isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She offers him a faint smile, one that could almost have been apologetic. She doesn’t think she actually feels sorry, though. It’s not her fault that she cannot take him to where he needs to go, and she can only almost empathise at what it feels like to feel like you don’t belong here. She thinks she doesn’t belong, but even in that, she is not entirely sure why. She isn’t sure if she doesn’t belong because she is not like the rest of them, because her smile is empty and her laugh is hollow. She isn’t sure if she is not like the rest of them because her eyes are like a bruised, starless night sky, dark and vacant, and she feels cold clear to the marrow of her bones. She wants their warmth and their happiness and their laughter, but she can’t seem to find it.
The orbs continue to float between them, but her eyes are on him. She is somewhat fascinated at the way he shifts so easily between emotions – disappointment when he realizes she cannot take him anywhere, to a resigned acceptance, and now a look of wonder at the captured starlight she controls. She does not have time to give too much thought into what that must be like, to so wildly feel everything, because his last statement catches her off guard.
“How could I be a star?” She doesn’t know her father is made from galaxies and stardust, that he is everything powerful and otherworldly. She doesn’t know that it’s not that far of a stretch that his magic could somehow – maybe accidentally, maybe on purpose – steal a star and turn it mortal. She doesn’t know, because she never asked, and her mother never told. It was better, Ryatah thought, the less her daughters knew, because they were beautiful and pristine and she didn’t want them to be anything like her. Islas never pressed it, because it never occurred to her to care.
And so she is skeptical, regarding him with a cautious curiosity. “And even if I was...why am I here?”
@[Astrophel]