Circinae;

[Circinae]

oh, my love, don't forsake me. take what the water gave me ..

The night always brought them together. The hour of the Wolf, some called it: a dead time of darkness when everything else stilled or was lost to hopeless dreams. Circinae herself would usually succumb to sleep, curled deftly into herself as a canine and tucked away beneath the proud, arched curve of some blood-red root hidden away in their home.

But not tonight.

Tonight she met him somewhere between sadness and longing, where he waited in his cloak of black and white to watch the stars glitter above them all. He is her planet and she is one of his many moons, drawn by an invisible force that keeps her rotating endlessly in orbit around him. She cannot escape him just as much as he couldn’t dispel her, so they continue their spacial dance in these quiet moments while the world seems to spin on without them. “Do you remember my wings?” He asks her when she finally comes to rest underneath the bough of a young sapling, its shadow painting a hard, dark line over her midsection.

Circinae remembers many things, his wings included, but this is not the object of the question. He is using her again, filling her with his guilt and shortcomings and drawing her in without even meaning to and it takes everything within her not to break the stillness of her body and close the distance between them so that she might comfort him. Not this time, though. He’d made himself clear before and the sting of that lash would never strike her heart again, if she could help it. Their eyes meet in the soft blue-black and her wolf mourns for him.

His final words cut her. “Was I the one who broke you?!” She thinks, the sound of her blood pulsing erratically in her ears, “Did I drive that knife into your back?”

She’s angry. Upset that he would push this weight upon her and drown her in his bitterness. Her head turns sharply aside, mouth pressing into a firm, sour line as she finally speaks, “What about the promise you made to all of us here?” to him. “To lead and guide us, shelter and encourage us? Have you forgotten?” She accuses, knowing better than to let her emotions speak for her, but she can’t stop herself. That fine, laurel-tinted head swings slowly side-to-side as she murmurs “If you push us all away, who’ll be left, Ruan?”

Circinae