[open] say something that says something, any

[Selaphiel]

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

Valkyrie, she says, and he knows now with certainty that Mazikeen had not told her their names. (Had she known that it would have served only to wound him? To further drive home the point that Firion had saved her when he could not?)

“Valkyrie,” he echoes but there is no inflection. There is no softness. Just the memory of how he and her mother had decided that they were friends enough to call each other Maze and Sela. Just the memory of how sweet it was to have friends once. But also the memory of how much it had hurt. This is why he does not draw any nearer to the daughter, the niece, just stands there and looks back at her while she smiles. (Would he have smiled back in some past life? No, probably not.) 

Her question almost certainly would have elicited a stronger reaction in his youth. He might have even found it within him to laugh. It would have been a breathy, surprised thing, and he would have turned immediately bashful at the sound of it. But it would have been a laugh all the same, because who would have ever thought to ask him that?

He shifts his weight, uncomfortable with the idea that this is a question that has followed her from childhood. Uncomfortable with the idea that he has lived in her memory at all. He swallows and glances down at his leg, cut through with a gaping crevasse, the ice of his hooves. 

“I don’t notice it anymore,” he tells her without meeting her eye again. In truth, he had never noticed. There had always been more pressing issues at hand. The stench of death that followed his sister, the pressing urgency of every other death he could not prevent and then felt all the same. After a beat, he lifts his gaze back to her face. “It doesn’t feel like cold when you’ve never known anything else, I guess.”

He could shrug, but he doesn’t, he just lets this admission linger in the negative space between them. 

—I just bite my tongue a bit harder

@Valkyrie