05-30-2021, 02:36 PM
The beach. His admission sends her reeling for a moment, though it isn’t fear that leads her. She’s never visited the beach, though she knows the stories of it, the whispered purpose. Just as she knows that if the world weren’t so dark she would likely be able to see the glint of sun-bleached bone poking up from sand made almost white by eroded skeletons. Certainly not everyone stayed carried out to see, carried out to the sun waiting along the horizon. Death wasn’t some kind of fairytale in that way.
Mindful of what might be beneath them, around them, of who might be watching them without eyes to see, she steps subtly closer to her companion. “We’re really here?” She wonders quietly, those eyes alight with some kind of soft trust as she searches his face. “It isn’t just some kind of an illusion?” It would have to be a very thorough one, though, because she can feel the sand beneath her hooves, smell the brine and the decay and something so foreign to her she has no name for it. If she had to guess, the scent is death. It is the impermanence of things. It is what lives inside everyone just waiting.
But there is a sorrow in his eyes that draws her focus back to what he’s saying, to the crack in the sky and the way he had felt it. “That sounds like quite a burden.” She whispers, and though she knows she cannot understand what it is inside his chest, she is not afraid to guess that the connection makes him feel responsible in some way. Like he had been chosen or trusted but none of the purpose had been explained to him. “Did it hurt you too?” She asks, and she is so gentle with her words, with the way her eyes search his face. “Do you have a scar I cannot see as well?” It doesn’t feel like prying when she asks. It feels like a hurt inside her own chest, a wound made by worry for a stranger she doesn’t know at all.
Then he is surprising her again, a thing he seems rather deft at, and those molten eyes go wide with pain and sorrow. “I didn’t know.” She says, and she finds she has to look away from him because it feels too vulnerable to let this stranger watch the hurt unravel across her delicate face. “How do you know that she has a heart?” It is not a question filled with doubt or accusation, perhaps she is too trusting but she has no reason not to believe him. He has sad eyes and a sad smile and if anything she is relieved to know why, to know the roots of his vast pain. She reaches out for him again, laying her cheek against his neck and letting a wing curve over him, the feathers a dozen shades of brown and tawny and cream. “Is she dying?” The question comes as a whisper, and she doesn’t pull away from where she leans eyes-closed against his warmth because she does not want to see his face when he answers.
aureline
dear wilderness, be at your best
her armor is thin as the fabric of her dress
@[Ten]