Are they all awful?
The fathers of Beqanna.
She has begun to go mad with her loneliness, but she understands that this is a thing that binds the two of them. And she will tuck Sickle’s heart into the empty space beside her heart and she will keep it safe. She will hold this truth fast and hard between her teeth.
There is nothing she can do to help her, she knows. She cannot march into the wilds of Beqanna and find him, neither the father nor the brother, but she can keep the heart safe.
This is a thing worth being sorry for: the separation of young siblings.
(She knows because sometimes she misses the sisters so desperately that she can barely breathe around it, even if she can hardly remember them at all.)
And so she is sorry but she doesn’t know how to say as much. So she just goes on touching the knee gently, peering up at her friend with soft eyes.
Perhaps it will mean something that Asterope will always be in the last place Sickle left her and there is some consolation in knowing this.
They are too young to be so introspective, the girls at the edge of the pond, but the nymph shakes her head and says, “you can’t blame yourself.” It is too heavy a burden to bear for someone so young and she has come to find that things have a tendency to play out exactly as they were meant to, though she does not know how to explain this.
“You don’t know that he’s not happy wherever he is, right?” she asks and means for it to be encouraging, comforting, if only because she likes to imagine that the sisters are happy wherever they are.
And where are they?
She shakes her head again and admits, “I don’t know. Our father took them first and came for me last, but I like to think they’re happy, too.”
Happy like perhaps Sickle’s brother is happy.
The fathers of Beqanna.
She has begun to go mad with her loneliness, but she understands that this is a thing that binds the two of them. And she will tuck Sickle’s heart into the empty space beside her heart and she will keep it safe. She will hold this truth fast and hard between her teeth.
There is nothing she can do to help her, she knows. She cannot march into the wilds of Beqanna and find him, neither the father nor the brother, but she can keep the heart safe.
This is a thing worth being sorry for: the separation of young siblings.
(She knows because sometimes she misses the sisters so desperately that she can barely breathe around it, even if she can hardly remember them at all.)
And so she is sorry but she doesn’t know how to say as much. So she just goes on touching the knee gently, peering up at her friend with soft eyes.
Perhaps it will mean something that Asterope will always be in the last place Sickle left her and there is some consolation in knowing this.
They are too young to be so introspective, the girls at the edge of the pond, but the nymph shakes her head and says, “you can’t blame yourself.” It is too heavy a burden to bear for someone so young and she has come to find that things have a tendency to play out exactly as they were meant to, though she does not know how to explain this.
“You don’t know that he’s not happy wherever he is, right?” she asks and means for it to be encouraging, comforting, if only because she likes to imagine that the sisters are happy wherever they are.
And where are they?
She shakes her head again and admits, “I don’t know. Our father took them first and came for me last, but I like to think they’re happy, too.”
Happy like perhaps Sickle’s brother is happy.
Drops of dew from their hair
