She doesn’t think twice before folding the paper away. Maret doesn’t stop to ask if it wants to be anything more than a dead poem, locked away in her bedside drawer. But it shivers all the while, the sound of dry paper sounding so much like wings that she might have set it free then to fly off into the ocean, if the girl hadn’t been there to watch."In Denocte, never," The people, the sea, the dragons - even here, even now with the festival winding down and the sky lightening in the east and all the people falling exhausted, drunken, careless into their beds. Everywhere Maret turned there was life and the living, even the ghosts disappearing into the fog seemed more real to her here than they would have in Delumine. Even the ocean crashing on the black sand shores sounded hungrier, angrier, wilder than the same ocean lapping quietly on the beach back home.
Maret had thought she was loud, when she was in Delumine. But she had not known then how much louder the rest of the world could be.
"But in Delumine it's all anyone ever does. And it’s always quiet." And only for a moment, she wonders if she had been born here, instead, if she might have learned how to be as alive as the paper that flutters sorrowfully against her skin. Or if Avesta might have grown up knowing only longing, never doing, never creating, if she had come from the other end of the world (because to Maret, Delumine and Denocte are as much on opposite ends of the earth as two courts could be.)
But the thought is only fleeting, gone the moment the sea air tousles her hair like an old friend teasing her.
She wants to whisper Avesta’s name against her skin, just to see if it tastes as primitive as it sounds. She wants to know just how sharp the girl’s horn is, and if all unicorns are so good at taking because everyone knows not to say no to a woman with a blade. She wants to ask a thousand questions so that she can write about her later, and not just as the girl who teaches a pen how to dance. She might have, if her heart wasn’t already choking her with every disturbed stutter, leaping higher and higher in her chest until she can feel it in her throat - and the only words that come to her would only describe what it feels like to suffocate. And she has to wait until her blood starts to settle again before she can trust herself to speak instead of gasp for a.
"Everyone says Denocte is the city of dreams," she doesn't know if she wants to look at her horn or her eyes or her pearls or her wolf; all of it looks like moonlight to her, breaking through the fog like there had never been enough room for a cloud to block the cloud. "Do you ever dream of the quiet too, or is it only ever the stars?"
@avesta
