It is kindness and cruelty both, that she was made to mirror the sky above her. It is a memory; especially on clear nights when the stars seem almost touchable, and they scatter across her skin and she remembers with an aching clarity what it was like, among them. But it is a taunting memory, what she will never have again drawn across her body, again and again until days come when she does not want to look at herself, when she cannot stand her own skin.
Memories are like that, though, tinged in bitter sweetness, the sky laid over her a joy and despondency both.
The earth is strange to her still, the fecundity of nature overwhelming, sometimes – she is not used to so much greenery, not when she spent moments (or eons) among blackness and lights so brilliant you had to look away. The smells of it, too – she had now known things had smells, not like this, so imbued with life. The only smell she can recall before this is a cold purity – winter air is the closest she can think, but it’s not right. The earth is overwhelming.
Once, all around her, stars collapsed and died and were reborn.
Now, all around her, animals rut and birth and kill. Same, but not the same.
There had been sounds, behind her, but she paid them little mind. She feels dulled, today, far too anchored.
(The heaviness of the world astounds her still, she grew up weightless, and when she came here she felt impossibly weighty and strange.)
The steps lend themselves to a girl, who strolls closer until the space between them is tenuous at best. She murmurs a hello, and Carinae’s head dips in kind.
“Hello.”
Another pause, as clouds wander across her haunches, and the mare speaks again.
You are brilliant, she says, but Carinae is not so sure. She does not think of it as brilliance, anymore then she thinks of her own shapes and angles as anything particularly noteworthy – it is part of her, the way bones and organs are.
“Thank you,” she manages, because she is a polite girl, if a lost one.
“I’m Carinae.”
A beat, a moment to inhale.
“Where are you from, Vineine?”
She likes their stories, the tales of their lands that are as distant to her as the sky must be to them.
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)