I make mountains out of stones and with that timber, burn a hundred fires
Tessa tries to not tell him about her wanderings.
She waits until he is asleep to flare her wings and take to the sky. To test the limits of the muscles that begin to grow lean and strong beneath her dark coat. She waits until he is deep in the ocean of his own dreams to find the skies and the water, skimming over the surface of the ocean and sending the waves arcing over her back and then fluttering next to her in the shapes of all of her wildest fantasies.
Perhaps he notices that she sleeps longer each day.
Perhaps he notices that she sleeps until the sun is nearly hung in the middle of the sky.
But Tessa never bothers to ask. Instead she just smiles and walks with him quietly, content to keep this pace, her wings sore from her exertion last night and tucked over the dark expanse of her back.
She watches him out of the corner of her pink eyes, the only thing she truly inherited from her mother, but she says nothing. She doesn’t go overly slow or pity him for his fragility but just feels the way that her heart expands in her chest with the love she has for him, that fierce protectiveness that flares within her.
At his question, her heart aches to tell him of everything that she has seen so far. To tell him about the way the ocean looks at night—like a poem with its endless blue—and the sea creatures that rise to greet her or the way it feels to soar over a mountain when the dawn has just begun to brush the sky golden.
But she bites her tongue and just frowns a little, rolls her shoulders.
“I imagine it is magnificent,” she says in her silver bell voice. “We’ll see it all together one day.”
TESSA