the courage of stars; either be straia or have wings

[Oksana]

you taught me the courage of the stars before you left

how light carries on endlessly, even after death

The birds are oddly unnerving, though no winged thing has ever felt strange to her before, comfortable as she is with the things that call the endless blue sky home. But they group and they caw and they darken the sky over the Chamber like fleas infesting the trees, and Oksana can feel her own skin crawl - though she vows to say nothing to her heart sister.

She isn’t left waiting long, not with the ravens and their hundreds of flat beady eyes tracing her progress across the Chamber’s sky, and suddenly Straia is beside her with a pair of gleaming black wings unfurled at her shoulders. “So the rumors are true, then?” Oksana says with a laugh that changes her face, turns those dark hollows shallow and the sharp angles soft. “My sister the raven queen.”

Her coppery leather wings unfurl impossibly wider as she lets the wind currents and updrafts of warm air carry her higher, knowing without a doubt that Straia will mirror her. The air feels decidedly cooler up here, damp as they pull apart low clouds with the flapping of their wings. “It’s always good to see you, Straia.” Oksana says, and her words wrap around the moisture clinging to them like fog. “I should visit more.”

There is a touch of heaviness to her voice now, a shadow that darkens that aching emerald of her eyes. Straia was the permanence in her life, the only constant she had not ruined, had not broken. She was the first family Oksana had ever known, the first family that, although it had been chosen for her, she chose back. And each time she left Straia, disappeared for months and years, it was a weight she felt in her heart, a loneliness that reminded her of what it meant to have family.

Her wings flap once and she steadies, her face turned to Straia and those large black wings, “Tell me everything I’ve missed, sister.”

oksana