but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need
all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees

She prefers the night.

From a very young age, she had learned that to be alive for her is to find herself in the darkness, and she makes no attempt to change the course. She keeps to the nights, to the shadows, and she lives in the light of the stars instead of the glow of the sun. This has meant that she has made few friends, has not yet learned the meaning of community, but she feels no great loss because of it. Instead, she finds that she comes alive in her solitude, in the moments where she meets the other creatures of the night—letting their conversations mark her, mold her, carve her into this strange young woman that she is becoming.

In some ways, Aurorae is soft. She is lovely, graceful starlight. She walks through the common lands, leaving no trace of her comings and goings—just smoke that blows through the night. But if one was to look close they would see that the darkness of her parentage has not missed the mark in her. It lives there within her chest, beating alongside her moonglow heart—and she embraces it completely.

It pushes her to find the darkest amongst them.

Find their company and not shy from the blood on their chins, the sins in their eyes.

She molds herself around them and doesn’t worry what it will mean when she is fully formed. She lets it poison her veins and breathes it in deep, lets herself grow warm to the idea of them, accepting of them.

And so she stands tonight, on the precipice of adulthood, with the night reflecting in her eyes.

She pulls the starlight down around her shoulders, letting it shimmer around her, and she tips her lovely head back to stare at the sky that swirls around her in patterns that only she understands.

The darkness will find her eventually, she thinks.

And she will be here to greet it.

but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need
all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees

They always seem to find her—these creature of shadow and night. She has come to expect it, no longer wonders at what draws them. Perhaps it is the starlight that she wears like a beacon—perhaps it is the way that her very heart is a lighthouse for such things. Perhaps it is merely the hunger the roils in her stomach, that gnashes its teeth, that draws her into the shadows, seeking them out in equal measure.

Whatever it is, she does not fight when she feels the thoughts so obtrusively pressed into her mind.

Instead, she drops her shoulders and lifts her head back, her bright teal eyes closing slightly as her black lips spread into a small smile—the curve of it just a whisper. She is no stranger to magic and the starlight around her glows even brighter in response to her curiosity. For a moment, she opens her eyes and stares out into the darkness, into the shadows, but she is not surprised when she sees nothing, just emptiness.

Her own smile grows as the starlight begins to glimmer and change, bathing the area in its glow and then wrapping her in a minor illusion of invisibility. It won’t last forever, but she feels powerful when she does this—when she uses her gift to simply drop from existence as if she never existed at all.

“Hello,” her thoughts curl in response to his own, no words rising to her lips. ”Do you always hide in the shadows, stranger?” Not that she minds, she finds. It is exhilarating to talk to someone who seems to only exist in the boundaries of her own mind, to someone who belongs only to herself.

but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need
all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees

Would she live in the shadows if she could?

She has never given it much though—never wondered if perhaps she was meant to find her home within the darkness like these things that call to her do. Would she be able to find solace in the silence and in the spaces between—the moment before the breath? She herself is such a contradiction of herself. She is two pieces cleaved apart and sewn together, two ideologies that live within the same pulse, the same host.

There is the light of her, the joy and the quiet. The pieces of starlight that dazzle and draw her toward the silvery wash of the moon and the stars. And there is the darkness of her. The contemplative and the sorrow, the things that mourn that which she will never have. Will never touch. will never understand.

She is both of these things and she wonders if he would be able to understand.

Could he when she herself does not?

Such things slide from her though as his voice curls within her mind again. “Do the shadows love you as much as you love them?” she wonders in her mind as the starlight envelops and hides her, as she blinks from existence. It won’t last forever, she knows. Her illusions do not permit living in the nothing.

“I don’t hide,” she explains as the starlight recedes and leaves her in its wake. She is still washed aglow with the silvery light of it, but it fades slowly until it withdraws into the night sky completely, leaving her alone on the hill—just a young woman with the night sky painted on her back. “I play with the things I will never touch and wish for more,” a sigh, wordless and breathless.

“What do you wish for, stranger?”