[private] you're walking alone - oh, how to get through?

[leuce]

i’ll dream each night of some version of you—

There amongst the wreckage, two things are becoming new again.
Two things materializing as the sun slips slowly (and then more rapidly) beneath the line of that great horizon. 

He comes to life all at once, heaving in a world-swallowing breath, turning quite suddenly from stone to flesh. But she has been alive, skirting through the world absolutely invisible, inconsequential. She could open her mouth to scream and no one would hear her. She does not exist as a real thing until dusk, you see. 

And she had been studying him for some time in the sunlight, wondering at what kind of magic could have crafted him. (She does not suspect that he is an alive thing. No, she merely marvels at how precise the angles of him, how realistically equine.) She is dissolving in reverse when he blinks awake, materializing slowly until she is fully visible there, heart slamming out a startled beat. (She had skittered backward away from him, but she had not run. So she stands there now, staring, reflecting the colors of the sunset.) 

For a moment, silence stretches between them until, finally, she tilts her head and takes one small, uncertain step forward.

“I thought you were…” She pauses there, grasping for the right word, but she comes up short and shakes her head. Perhaps it’s rude to point out that she had not recognized him as an alive thing anyway.

“Were you sleeping?” she asks instead. 

—that i might not have but i did not lose

@Nemeon