"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Does she know, how it happened? Not really. She tries to look back, to delve inward to the years (was it years?) when she knew nothing but the rock around her, the dark gobbling at her knees, but her memories are simply thick and a shadowy, vague hints of things but nothing she can articulate. Her head aches if she thinks of it too long. She knows the world around her hurts. Her eyes are squinted against the sunlight. Her skin is drawn tight against her bones. Her stride is cautious, pained, as if she has not moved in some time. (was it years?) She walks, and walks, and walks. She passes place after place and none of them speak to her. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, doesn’t know if there is anything she can find that might fill the ache she feels inside. She is a homesick girl with no home, this gaunt thing walking, pale as a ghost and looking half as dead. The forest isn’t home, but it’s where she finds herself, finding relief in the shadows cast by the towering trees. Her eyes open wider, taking in the world that seems overwhelming, the noise of birds and other smaller creatures, the footfalls and murmurs of other horses that do not turn her way. She is back, but was she ever gone? She is here, at least, for now. She is here.
isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She is alone, but she does not mind it. It has been years since she has stopped trying to assimilate with the masses, stopped trying to pretend that she wanted to be here. In her isolation she reverts back to the ways of her youth to staring at the sky with a longing that no one from here could ever comprehend, to wrapping herself in starlight as if that could make up for the fact that she is earth-bound. If her heart had ever learned to love, those feelings are long-lost, stripped clean like the memories her father had taken all those years ago. She doesn’t hate him for it; she had never pieced it together, that he is the reason for that void in her mind.
For all she knows, she has always been this way; solitary and quiet.
She is not often out during the day; the sunlight didn’t appeal to her.
She did not believe in fate, but it is a strange occurrence that today she does decide to walk through the forest, the faint glow of her body amplified by the shadows of the trees. She sees her, a haunted version of what Islas had once known her as, but she recognizes her instantly anyway—the closest she has ever been to anyone, and maybe the only one that causes that dull, uninspired heart of hers to flinch.. “Cavern,” she recalls the name that she has not said in ages, has not thought about either, truthfully, because Islas thinks of little else besides the stars.
She knows that she looks different, that something is wrong, even, but she does not know how to articulate that. Words escape her, as they so often do, but she knows that she should try, that she cannot leave her sister standing in the awkwardness of her own silence the way she unabashedly does to others. “Are you hurt?”
She does not think, truly, of how she looks to others. Her odd skin, pale – not the angelic glow of her mother, but something sickly and pallid. Her skin drawn taut against her bones, the membranous wings that she is, truthfully, too scared to use. She doesn’t think of her appearance because she hasn’t really seen herself since leaving – or being set free, she isn’t sure what the word is. Not escape – she had never managed to escape – but a loosening of the rock around her, the sharp stab of light where there had so long been darkness.
Most of these memories are indistinct, jumbled as rockfall.
And then there is a star among the sunlight.
How long has it been, since she thought of her?
You’d think there might have been jealousy – Cavern kept in darkness, Islas, the stars – but jealousy had never been her lot. There isn’t much, really, she feels dulled still, a slow waking after slumber. But she knows her. A part of her, a primal kinship in her blood, cries out to her, wants to wrap her thin body again Isala’s beautiful one.
Instead, she merely lifts her head, and meets her sister’s eyes.
“Islas,” she says. Her voice sounds stronger than she’d thought it might – she’d expected to taste dust on her tongue – but perhaps the strange sweetness of seeing her twin washed that from her mouth.
Islas asks a question and Cavern isn’t sure how to respond. Is she hurt? Her body aches, dully, but it has always ached – often the pain much sharper – and the light hurts her eyes, but lord knows she’s known much worse.
“No,” she says simply, then, “not today, at least.”
She smiles – smiles! – a motion she did not expect her lips to know.
“How…” she begins, and there are too many ways to end that question – how are you, how are you here, how did I get here, how did we survive everything - so she stops, begins again.
“It’s been a long time,” she says instead.
