The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
—
There beneath the bower of flowers and gold that is her mother’s hair, Aster is content. She leans against her mother’s shoulder until together they are as white and gold as a star, and she closes her eyes against the rise of her breathing, the beat of her heart - the oldest rhythms she knows.
She does not worry about the sun that is motionless or the birds that have vanished or the water that rests like glass when it should run and laugh like a child. It will be far stranger when everything starts up again, and Aster will ask why, why, why and trust no one to find the answers but herself.
But for now her only wondering is about the dagger that her golden eyes drink in, with its carving of leaves and vines that curl up the hilt, and the barest edge of it that glints silver in the steady sun.
Worlds, says her mother, but to Aster the answer comes as everything. Anything, anything at all, is open to a dagger that can cut open the world, and the girl wants to peel them all open like the ripe skin of a plum, and find how sweet the flesh tastes. What else, what if, what more - these are the questions her own heart beats to as she watches the knife swing and settle against Florentine’s breast.
Her fuzzy ears flick at the question and that word - dreams. When she sleeps it is like before she was born, only the bright sunlight looks red through the skin of her eyelids and the dappled shadows of leaves slide over her skin. There is the lull of her heart and her breathing, and her brother’s heart and his breathing, when she lays her head across his back. And when she wakes the world is the same as she had left it, as though caught in amber. But in between -
She doesn’t have the language for what she dreams of, the sensation of being a thing slumbering beneath the soil, in darkness so complete it ceases to be frightening, reaching out blind roots as though looking for something to grab ahold of. She doesn’t have words for the patterns of light she sees in her slumber, greens and blues and yellows and reds, bursting through the darkness of space, bright as a universe then gone altogether, the sense of nothingness that comes after not feeling hollow at all but full of potential.
“Yes,” she says simply. And then she looks up at her mother, cocking her head like a wolf-pup, sunlight glinting off the faint dapples like fallen sunlight along her back. “How do you find home?”
And what is this world, if not it?
@Florentine
She does not worry about the sun that is motionless or the birds that have vanished or the water that rests like glass when it should run and laugh like a child. It will be far stranger when everything starts up again, and Aster will ask why, why, why and trust no one to find the answers but herself.
But for now her only wondering is about the dagger that her golden eyes drink in, with its carving of leaves and vines that curl up the hilt, and the barest edge of it that glints silver in the steady sun.
Worlds, says her mother, but to Aster the answer comes as everything. Anything, anything at all, is open to a dagger that can cut open the world, and the girl wants to peel them all open like the ripe skin of a plum, and find how sweet the flesh tastes. What else, what if, what more - these are the questions her own heart beats to as she watches the knife swing and settle against Florentine’s breast.
Her fuzzy ears flick at the question and that word - dreams. When she sleeps it is like before she was born, only the bright sunlight looks red through the skin of her eyelids and the dappled shadows of leaves slide over her skin. There is the lull of her heart and her breathing, and her brother’s heart and his breathing, when she lays her head across his back. And when she wakes the world is the same as she had left it, as though caught in amber. But in between -
She doesn’t have the language for what she dreams of, the sensation of being a thing slumbering beneath the soil, in darkness so complete it ceases to be frightening, reaching out blind roots as though looking for something to grab ahold of. She doesn’t have words for the patterns of light she sees in her slumber, greens and blues and yellows and reds, bursting through the darkness of space, bright as a universe then gone altogether, the sense of nothingness that comes after not feeling hollow at all but full of potential.
“Yes,” she says simply. And then she looks up at her mother, cocking her head like a wolf-pup, sunlight glinting off the faint dapples like fallen sunlight along her back. “How do you find home?”
And what is this world, if not it?
@
