She prefers the night because it reminds her of home.
The stars creep out and sometimes they are so bright and close she’ll stretch her neck up as if they were something she could touch, something cradled in the palm of the hand like a bird. She likes the stars on her back, and though she is naught but a mirror she imagines she can feel them there, set like memories on her skin.
She aches for it, for them, for the timeless dark she swears she once knew.
She prefers the night because they once kept her alive, the stars.
He murmurs something - beautiful - and she smiles. It is not surprising, she’s heard such things before. It is not her face that elicits such responses, she knows, it is that she walks like a piece of the sky fallen.
(In a way, she supposes she is, though she fell much further than the sky.)
He is near, perhaps too near, but she feels the night in her bones so she does not step away. She lets him preside there, close enough that she can feel the heat and smell the scent of him, the fecund earthiness.
“I’m Carinae.”
She offers her name, and watches him again. Speech is still slow to come to her tongue, at times.
“Did I interrupt you?”
astra inclinant, non necessitant
(the stars incline, they do not compel)