but now we're sleeping at the edge, holding something we don't need
all this delusion in our heads is going to bring us to our knees
Aurorae is too young to fully comprehend what it means to be dead.
She knows it is out there—somewhere—but she hasn’t given it much thought. She has been too interested in the world around her, the world that she explores alone, to think about what lives beyond it. She has been too curious about the stars and the skies, her mother’s strange gift to her, to think that perhaps there is more than the night. Even the day feels like a strange, foreign thing. From a young age, she had adopted a nocturnal existence, one that left her mostly alone save for the creatures of the night.
And such things were no good influence for her young mind.
She grew up lonely and yet unafraid. She grew up with a morbid curiosity about that which lives in the shadows, a strange kinship with those who find themselves most alive when the sun had finally died.
So it is strange that she is here now, in this moment of twilight. It is not yet fully night, and yet she finds that she wanders the meadow anyway. She is nearly two now and strangely mature for her age—her body somehow knowing that her mind had long ago escaped the trappings of youth. There are more creatures here than she is used to but she doesn’t resent them as much as she would have expected.
They crowd her, but she is not so arrogant as to think the meadow is hers and hers alone.
Sniffing a delicate nose, her bright eyes turn toward the shadows where she sees him.
That same darkness that has always drawn her in strikes her chest and she angles a delicate head to consider him, the endless darkness of her mane and forelock framing her midnight face. For a moment, she is still and then she begins to make her way toward him, as natural in her curiosity as the stars are in the sky. When she is close enough to see him better, but not close enough to completely unravel the mysteries of him, she pauses—staying for a moment just to watch him, study him.
“Do you always find yourself in the shadows?”
Her voice is throaty and breathy and there is no smile to soften her features.
“I do.”
