walking in circles seems to have meaning somehow; shahrizai

[Carinae]

astra inclinant, non necessitant ------ (the stars incline; they do not compel) “It was,” she says, voice etched with nostalgia. “I was there with my sister – she looks just like me – and mother, she was a star once, I think. Father was there and he was…a nebula, sometimes. He changed a lot. He’s the one who kept us there, I think.” Her understanding of magic is vague at best – her whole life has been magic, it’s hard to remember that she is no longer in a world of it. “I don’t know how I ended up here,” she adds, and she truly doesn’t. That time is lost to her – she was in the stars, and then she was in the woods, the earth strange beneath her feet, marching to obey the orders of a strange owl on a quest she had no stake in. (She’d learned things about herself there, that part of her wants to hurt, that she wants to survive desperately.) “How did you lose your tail?” she asks, curious. She wants to ask if it hurts, to miss part of yourself, wonders if it’s anything like her ache for the stars. They had been a part of her, she’d been made and  born and raised in and among them, and now she is exiled, meant only to look up at them. carinae