One luminary clock against the sky - Exist

[exist]

while collecting the stars, I connected the dots.
I don’t know who I am, but now I know who I’m not.

She draws alongside him in the dusk, and for once there is only quiet glowing in her chest. The magic is still there, hers and not hers, impatient and yearning and reaching for Giver, but when she turns those pale green eyes against the softness of his troubled face, everything else fades away. For the first time since the fairy gifted her these magics, she is in control. Perhaps it is because it is the last of the magic, one final gift and then her job will be done. But it feels different, it feels better- and she feels whole.

“Hello, Uncle.” She says at last, quiet, reaching out to touch the soft of her whiskered nose to the curve of his gleaming cheek. He is family, he has always been family – though, he does not belong to them by blood. It is something more and stronger, something that feels even more relevant in this closeness. She has known him forever, as long as she has known any of her wide and scattered family – admittedly most of them also bound together by something more than the blood in their veins. But she thinks she prefers it this way, being surrounded by a family you choose.

“What’s on your mind tonight?” She asks because she can see it in his face, because he is a book she has read a thousand times, whose pages are as memorized as her own or those of her sister, Leliana. She shifts closer,  close enough that the russet feathers of her wings press soft against the curve of his side, and lays her cheek against his shoulder to stare out across the ocean with him.

The water is quiet but for the ripples of uneven rocks below and the water-beasts that coil and twist beneath the surface. Further out, beyond that stretch of bright blue like summer skies, she can make of the silhouettes of dark and stone, of reef and the things that hide within. At the edge, where deep ocean blurs to blend with a mottled gold an orange sky, she finds her peace. Even her wings shift restlessly, yearning for the in-between, for that streak of color where the sun sinks like a dropped coin.

Instead, with a sigh, she lifts her cheek from where it lay against a palely glowing shoulder and shifts to turn her eyes on him, letting them settle uncertainly in those dark hollows she has come to know so well. “Giver,” she pauses then, hesitant for the first time to return a gift- but it doesn’t matter whether or not he wants it back, she knows she can’t keep it like this in her chest, so she continues with a furrowing brow, her eyes sad and heavy when she says, “I have something for you.”

When his magic pours out of her, a euphoric exodus for the final time, she finds that the hole it leaves behind is strange and stretched and she does not like how it feels. She is certain that in time it will heal, because it is nothing that has been taken from her, nothing that was hers to keep. But, still, there is too much empty and too much hollow, and when she breaks her gaze to stare back out across the ocean as she had done before, there is a new dark to her face, a hollowness that had not been there before. And then, without looking back at him, “We can all be whole again.”

Exist