She's lost in the embers rising up into the black sky like tiny birds and tiny seeds. There's this way they fade into the black-- flaring brighter for just a moment before they fade to ashen gray and start to drift lazily down to the earth like wishes. It's a strange pattern, this way of the fires, and it makes her think of death, the sea, and grapes crushed between her teeth.
Maybe it should all make her think of home or of the way her house flares bright golden in the fall twilight. But each time she blinks and tries to tell her heart to be happy, to dance, to wander towards the merchants selling her wine, it only reminds her that even home doesn't feel like home anymore.
It hasn't for years. Not since the rains came.
And so she's wandering with her eyes caught on those dying embers and her heart caught in some iron fist she can never seem to loosen. If there are merchants calling her towards their booths she does not hear them. Another winemaker is ringing a bell somewhere in the distance and she knows what it means, she knows it means she should hurry over to see what dreamer thinks they know the language of the vines in the way she does. Yet tonight she cannot bring herself to feel hopeful that someone else knows the language her soul knows--
A poet starts to sing and her heart knows it's a rhythm of love given the shape and tone of words. Her spine starts to sway because some of those sad, lilting words sound a little like the hush of the sea over sharp shells. And her skin, her specked too-mortal skin, trembles like frost on a winter night has settled down upon it. Somewhere, in a memory so deep she can hardly remember how the light sat in the window, she is dancing between the old stone walls to a song sung by her lost heart.
Somewhere she is hopeful. But--
Tonight she can only look at those embers rising up like red, dying stars. And if she is swaying to the sound of a love-song she knows it no more than she knows the sound of her own name spoken by a merchant waiting for her.
