more, and this time it strikes a chord. It had been a clear warning, of course, but from a child that was so obviously not Solterran, what did this mean? That he had emigrated here in recent days, or weeks? She blinks, and swallows, and feels the desert hold its breath in anticipation for the words that come spilling forth: "why, then, are you here?"

(sad birds still sing.)

@tag | "speech" | notes:

rallidae