11-14-2024, 05:15 PM
She does not think, truly, of how she looks to others. Her odd skin, pale – not the angelic glow of her mother, but something sickly and pallid. Her skin drawn taut against her bones, the membranous wings that she is, truthfully, too scared to use. She doesn’t think of her appearance because she hasn’t really seen herself since leaving – or being set free, she isn’t sure what the word is. Not escape – she had never managed to escape – but a loosening of the rock around her, the sharp stab of light where there had so long been darkness.
Most of these memories are indistinct, jumbled as rockfall.
And then there is a star among the sunlight.
How long has it been, since she thought of her?
You’d think there might have been jealousy – Cavern kept in darkness, Islas, the stars – but jealousy had never been her lot. There isn’t much, really, she feels dulled still, a slow waking after slumber. But she knows her. A part of her, a primal kinship in her blood, cries out to her, wants to wrap her thin body again Isala’s beautiful one.
Instead, she merely lifts her head, and meets her sister’s eyes.
“Islas,” she says. Her voice sounds stronger than she’d thought it might – she’d expected to taste dust on her tongue – but perhaps the strange sweetness of seeing her twin washed that from her mouth.
Islas asks a question and Cavern isn’t sure how to respond. Is she hurt? Her body aches, dully, but it has always ached – often the pain much sharper – and the light hurts her eyes, but lord knows she’s known much worse.
“No,” she says simply, then, “not today, at least.”
She smiles – smiles! – a motion she did not expect her lips to know.
“How…” she begins, and there are too many ways to end that question – how are you, how are you here, how did I get here, how did we survive everything - so she stops, begins again.
“It’s been a long time,” she says instead.
c a v e r n
glory be to the girl who goes back for her body
@Islas