AGHAVNI
She breathes in the black-churning smoke, the snowflakes of ash, and wills the heart thumping traitorously in her chest to quiet. A tickle climbs through her lungs into her throat, until it escapes in a dry, heaving cough.
Aghavni licks at the soot coating her lips and inspects the black-streaked wetness she had coughed onto the ground.
“Smoke is perfume and ash my sustenance,” she whispers, because nonsense calmed her when she was afraid. There is no one around to hear. There is no one around to know her fear, and she is glad.
The sea drags back and forth, back and forth, over the beach. Like a slick black puppet on the strings of the hidden moon.
There is no seawater lapping at Aghavni’s hooves. There is no sand clinging to her skin, no seaspray blowing into her eyes. Tonight (it is not really night, but it is dark enough to be) she is far away from the siren spell of the ocean, safe and distant and forgotten.
She leans against the rough limestone wall of the alley, the secret one she had discovered months ago that spilled its trespassers onto the cliffs that bordered the Terminus. The shuffling bodies below, ink drops on the sand, remind her of ants turned languid by the heat of the sun. She is glad she is not among them.
Her back grinds into the stone, and reluctantly she drags her eyes from the sand (to stop them from searching for the pink of Minya, the gold of August — they had both left earlier, and Aghavni had been the shadow disengaged from its body when she'd split from the crowd to head up towards the alley, instead of down to the beckoning sea) to stare, half in wonder and half in fear — she tries to let the wonder win — at the horizon and the smoke-spitting island.
She studies the not-night sky dubiously, and wonders if the volcano’s fury will reach across the sea to drown them in island-fuls of ash. And if it does, what that would feel like.
“Like the first time,” she remarks aloud, emboldened by her solitude to voice her nonsense to the wind. Like the first time I had ever known of ash, and how it chokes. When Sol (her but not her) had died besides her mother, swallowed by the rebellion’s flames.
Aghavni’s eyes stare, too large and knowing and green, at the sand and the ants and the black sky and sea. She remembers how —
They had never buried her mother. Father had said there had been nothing left to bury.
— before pushing herself off the wall, kicking a pebble down the cliffside and hearing it plop into the water, and slipping back through the alley.
In her room, settled primly behind her desk, Aghavni draws out a white-feather quill and smooths down her parchment. The quill scrawls over the paper, and the glistening ink reads:
Have you seen the flames?
@Random Events "speaks" { an odd last-minute post }
***STAFF EDIT
@aghavni has rolled a ! She has been awarded +120 signos
