She does not dream, but if she did perhaps she’d dream of starfire.
So many of her thoughts are consumed by her preoccupation with what it might be like to burn. How terribly she aches for the lick of flame.

Her sleep is plagued by something that is neither dream nor reality. It is something Other, the cosmic traveling. It is something she discovered by accident, this magic, and it thrills her so completely that it makes her tremble even in her sleep.

She does not travel far tonight. She slinks, weightless, across the surface of the moon and back again. She is shapeless, boundless, until the soul fits itself back into her chest and she begins to stir.

A sharp breath and her eyelids flutter, the eyes flashing electric as they open and fall heavy on her brother’s familiar form. There is a beat of silence before he speaks, before she lifts her fine head, before the sensation of being shackled to the earth sets in. She studies him, her gaze sharp, and then pushes herself to her feet.

Even in the morning light, the stars wink and twinkle and a thin tendril of stardust curls out of her mouth when she exhales.

“I want to take you with me next time,” she murmurs, head tilted. She loves their brother dearly, but she does not trust him to listen to her. She reaches out to touch his shoulder, just barely, meets his eye as she draws away again. “Do you trust me?”

Anyone else might have missed the pause -- ever so brief, hardly there at all -- but she does not. She knows him better even than she knows herself, she thinks.

But there is no sharp spark of irritation. She does not gnash her teeth at his hesitation or punish him for the way his breath shudders out of him.

No, instead there is a patient smile. It lacks in warmth, certainly, but it is genuine all the same. She turns to face the sun then, lets the heat sink into her skin as she sinks her shoulder against his, a nebulous wing trapped in the space between them. And she marvels at the differences in them, her soot such a stark contrast to his deep black and Sepulcher’s, too.

“Where would you have me take you?” she asks, studying the sun-drenched horizon as she speaks. Perhaps it’s a test, perhaps there is both a right and wrong answer. But there is no indication in her expression, her smile having faded only to be replaced by something cool and passive.

She is tired still from her journey, though the exhaustion exists only in her mind. There is no reason for the body to be tired if it never left this corner of Pangea.

Only a moment passes, though, before she turns her sharp gaze from the horizon to her brother’s face.

How keen he is to tell her exactly what she wants to hear. And she loves him for this, certainly.

There is power in the way he looks at her. It is this she feasts on. It is this that convinces her she is worthy of worship, because there is something in his feverish eyes that tells her she is. It is a dangerous power, certainly, if only because it leaves her fiendish and feral when the rest of the world does not look at her the same way.

He is so precious to her, her Obelisk, but so terribly bad for her, too.

She turns her attention squarely on him then, exhaling a stilted sigh as she studies the galaxy splashed across his face, down the length of his neck. A charged silence passes between them in the wake of his answer while she studies him, something like scrutiny but softer.

“Tell me the truth,” she says, plain. His answer had shot a sordid thrill through the network of her veins but she suspects he’d only said it because he’d thought it was what she’d wanted to hear.

At the heart of her, she is cruel. She is cold and calculating. She is the result of the tragedy that bore her, bore all three of them. But there is a softness in her reserved only for her brothers and though she delights in all the ways he pleases her, she knows that he does not exist only to serve her.

“Where would you go?” she asks again.

It shifts something in her chest.
The heart beats sideways. Once, twice, thrice.
And then it settles back to center as she studies him.

It sways her even deeper into that terrible softness to watch him shuffle. To hear his answer. His true answer. There is a flash of that softness in her reptilian eye before it is gone. Just as quickly as it had appeared.

She draws in a long breath and shifts her gaze back to the horizon. There had been no glimmer of curiosity in his tone, thus she feels no particular sense of delight to hear it. No, she takes no pleasure in the answer when all it inspires in her is a depthless dark.

The silence stretches elastic between them until, finally, she nods. If that is what he wants, that is what she will give him. She has never attempted to travel that far and the preparation will likely take weeks. But she will take him there.

“Okay,” she murmurs. “I will take you there.”

It is a promise even if she does not explicitly say the words.

There is no need for his thank you and she feels no impulse to respond to it.

Instead, she ponders his question.
And she wonders what she has to lose by telling the truth.

She is young, but she has so rarely been honest in her short life.
She has so rarely trusted anyone with her truth.

But if there is anyone she trusts, she thinks, it is Obelisk.
It is he who she trusts to watch over her mortal body when she leaves it behind.
This is perhaps the deepest trust of all. And she turns her head then, turns her head to touch her mouth to his forehead where the galaxy splashed across his skin begins.

She exhales a breath, hot and licked with stardust, and drags her mouth down from his forehead and across his throat. Down the length of his neck and stops at his chest. Where the galaxy ends (or perhaps this is where it starts, this place where his heart beats).

“Here,” she says and lifts her head. Steadily meets his eye then, perhaps to gauge his reaction. Or perhaps to determine if he understands what she’s said.

When she leaves, she finds this galaxy specifically. And in this way, she curls herself into his skin.

But if he does not understand, she does not offer any explanation.