walking in circles seems to have meaning somehow; shahrizai

[Carinae]

astra inclinant, non necessitant ------ (the stars incline; they do not compel) How can you be from the stars? he asks. “I don’t know,” she responds, quite honestly. She doesn’t know why she was borne in the galaxies rather than in a quiet meadow, she doesn’t know why she spent her childhood in a queer void she aches for and fears. They are simply facts – she was born of the stars, she is the color of the skies, the grass is green. It is her reality, this strangeness in which she was begotten, and she forgets that it is not everyone’s reality. To them, she is a mystery. Or simply a liar. (She has not met that type yet, luckily Beqanna is wrought with magicians and mythos, her paltry origin story matters little.) “We lived there,” she says, not quite answering, “mother and father and sister.” (She doesn’t know their names. She doesn’t know that father came here, painted like the nebula where she was born, and spawned legions of children, marked with celestial colors.) “Only I came back,” she continues, and here her voice is traced in longing. She misses sister most, the shared closeness of twins, standing there reflecting each other, their own private hall of mirrors. “I’m alone now,” and oh, it hurts to say it, even in space where she sometimes felt so small her insides hurt, she never quite felt alone. carinae