isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She wishes she were better at this—at talking, at knowing someone, at simply being. Even after all these years of watching them from the edge of the world, she never quite mastered how to mirror them. She could smile yet it felt hollow; she could laugh, but the sound was always discordant and strange. There had been a time when she envied them, thinking that it would be easier to exist in this place if she could, but that longing had died with everything else.
It’s only now, looking at her sister, that she wishes again that she could be different, better. That she could find the words to lift the weight from her shoulders, or at least let her face speak where her words fail.
But Cavern knew her; even if the years had stretched between them nothing could change the way their lives had started as intertwined, or that her twin was still the strongest thing that anchored her to the earth. She did not have to stumble her way through pretending, and simply knowing that is enough to loosen the knot in her chest. “It has been,” she agrees when she mentions the time that has passed since they last saw each other. She tries to remember what has transpired in her own life — she remembers Pangea and Loess, and all the ways that Beqanna had broken and remade herself, but that gaping hole in her memory, that unmistakable feeling that something is missing, has her diverting her thoughts elsewhere.
“Something happened to you,” she tells her, her tone not cold or blunt, but still plainly spoken, where someone else might have found a softer way to address the subject. She has stepped closer now, reaching out to gently touch her nose to her sister’s shoulder. “You can tell me, if you want.”
