02-24-2025, 05:26 PM
Like her twin, she is ill-fit for the world around her. She knows stone better than she does open air, knows darkness so much better than sunlight. She does not know others at all, locked away as she was – the proverbial princess in a tower, except she had no windows, no world to look out to and dream about.
(And now that she is out in the world, she thinks too often of the darkness. She does not long for it, exactly, but there was a sick comfort to it. This world is all so vast and strange.)
Something happened to you, Islas says, and Cavern fixes her eyes on her twin, her beautiful twin, and she wishes so dearly that they could have grown up together.
“He kept me,” she says. She does not specify that she speaks of their father, does not think to – He is forefront of her memory, the only interaction she knew for years.
“I don’t know where,” she says, and continues, “it was a long time. It was often very dark. He visited, sometimes.”
She had loved and loathed those visits. Sometimes he told stories, for she was the most captive of audiences. Sometimes he didn’t speak at all, instead drew blood or worse, and the darkness flashed white with the pain of it.
“Are you safe? From him?” she asks, then. She does not think Islas was kept in the same place she was, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t kept elsewhere, or hurt in some other ways. She knows his imagination is endless.
c a v e r n
glory be to the girl who goes back for her body