Lyr does not mean to follow her.
He really doesn’t; the act is involuntary, and feels as powerless as falling does. Some sick puppeteer has transformed him into a marionette; his strings are dancing; and his hooves move, nearly stumbling over themselves, when he turns to go after her.
Ghosts never really die, do they?
That’s the thought that floods his conscience like the tale of Genesis. He feels undone, rewritten; and sick, sick, sick.
She’s dead, Lyr tells himself as the sun turns dusky on the horizon.
She’s dead, Lyr repeats as he pursues the sun-bright palomino at a distance through the crowd of citizens. Terrastella is finishing work, closing shop, going home for the day—and he tells himself, that’s it, that’s it, because he never wants to return to the solitude of the soldier’s barracks.
Perhaps it’s a diversion. A final distraction at day’s end.
He knows better, though. He knows the thing that carries him is almost obsessive. He knows he is as powerless to it as a shell in the sea’s current. He simply has to understand, he has to know. Lyr holds hope in his heart more fragile than porcelain, an impossible hope, because maybe it’s her, it’s her, it’s her.
The walk is so similar. The mindless gestures of one going through life unobserved… everything about the girl, from a distance, screams, Capella, Capella, Capella. Watching her walk is the same as watching sun streak across a field. Watching her walk is the same as seeing it settle, somewhere, with the grace and beauty only the transient can hold—
Lyr follows her to a tall building. He knows she went inside, because it is the only place to go, and from there the only place to go is up. But standing outside, he finds it difficult to make himself move those extra steps; here is a pinnacle, one he must either reach or abandon. To follow further would mean he would have to talk to her, he would have to look her in the face and destroy his own fantasy. Lyr swallows. Lyr drags a hoof against the cobblestones and then, and then, begins to ascend the stairs.
He breaches the rooftop to hear her humming.
The sound strikes a cord in him that will not stop echoing for the rest of his life.
It isn’t her.
It will never be her again.
He clears his throat, announcing his presence.
The beauty of the sunset is lost on him; he only sees the way the light plays across the blonde of her mane, her body, in all the same ways it had his beloved sister’s. He says awkwardly, haltingly,
”You look just like my sister.”
And promptly bursts into tears.
"Speech" || @
i heard them speaking of perennial quiet
i heard them say that sorrow is just happiness at
a different destiny, a different coloured light
a different destiny, a different coloured light
