She presses the taste of the stars to the roof of her mouth and finds herself surprised - she did not expect this. Yet, the scattered stars that rest across his shoulders like a magician's cape do rather look like salt rime gathering on rocks at low tide and so she nods and decides it is right. Stars are another kind of salt. Like sweat. Like the sea.
What do I taste like?
"Lahk teahs."
The words form slowly, carefully. She is not fully without language. Bits and pieces come to her, sometimes enough to be understood, though she avoids long sentences. It becomes too difficult to remember the words she can say and the ones she will only mangle. It becomes too difficult to remember what they are discussing, too difficult to keep her thoughts from skipping the tracks. His tracks in the sand have filled with glittering seawater and catch her gaze, leading her away like sugar drops, and she has followed them several paces past him before stopping as if she has hit a wall.
No.
Whose tracks are these?
They're not hers, she doesn't remember that her footprints ever led her anywhere - they have always been followers, too shy of the world to ever go ahead. It is exhausting, sometimes, to always have to lead, a burden she feels most heavily on longer journies when the weight of them drags down her feet and makes their impression long and lazy. No, certainly not hers. She places her own foot into the deep well of one and finds it larger than her own. Seawater bubbles up around the shell of her hoof, the damp sand bows and cracks, falling in around, and Crackjaw is lost in a universe of tiny details. She turns to see how her inattentive tread has broken the trail and finds the night sky watching from behind.
Stars. Salt. Tears.
"Helluh," her head tilts on its knife-thin neck, "Ah knuh yuh?"
Yes. She can taste him still on the roof of her mouth.
"Yuh nest heah?"
Crackjaw
tastes like water spiked with strange
@[Aedan]