khier
Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything--
T
here is nothing more right in the world than the moment that Khier turns, expecting emptiness, to see instead a girl with a moon on her shoulder and dreams in her eyes. Do you ever dream something so often, that you think it must be alive—somewhere. Both inside of you and out? she asks him. Khier’s smile is incomplete; a smile half-finished, crooked, a boy’s dreaming smile. The smile he wore at the bows of ships, when the white-capped tips of waves splashed over the railing, salting his face.
Chara’s heartbeat feels too loud between us; it feels as if she stands there, and in my mind she whispers, There is nothing more right then meeting a girl in woods that are alive with memories,
He remembers, of course—he remembers the necklace, the way it called to him—the way that the gravity in that moment seemed larger than that of stars, of planets, of space. The gravity between souls always is.
Khier’s smile is shier, now. Fates can be fickle; they can be coy. He does not want to frighten them. “I live that story,” Khier whispers, conspiratorially. Chara is the dream; and she is alive, but only inside of him. Only inside him.
But he does not know what she wants. He might never.
Her blue eyes pierce him; she is younger, far younger, but there is a weighted aspect of her gaze that makes Khier think that impression might be inaccurate. She is not young. She is old in a way of this forest, of time, of the sea that whispered to him as a boy. She is a witness.
“I simply talk to mine,” Khier says. There is a light of mischief in his expression; flitting there, the sun between leaves. “But when that doesn’t work, I listen to the quiet. I try to feel what she is feeling.”
True does not bark; True only turns to study her, with dark, gleaming eyes.
“I might be able to show you,” Khier says. “But you have to promise not to say anything about it, to anyone, ever again.”
And Chara is beat, beat, beating against his breastbone.
