I dreamed of you in colors beyond seeing,
braided your name into the earth
It was a small wonder the honeybees had not swarmed to me in force.
Flowers in every shape, color, and size filled the bags on each side of my body. Almost all of them were purchased in bulk from Delumine, but there were a few desert beauties-- like fragrant sage, bundled and dried, and autumn-budding rosemary, with its little pink florets. The real Solterran exports were deeper in the bags, hidden beneath the shadows of lavish lilies. There a discerning eye would find peyote buttons, humble but powerful, and seed pods of poppy, from which (of course) a powerful sedative could be milked. Solterran specialties. The money-makers of tonight, with a little luck and the right clients.
The goods were not my product-- I was just the proverbial mule. But I did manage to squeeze in a few items of my own making among the rest. A wind-up bird, a small mosaic of sea glass, little trinkets and novelties like that. I was most fond of a bronze rose made of discarded clock parts, its petals blooming and unblooming with the twist of a gear. Technically they were all made of scrap and discard. Trash. But sometimes their whimsy caught the fancy of someone with too much money for their own good, and for a bit of coin my little creations found a happy new home.
It was my first time in Denocte. Kirk had been trying to get me to work the night markets there for ages. He was a trader of many things, only some of them illicit, and although he paid well it took humbling to work with him. Tonight he had me paint a golden eye in the center of my forehead. I didn’t ask why-- of course I never asked questions, and that’s why he liked me-- but I suspect it was a secret symbol, for those who knew to look deeper into my wares for the things that could not be openly advertised.
For a long time, I had no interest in leaving Solterra. But things were changing. I was changing, magic surging and growing in me until I was full to bursting with it. All the dreams I walked, all the dreamers I met… All the lives I did not live were knocking at the door.
They were knocking, and I no longer could ignore them.
Apparently the market stalls in Denocte were mostly stationary, for I caught a lot of attention as I ambled down the cobbled street beneath my veritable mountain of flowers. The evening was ramping up to a lively night, I could feel it in the air. Most people donned costumes, for what reason I was not yet sure. Kirk had forgotten to tell me it was a costume party, or maybe he did not know. Regardless, I had to take out a sack of coins and jingle it, so that the festive crowd would know my wares were indeed for sale and not some strange outfit.
I angled my body against the flow of the crowd, searching faces for interest or pity. I sold a handful of flowers to a young mare, then helped her make a crown of them. A sad looking man bought a single lily. Otherwise my pockets were empty. No sharks out yet, no big sales... but the night was still young, and I hopeful. The sky was still colored with the last light of the sun, a brilliant burnt orange, although a single bold star had emerged low on the horizon.
And then I saw her. My dreamer.
(I thought of them all as my dreamers but truth be told I was as much theirs as they were mine)
I never forgot a dream, but hers was one of the special few that haunted me. But did she remember? Through the crowd I pressed closer to her, jangling my coins in a poor imitation of the way other boys would yell “Flowers! Come get your flowers! Roses, tulips, tiger lilies!” I tried to catch her eye across the sea of strangers. And against all hope, all reason, I prayed to a god I did not trust in for her to remember me.
@Warset <3
06-04-2020, 07:55 PM - This post was last modified: 06-04-2020, 07:55 PM by Dune
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
The dying night is running through her blood like the cosmic river and the great snakes. Every time she closes her eyes the sting of the red-sun shining at the horizon echoes in the blackness like bloody lightning. Her sinew aches and atrophies at the sight. Her curse starts to devour her from the inside out by way of tooth, and claw, and ferocious endless hunger. And if it weren't for the music rising up like war-song around her, and the crowd pressing in tightly (as if they might keep all her pieces from blowing apart), Warset would have run into the dark alleys bloated with cedar smoke and prayed for death, or anything less terrible than this mortal coil.
She tries to swallow the pain of un-becoming instead of becoming. And she tries to loose herself into the tomes of poetry writ across the bonfire smoke like scripture and legends of the black space between stars that she does not remember. Somewhere the other stars, the other diluted chewed out pieces of light, gather and pray, pray, pray for the quickening of the night.
Warset prays for the sun and constellations etched between clouds and gulls instead of stars. She prays for light, light enough to blind her and send her home.
The music ascends into something holy and blood rises feverish just below her dark cheeks. She feels flush with the sum of this place and the voices all ring in her ears like battle-drums on corpses. Her lips ache to hum, and bellow, and snarl at the way this place is rendering her apart at the edges.
And she's remembering how to be a star, and a war-singer, and a girl fat with dreams, when the ring of coins cuts through all the sound like a harp-string singing her home. She turns to him, to him, to him--
A memory dances like a butterfly in a storm on the edges of her thoughts. She cannot grasp it, or hold it, or sing it closer.
Three things, three souls, all rise in her once.
A wildcat scrapes teeth against her bones as if it might chew it's way out and fill up a hollow belly with crow bones. A girl starts to smile with hope instead of hopelessness. And a star smiles and snaps her wings like a hawk at the sight of gold fading into caught suns in the smoke.
Warset smiles (just Warset), and there are too many teeth in the look for the liquid sorrow pooling like lost diamonds in her mercury gaze. The ground hardly seems like stone and dirt as she moves across it to him. It turns into moonbeams and sugar-spun clouds just starting to rot as she floats across it with her wings pressing the mortal crowd around her back, back, back to the edges where she will not devour them (later).
And when she drags her lips down his neck, and buries them into the flower crowning his spine as something precious, she does not know why it feels both like breaking and like coming home. “I do not know you.” She whispers with flowers between her teeth and pollen on her nose.
But when she pulls away the silver shining thing living in her eyes says that she does, she does.
She had not smiled like that in her dream. Or, maybe, Dune did not look at her the way he does now.
When she steps closer with all the certainty of a comet falling to earth, he thinks she might remember. When she drags her teeth down his neck, marking him, he’s sure of it. Then she pulls back, pollen on the tip of her nose quite adorable-- he’d laugh if he was not so concerned by what she’s about to say, the words already written in the puzzled furrow of her brow-- “I don’t know you.”
It's okay. It's fine. His heart sinks and retreats to a safe distance, withdrawn into the chest instead of thump-thumping at his throat.
We'll start at the beginning again. It's better this way.
This time, he'll be better.
It doesn’t matter that she does not know him-- although, he’s quite sure that she does, somewhere deep down. The mind was fond of hiding things from itself, the way the river’s surface could be pleasantly oblivious to its own depths. It doesn’t matter, because he said he would find her (well he didn’t say it, but the intent was there) and he did. He found her, against all odds, against all hope. Against, he blushes to admit, all lack of effort.
Truly, he did not think he would ever see her again-- in flesh or in dream. To even try was futile, not that he had the time and resources for such a luxury. Two weeks ago he had never left Solterra, never even wanted to in his wildest dreams. (and oh, they could be wild) Yet here they stand, reality so very solid around them. Alhough pride and disappointment tells him to turn and walk away, he does not. He will not. He’s here. She is, too. He has this moment.
It is more than he’s ever had before.
Dune is half hysteric with a hundred desires. The long journey to get here, the unexpected delight of finding her and then the disappointment that followed. The restless nights, the frayed nerves. There was only so much a man could take. He leans in close enough to feel the heat of her poll reach across the scant distance to his lips. “You could.”
The bay is speaking freely now, breaking long years of silence; for he’s found it no longer suits him, especially not here surrounded by strangers and dreamers. His voice is quiet-- it will always be quiet-- just above a whisper, plain and simple as red clay; a certain understated richness to its depths. “Where are you going?” He turns so they stand shoulder to shoulder, headlong into the sunset. Daisies, violets, tiger lilies brush gently against her ribs. His intent is clear in the questioning inclination of his head: may I come too?
It is not so bad, being mortal. He could show her.
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
The cold of the night feels like the sun in the places where it pools shadow-thick between them. It feels golden and bloated with glittering brightness. It settles the wrath in her bones and holds together her fraying edges like gold-leaf spools of barbed-wire. Her delicate form feels full of comet fire and molten something – a thing even a torn out star does not have a name for.
And she tries to think of a name for it, this itch of her soul against the belly of her skin as it reaches from him like a spectral appendage she has no control over.
It eddies and whorls into the patterns of her forgotten dream. It etches itself into feathers and raven beaks full of teeth. It pricks her neck like thorns until she's bleeding silver, silver, silver in a memory black as the brightness behind her eyes when she blinks predator slow at him.
The heat of his muzzle, that almost touch, is a live-wire sparking her back into the soot and stone like she's only made of copper instead of stardust. Edges on her soul start to fray, and smolder, and whisper against the embers of a wildcat waiting to consume her. She can feel his flowers like kisses against her skin as she leans into both the bouquet and him.
Her edges tremble and hold.
“Yes.” She prays with a whispering echo of his red clay voice. She is star-shine to his bones-of-the-earth, moonlight to the mountain stone.
Pollen tickles at her nose like a a garden. She tucks it to his cheek as if she might give him a weak petal kiss to the bouquet of them he has given her. Warset feels like a thing made to know only the language rend and ruin, as she looks at the outside of him like a thing she does not know how to really reach. But she wants to, oh she wants to, when she settles her wing over his garden so that their hips might touch like stones wrapped in vines.
The sunset is an incandescent thing as they look towards it (and tries to turn her trembling to stone). Her eyes look up to the bruised sky that hasn't yet started to speckle with stars. “I do not know.” She whispers to the darkness creeping towards them like a pack of rabid hounds. White peppers the edges of her quick-silver eyes when she turns to look at him instead of the horizon, as if he might tether her to this coil. “Show me where I should go.” She sighs loud as a heartbeat. It feels like she's breaking apart as she takes that first step away from him, towards wherever it is she should be going.
And she hopes it's someplace with light enough to blind them. Because when her hooves echo on the moonstone pathway show me starts to sounds a little like save me..
NOW YOU'RE ALL SONG. BODY GONE TO MEMORY. AND GUESS WHAT?
IT HURTS
Dreams often had elements of the fantastical. It was sometimes obvious, like floating castles and otherworldly colors, but it was often more delicate than that: words rearranging as soon as they are read, or the sun slowly moving in reverse-- things out of place, sure, but made so subtle by the dream that it isn’t until later, awake, that you realize how strange they were.
When his dreamer reaches out with the tip of her wing and brushes it across his skin, it is exactly as he remembered. It almost hurts-- the burn and burden of memory, ignited by the touch of the tip of her wing. He wants her back-- the dreamer who dragged her wings along the sand of the oasis, then walked with him across planets, then carved a crown for him even as the stars fell around them.
And in that moment Dune aches for the dream like he never has before. He’s never felt so revealed as he does now, without dream magic to hide behind. All the places he wants to show her are hidden behind closed eyes, curtains waiting for magic to roll them back, and all the things he wants to say go sour in his stomach. He longs for the lawlessness of dreams. Even here and now, in the flesh, hips pressed together like rose petals... it isn't enough. He accepts the pollen-dusted kiss of her skin, but this too isn't enough.
“Show me where I should go.” She sighs and steps forward and his skin is suddenly so, so cold where it was once pressed against her warmth. “With me,” he says, like the answer is obvious, like he isn’t about to murmur, befuddled, “oh, well… I don’t know.”
This is not his city. This does not even feel like his life. He’s never been so far from home, or spoken out loud so many words to one person (eight words, he’s counting) and all he has are the flowers on his back, and the illicit goods tucked away beneath them, and the way his heart tolls slowly behind his eyes like a death knell.
He does not have the slightest idea where to lead her, except to dream but that-- that’s terribly forward. So he walks straight: towards the sunset, towards the sea on the other side of the city’s walls. Because why not? They’re the only two things he recognizes in this place.
“Who--” He begins to ask, when a young colt bumps into him in the crowded streets. He stops to offer him a daisy to ease the overzealous apologies. In the dreamer’s company, Dune is in a good mood, full to overflowing, and the least he can do is share such good spirits.
As the colt teeters off, flower hastily braided into her spiky mane, Dune turns back to his dreamer as though there were no interruption. “--are you?”
"I'm Dune." He tucks a flower of his own making behind her ear. It is a sunflower, crafted of metal scraps from the forge, and it smells like copper, like blood.
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
Even if she had know it was the sea waiting for them beyond the wall and the crowd pressing in around them like crows over a battlefield--
Even if she had known the walls would open up like a jaw and welcome her into the free roar of the tide with the constellations winking mysteries down at them--
Even if she had known-- it would still be only the sunset her eyes strain towards. That line of rose-gold, and dusty lilac, and a bruise black edge, would still be the only thing her gaze catches on. She strains towards it like a petal straining for the sunlight or like a star straining for the kiss of the moon. An ache settles in her bones, of hunger, of want, of everything her blood had run for in the dream she cannot grasp by anything more than wisps.
Warset knows she'll have to leave him soon, this stallion who makes her reach for unknowable things. She knows that soon it'll be the blood beneath his skin she'll want instead of the smile turning his lips into art she does not know how to make. The blood-red ruby moon bangs against her pulse like a reminder as the stallion pauses to tuck a flower into a child's mane.
Tap. A warning. Tap. The night is rising. Tap. A wildcat purrs.
She watches him anyway, straining towards the sight of this very mortal action of tucking flowers into hair. A memory flashes across her mind, like heat-lighting, and when she blinks it's to a negative of gold, and horses rising from the dirt like weeds. She presses her eyes closed to keep the image. It turns white, blindingly white, lighting white.
But she still does not open her eyes, not even when they start to ache. She thinks she might never open them again. What is there to see but daylight, and sunlight, and sunset? There are no stars for her.
There will never be any stars.
But when he touches her and tucks a copper and blood scented flower behind her hair Warset opens her eyes to look away from the sunset, and the gone white memory, and the blackness of her eyelids. She looks at him. And she is too lost in his gaze to see the reflection of his gift, the way it twists and turns like a crafted harp she once played. She only sees the mortality of his gaze, the terrible way he shines with a hundred things she does not know how to name or feel.
She only sees how he dies second by second. And it feels like a terrible thing, to smile back at him like another innocent overjoyed at the touch of another. It feels like an omen.
Still, because she cannot deny him, she smiles a look bright as she used to be, just as glorious. It's all moon-glow on a clear night, all wishes that live even after the fall. It's all hope. “I am Warset.” She whispers. Just Warset. Just a girl, not a star lost, not a chewed out and forgotten thing.
Not a lost thing.
She's a thing too timid to close the distance, a thing too almost-feral to brush a kiss of thanks across his cheek. But when she leans away and says, “What is this flower called, Dune?”, it's almost easy to see all the thing she wishes she was instead.
And it is easy to name all the things she knows she'll never become lingering in the way she says his name in the same notes that a star might use to sing of the earth.
NOW YOU'RE ALL SONG. BODY GONE TO MEMORY. AND GUESS WHAT?
IT HURTS
Dune is thinking of the shadow shows that popped up on occasion in the busier intersections of the Solterran streets. They were essentially puppet shows, except you did not watch the puppets themselves but the shadows they cast, projected on large white sheets. These shows were exceedingly popular in the low quarter, for the quality of the show was not contingent on wealth... In fact some of the best shows were put on by dirt-poor children with just a few pieces of cloth and sticks. The brilliance of the shadow shows came from imagination and resourcefulness, and while they seemed at passing glance childish, Dune had personally always found them captivating.
He is thinking of this because if he and Warset were just shadows cast on the wall, he imagines the audience would see his heart pounding with such urgency it would leap from his chest, tied to his body with a thin black shadow, before being sucked back into his body, again and again. A comedic thunk-thunk would accompany the movement of the shadow, the sound effect pounded into the dried flesh of a goat skin drum.
thunk-thunk-- a heart-shaped piece of shadow tries to break free-- thunk-thunk-- the blood in his ears almost overcomes the quiet, rosehip-whisper of her name: “I’m Warset.”
Warset.
thunk-thunk.
She’s perfect.
“What is this flower called, Dune?”
It is strange how she leans away like she doesn’t want to. It is strange to hear her say his name. Strangest of all is her question and how he’s never asked it himself. He had never thought to name his creations. Is that what a god does? Metal flower, he almost says. Instead, “yours” slips out.
It becomes almost unbearable every time he must decide what to say. Each word becomes a gamble, a roll of the dice. He doesn’t even know what exactly it is he wants to walk out of here with, and maybe that’s the most dangerous part of this game. Every small victory (a smile from her, a word, a flutter of the lashes) emboldens him to dare to dream of more.
Dune is not an idiot. He knows there are things he does not understand. He feels them bristling in the air, hiding behind the horizon he and Warset sway towards. When he blinks, in that split second of darkness there is a sense of desperation. Like he is trying to hold up the sand in an hourglass but it overflows and spills through his grasp.
The inevitable looms. Someplace in that squishy magical mind he knows this. But that does not mean he understands. Maybe being mortal means grasping at things you can never hold on to. Maybe it means hope persists, the dream lives on, despite knowing it cannot last forever. It is a beautiful kind of lunacy. Dune burns with it.
He makes a choice, takes a deep breath, and stops counting his words.
“Look, this is going to sound weird, but we’ve met before. In a dream. And you…” You flew with me across stars beyond imagining, and you wove me a crown, and when you cried your tears were silver, are they really silver? “You were kind to me and I want to... do something for you, but I don’t know what. Help you or, I don’t know. Make you laugh. What can I do for you?” He looks at her with wide dark eyes, helplessly on display. He doesn’t know any other way to be but himself.
“I promise I’m not crazy,” he adds belatedly, glancing around with sudden self-consciousness for isn’t that something only a crazy person says? A few passersby, having overheard the statement, are looking at him strangely. But they don’t matter right now. Warset is the only one that matters.
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
If words could be castles, or constellations, or gardens, she thinks that each of his would be the only thing heavy enough and real enough to hold even a ounce of weight. Her own would be the silver holding together the stained glass windows. Or maybe her own would only be worn threads of fabric woven into a bright curtain blowing in the turret window.
Or maybe, oh maybe, her voice would be the light in the lighthouse crown making all the froth in the sea seem like stars racing across the horizon towards a world no mortal eye can fathom.
Her feathers, her form, the look in her eyes, screams both save me and run away at this Dune-of-the-desert who holds in his eyes a million hard truths she is not ancient enough to remember learning the tales of. Still when he calls the blood-and-metal scented flower yours, she smiles the secret smile of a newborn star fat with the hope of a wish, and whispers against his shoulder. “I have never known anything with such a name before. Forever I will treasure it.” And she will because stars are jealous things who keep their constellation patterns no matter the shift of the moon and planets.
Surely, she thinks, this treasure is no less a constellation and a tale than all the bits of her heart left behind in the cage she had been spit out of. Warset wants to pull it from her mane to watch the cogs of it catch the dying light and the flames. She wants to look at it because a metal flower is easier to fathom than this stallion.
Especially when, oh especially when, his words sink into her heart like stones.
She blinks. The gold-leaf, and the blood, and the horse-flowers race like wolves across the black back of her eyelids. Her heart strains to join them, to remember the places she knows are a memory instead of a story. “Oh,” she says like a sigh, like the sound a girl makes when she's kissed for the first time. Oh, and nothing else, because the night is settling lower and lower around them. Her body is purring and her wings feel like prowling things separate from her when she snaps them out and in, out and in, out and in.
Warset wants to fly away or run away. She wants to crash into him and into the places where the bonfires chase back the night like rabid hounds a hare. “I believe you.” And she does, down to her star-heart and her girl-heart she does.
But she does not know which heart it is that trembles like a broken-winged sparrow in her chest when she turns her eyes to him and to the horizon and the wall beckoning her to remember how it feels to be hungry, and feral, and full to the brim with rage. Her blood runs swift through the frail edge of her jaw, her heart trembles again (and again, and again). “Tell me a story, Dune. Tell me all the ways in which I can learn how mortality is more than pain, and hope without reason, and better than the cosmic expanse.”
She presses her cheek to his, her thready and swift pulse to his and demands of him softer than the crowns of the bonfires. “Tell me how I can learn to love this place more than I loved a dream that I cannot truly remember.” And when she looks around him into the blue-black of almost night and a leopard purrs in her soul she knows it's too late.
NOW YOU'RE ALL SONG. BODY GONE TO MEMORY. AND GUESS WHAT?
IT HURTS
Instinct tells him to be skeptical of her statement. To suspect it might be a kindness, a thing you tell a child to make them go away. But there is such a gravity to her words when she says “forever,” like she really knows what that means, and he believes her, and he is happy. A nervous kind of happiness, but happiness nonetheless.
And then she believes him, and he’s not as surprised as he thought he would be because that’s just the way this night is shaping out, all these pieces fitting together that shouldn’t but they do, all dreamlike and strange; all right-wrong, doubtless insanities, sharp-edged joy. And her cheek, pressed to his cheek like a promise and a goodbye.
“Tell me a story, Dune. Tell me all the ways in which I can learn how mortality is more than pain, and hope without reason, and better than the cosmic expanse.”
A story immediately comes to mind, and he almost tells it to her.
He cannot remember when and where he first heard it. (Some small pitiful part of him wants to think it was his mother who told it to him, or his father, or a sister or brother. Someone who loved him.) It is just one of those stories that takes root in your heart and stays with you forever. He’s heard it told many times since the first, each a little different, and there was a certain beauty to the way the story twisted and spread like a forest, but the heart of it always remained the same.
The story goes like this: There is and has always been only one peach tree in Solterra, and nobody knows when and how it first got there and settled in the dry, sandy soil. There was an old stallion who took care of the tree- his back bowed and chestnut face greyed with age- and nobody knew when and how the stallion came to Solterra, except it was quite certain he came with the tree, or else the tree came with him. Nobody knew the stallion’s name, either, for he only spoke in smiles and gestures.
The old stallion watered the tree every morning in the darkness before dawn, and the tree grew tall and broad with a quickness that made many wonder what strange magic was at work. Each summer the tree bore more and bigger peaches, such a bounty that most every Solterran, no matter their station, were able to sample the fruit.
The tree was originally planted on the very outskirts of the court but soon became the heart of its own little village. In the spring, lovers young and old picnicked beneath its blossoms, and when the wind blew the delicate pink flowers fell like the gentlest rain. In the fall and throughout the warm winter the massive tree provided ample shade for the community to gather beneath, and it was said that even during the hottest of days a cool breeze could be found beneath those boughs.
Of course, the peace and beauty was temporary. The people wanted more peach trees, to export for coin. They pestered the stallion: “how do you grow the peaches so well, old man? How do you make the trees take root here?” He would only shake his head sadly, or shrug, and heavy shadows began to grow behind his eyes.
Here the story grows legs. It ends differently depending on the teller, but in the version Dune first heard, a less popular variation of the tale but the one that sat most deeply in his heart as true... and apologies to the story, but we skip ahead a bit here… the story ends with the old man being murdered beneath his tree in the hour before sunrise, his blood soaking into the parched earth. The peach tree lives on to this day, you can go see it in Solterra, but it is a meager shadow of what it once was. No one eats its fruit, which now tastes bitter and rotten. The village that sprouted up around it is impoverished and barren, and the breeze rolls through the streets hot and dry and merciless.
It was not at all the story she asked for, but he doesn’t know any other stories- all the rest of his life is toil and pain, sweat and dirt. And dreams, but there was nothing mortal about dreams. “Uh... I don’t know anything about those things.” I only know that you take whatever good things you can get, and you hold on tight, and you don’t dare be greedy or you’ll lose it all.
“I don’t know if you can learn how to love. It just happens.” His throat feels tight as he looks at her collar, its crescent moon a mocking smile that seems to say “you’re going to lose her, boy,” and his heart is sinking, sinking, sinking. “I hear it’s overrated, anyway,” he says, because that is what he’s heard again and again, scoffed by worn-down men he’s worked alongside. He wouldn’t know firsthand, although he thinks he might love the sound of her voice in all its ranges, dead-serious one moment and whisper-soft the next. Even when it seems to purr and fall away from him like a shooting star.
“You have to go now, don’t you?” His voice is quiet and trembling and so very close to that of a boy’s. She asked one thing of him, one simple thing, and he couldn't give it to her and now she has to go.
“AND DEEP IN OUR SECRET HEARTS WE WORRIED THAT WE WERE AN ACCIDENT,”
Warset struggles to name all the things, all the feelings, twisting around her heart like roots, and vines, and thorns hungry for the pulse. Once, as a star, she might have named them all as easy as she sang the songs of her sister’s light. She can see a constellation made of bonfire reflections in his desert eyes. Her heart knows how to sing of it, how to tell the story of it, and of how it was made to be found in his gaze.
But these lips cannot shape the sounds and there are no words in this mortal language to give name, and color, and shape to all the lyrics she might sing of him. Her lungs stumble over the sounds, the notes, the poetry, and all that comes out is a sigh (light as the wind and just as fat with seed) when he gives nothing more than more emptiness to fill the void of all the things she cannot comprehend of this world.
And if she were softer, less hungry, she might have sobbed at the look in his eyes as his lips arched and curled over the word love.
“I think you might be right.” The words are a mirror echo of that sob she doesn’t know how to make. And if it’s a mirror reflection the glass is stained with hard-water and full of map line cracks of constellations without light. “Love doesn’t exist in this world with all the colors I knew it in once.” The darkness creeps across the horizon, bruise blue thick enough to be black, and she knows that the night is the only color that matters and she’ll never know it again.
Beneath her skin her bones quiver, and shake, like fault lines beneath their hooves. Her wings snap and flicker like logs and embers. Warset strains against the night.
She buries her nose into his flowers, just once more, and her inhale is heavy enough that it’s more language than breathing (and it’s the language of nooses and thorns and dead-stars falling through the dawn). A silver tear beads like a newborn pearl in the corner of her mercury eyes. It does not blink away as a drop of water should when she pulls away.
“I would stay if I could.” The words are soft despite the dull echo of snarl tucked away in the shadows of them. Her wings settle back at her sides with a sigh and the movement almost howls when the air pushes through the metal in her mane. Hunger races through her in a roar and she pulls away, away, away from the boy with the desert and a dream in his gaze.
It’s overrated, anway. Her mind reflects his words back at her like it’s so and gospel instead of words about love. And when she runs from him, and dissolves into her cursed form, the words echo in the tangled mind of a star and a girl like a loop.
The words follow her into the hunt and into the morning.
