05-12-2024, 12:01 PM
She isn’t sure how long it has been since she went blind, but it has been long enough that she is no longer afraid.
There is something painfully poetic about it, she supposes, to have so many stars in your eyes you cannot see past them. That’s what others have told her, at least, as if the very idea of stars is enough to make it all okay. Stars are beautiful, after all, and the bright white must be so much better than darkness, they say. And Rare just nods and agrees, and does not tell them that she actually dreams of the dark; of a starless night sky or the dappled shadows of a forest, anything besides this unforgiving and unflinching silver-white light that has taken over her eyes.
But maybe her blindness is why she feels a shift in the atmosphere when hardly anyone around her seems to.
It’s faint, and would have been easy to ignore, if it hadn’t felt like a shock wave rolling over her. Her heart freezes and then leaps, erratic, wondering if this is the beginning of another disaster, another change that Beqanna will have to endure. But the speed at which the world falls back into its normal rhythm — the soft rustle of bird wings, the hum of insects, the distant sound of conversations she will never be a part of — almost allows her to relax.
Her newfound but hard-fought intuition tells her that something is still amiss, and so she follows that feeling.
Though she is far more confident than she used to be, there is still a carefulness to her steps, and she is not sure if she will ever move the way she had before she went blind. Her other senses work overtime to fill in the gaps her sight no longer can, guiding her across the meadow until she finds what she thinks is the source of the disturbance.
The smell of singed hair and fire still lingers, most likely unnoticeable to anyone that did not rely on such a sense, and she can feel the presence of someone so close — his nearly undetectable heartbeat, the softness of his breaths, the subtle shifting of weight. “Was that you?” she asks him, stopped a few feet away. She stares at him with those unnerving, unseeing eyes — once a pretty sky-blue, now star-studded — and though it crosses her mind to be afraid, she is not. “I felt it. Something changed.”
There is something painfully poetic about it, she supposes, to have so many stars in your eyes you cannot see past them. That’s what others have told her, at least, as if the very idea of stars is enough to make it all okay. Stars are beautiful, after all, and the bright white must be so much better than darkness, they say. And Rare just nods and agrees, and does not tell them that she actually dreams of the dark; of a starless night sky or the dappled shadows of a forest, anything besides this unforgiving and unflinching silver-white light that has taken over her eyes.
But maybe her blindness is why she feels a shift in the atmosphere when hardly anyone around her seems to.
It’s faint, and would have been easy to ignore, if it hadn’t felt like a shock wave rolling over her. Her heart freezes and then leaps, erratic, wondering if this is the beginning of another disaster, another change that Beqanna will have to endure. But the speed at which the world falls back into its normal rhythm — the soft rustle of bird wings, the hum of insects, the distant sound of conversations she will never be a part of — almost allows her to relax.
Her newfound but hard-fought intuition tells her that something is still amiss, and so she follows that feeling.
Though she is far more confident than she used to be, there is still a carefulness to her steps, and she is not sure if she will ever move the way she had before she went blind. Her other senses work overtime to fill in the gaps her sight no longer can, guiding her across the meadow until she finds what she thinks is the source of the disturbance.
The smell of singed hair and fire still lingers, most likely unnoticeable to anyone that did not rely on such a sense, and she can feel the presence of someone so close — his nearly undetectable heartbeat, the softness of his breaths, the subtle shifting of weight. “Was that you?” she asks him, stopped a few feet away. She stares at him with those unnerving, unseeing eyes — once a pretty sky-blue, now star-studded — and though it crosses her mind to be afraid, she is not. “I felt it. Something changed.”
Rare
@Nikolas