laugh hard, it’s a long way to the ground; any

[Carinae]

astra inclinant, non necessitant ------ (the stars incline; they do not compel) She is entirely of different worlds, a patchwork of them. Space, where she was born and bred and raised on a diet of black holes and collapsed suns. Where she grew for centuries and not at all, where everything had an exquisite timelessness to it, existing and not existing in such a dark place. And then she fell, into another world – the quest world, with dragons and stags and trolls (and the ghouls, the ones who hunted her, left her with a scar across her back). That world had moved entirely too fast, that world had offered her a taste of blood, of the ruthless heart that had lain dormant inside of her. (It’s dormant once again, but sometimes she dreams of how it felt to burn.) Those worlds make her, and now this: this world of the meadow, of passing strangers like ships in the night. Of catching their eyes, for a moment, as clouds or stars dapple her back, but then they look on (she is remarkable but she is not so remarkable to keep their attentions for too long, not in this rainbow world where they are all colored and magical). This world, terrestrial, where she is grounded and the stars are light-years away, where her brother is gone, where she is, ultimately, alone. These worlds make her, have built her into the woman before them now, star-speckled and smiling but for a longing in her eyes. She envies them for their closeness, for she had once been the same, with Cosmas. No one had understood her as he had, made of the same star-stuff, the same knowledge of what the world might look like when it went screaming into the void. “Maybe,” she says, and for all she knows, that’s it – there’s no rhyme or reason to why she’s here, no more than there was to explain why she’d existed in space the way she had. “And where did you come from?” she asks them, then seems to remember something. “I’m Carinae, by the way.” carinae