gleam
i will rearrange the stars
pull them down to where you are
There were stars everywhere. Pinpricks of flickering gem-bright colors you could make out the longer you stared, but looked plain and cold and silver at a glance. They filled the sky as far as she could see it - a sky hemmed in by forest and treetops and irregular, swaying leafy silhouettes. But they were not just in the sky, not just overhead. She saw them in the glossy black of the smooth lake, reflected back imperfectly over the faint ripples where fish breached to snag skittering bugs. A million, trillion stars like sparks of color popping across the surface.
She could not help it, could not stop herself from inching closer again - not so close that she could touch it, never that close - but close enough that she could see her own face glowing back at her. It was pale tawny and beautiful in its impossible smallness, wreathed in bright and light and gem-bright stars with silver skin, and she did not recognize it at all. Papa had looked like this though, the man who did not try to keep her, the man who kept her brother instead. He looked just exactly like this except bigger and more handsome, older and strong. It was why mama kept her so close, kissed her skin and coveted these stars.
She did not see Gleam, she saw Giver.
Her face darkens and her mouth sharpens, and it is a soft kind of broken sound that spills from her chest. She means to shrug back into the night again, back against the hollow in the rock that would have bit at her hips and shoulders if not for the star-skin she wore like a cloak. But a face appears in the dark and she freezes, paraylzed with fear. She memorizes it in an instant, sloppy though, in furtive half-glances as her eyes dart from his dark eyes to his strong jaw, to the hollow of his cheeks and the smile that slides so easily across his lips.
He is beautiful, she knows this innately, even this young. Smooth and dark, hard as though carved from obsidian and just as flawless. Even the smile is kind, coaxing, and those swirling rust eyes return to it warily. He is beautiful, but so was mother. Mother, who had given her these soft pink-gray scars across her belly in a careless embrace, who had quieted her tears forcefully, had almost drowned her twice out of love.
Gleam knows better than to believe in beautiful things.
There is always something darker buried beneath.
But then he speaks, a soft croon and her small face softens uncertainly, those wide eyes swirling up at him like trapped, ancient galaxies. There, there, little one. She tilts her face at him imploringly, a faint tremble of worry still rippling across her strange, starry skin. Lose your mum, did you? Her eyes widen as she is faced suddenly with a desire to lie to him, a need, maybe. “No.” She blurts the word before she is even done thinking, her voice a soft chime of sound in the starlit dark. Her eyes drop from his face at once, her pale brow furrowed and conflicted - she did not like how this lie felt sitting inside her. So she peers back up at him again, eyes mostly hidden behind a corn-silk forelock, voice soft and tremulous, “Yes.” A small breath, it stutters in her chest. “But I don’t want to find her.”
Her eyes find him in the dark, bright and tumultuous, wounded with a dread that had been taught into her. I can keep you safe. She huffs an uncertain breath in the quiet between them, struggles against a breathlessness that builds in her chest at the closeness of the water, the strangeness of the stallion. “You won’t hurt me?” She asks, hardly, barely a whisper, and her belly tightens reflexively around the melted burn scars across it. “I can trust you?” She seems to look past him for a moment, eyes soft and unfocused as the furrow in her tawny brow deepens. Wordless, she stares a moment longer, a frown appearing on her lips just a second before a small shudder of displeasure rolls between her small shoulders. Then, focusing back on the man again, she says, “Mama called me Gleam.”
