Three butterflies come together at the crook of her shoulder.
She isn’t certain if they’re real, but she tilts her head to eye them from her peripherals as they perch lazily, vivid and wild against her golden skin. For a moment she becomes an entomologist, and she traces the lines of their fragile bodies in pragmatic ways. They are swallowtails, she knows, even if she doesn’t remember how. They are yellow and black, with small stained-glass windows of blue and red at the ends of their wings, and Glassheart, still ripe with fever, watches the colours spin and melt into one another. She dissects them in her mind, searching for metaphors while only drawing blanks. Somethings, she decides finally, must not mean anything at all.
And so she forgets the butterflies then, and looks up towards her companion once more.
“I am… a girl,” nature says to her then, blinking eyes made out of emeralds. Glassheart watches as she drops to her knees then, folding in on herself before crawling in to find a place between Glassheart’s own neck and chin, and then at last draping across the flat plane of her cheek. It’s an unusual encounter, and with anyone else it might have felt claustrophobic, but Noori, (with a body as small and nimble as a child’s) is effortless.
“I am also the spring.”
“What are you?”
Dying — that’s what she thinks, and almost as though proof of her opinion, a light cough rattles from her throat in the moment that follows. She swallows it down though it isn’t likely to save her friend, nestled against her own body, from exposure. In the background the river hums as the violent water spills over rocks on its way to the sea, and there are parts of her that hope the sound of her cough has been masked by this noise. Of course she knows that her illness is no clever secret, but she doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t want to think about the things, the people, that she is giving up to die.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever been sure,” she settles on, an answer that’s honest albeit more than a little vague.
She doesn’t say haunted, but she should.
She doesn’t say dangerous, but she doesn’t know that she is.
“Alone,” she says, then, thinking of Cordis and the way she looked at her and it always looked as though she was looking just past her (to Spyndle).
“I’m alone.”
Glassheart
i'll always love you the most
@[Noori]