I heard the trailing garments of the Night - Moment/any

[Giver]

Alight is the passage of morning; pastel and muted, and then filled with chorale birds. He watches her – has watched her for their whole lives, like it was something he was meant to do without even being told – as she flows like a swift, smooth current between rocks and driftwood, careless but for the monster she knows too well from the yarns spun by their mother. (Her mother?) And he is the one meant to protect her from the friction of her own path, blockading her swell and undertow and turning her to safer pastures.

He is louder.

He is the roar of a constellation born, bottled and chained to her neck like a pendant. Fashioned from stars, revelry and teases, he was meant to be his mother’s boy until mischief came in the night and plucked him naked from her stellar web – told him his own tales; a boy taken from his cradle undercover of night and restored to his family by daybreak. Now he is her man. Her guardian and watcher. He follows at her shoulder like a hound.

It is love, to be fair, that keeps him there.

Years ago, he would have said that it was because they had been formed in the same darkness and fluid. That they had encircled so much in that formative time, that when they were free they were not free from each other, but bound. And then he came to see how carefree she was. How aimless and reckless. She took her mother’s cautionary tales as just that. Fables – in dusk, just before they curled up at night to watch the stars he made around his body, she would ask to play the monster and the princess among the pines –

…but Giver could taste something much different and much darker on Malis, like her words were made vivid in her mind. Too vivid and he wondered...

Nor does he believe that they are two of the same one, not anymore – this too he thought he could feel to, from time to time, in quiet and unsure moments. As a boy, Giver found himself, one too many times, considering the idea that his own fact could be a fiction. One whose tails and tops he dreams about to this day, but he finds himself unwilling to toil over it when he wakes. He has her to watch over, after all, while that monster hunts.
***

He leaves her behind, reluctantly, because she insists on it.

Like her, he feels there is safety in the Chamber (foolhardy, that may be). So he passes on his own (so unfamiliar to him) from the pinewoods and beyond, by night, where he feels a common kind with the stars that gather in their formations and twinkle their long-dead light down. Past steeples of mountains in the far distance, and the faint scent of saltwater, to the open air of the Meadow.

Here the sky is expansive. A fishbowl arching above and crowded with pinpoints of light. Far below, the man is alone, and alone is as foreign to him as the sun is to their comfort in the dark.