07-28-2015, 05:35 PM
He is here because he likes the power of the falls, the treachery in the waters crashing over rocks. He is here because there is a part of him that craves power, craves what he cannot and will not ever have.
He is here because she is steel and strong and he wonders at it, how it must feel, to be so unbreakable, to walk without fear of breaking.
(Of course, they can break in other ways besides the physical.)
“My mother and father are dead,” he says. It hurts to say. They’ve always been dead, they left them abandoned on the beach, him and Adaline. It still hurts. He wonders if things would have been different if they’d had parents there to watch out for them.
“I have a sister,” his glass twin, the one who understands what it’s like to live in fear of shattering, “Adaline. I don’t know where she went. Or if she’s alive.”
(The thought of her death haunts him nightly. It’s a miracle he is alive, he cannot expect many more.)
“We were together for a long time and then she left. But she might come here, too. If she’s alive.”
There are other things to say, hanging heavy between them, but there is a call. A summons. He does not go. They do not want him. She does, and he watches, the sunlight catching inside of him and all around.
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark