"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Joy as just a wee girl in the face of demons. She knows the feeling intimately, succinctly. Joy is not a foreign feeling to her now, a woman grown; but the sensation certainly evades her in the shadows of adulthood. Mostly, Margot feels content. Never happy, never joyful, but certainly and vividly alive.
She is vibrant now. Perhaps not joyful but every inch of her appearance appears elated and angelic. Porcelain, sleek skin glittering with pastel galaxies paired with the slowly spinning moons above her head, Margot is the picture of heaven. Ethereal, she might convince herself that she is a goddess.
Beneath the hot spring sun, Margot bakes. She lays dramatically on her side in the middle of the meadow, a white beacon of glittering light. It is unusually hot for the middle of spring in Beqanna, but the mare is determined to remain on her side and enjoy the heat (and perhaps grab some strangers' concerned attention—despite her clear lack of distress).
Margot releases a melodramatic sigh and closes her eyes, prim and proper even in such an inelegant position. She convinces herself that the sun makes the day less of waste and relaxes.
( MY DAYDREAMS LOVE THE VIOLENT COLOR OF YOUR LIPS
AND THE NIGHTMARES THAT ACCOMPANY IT )
It is only by chance that these two daughters find themselves in the same place on the same afternoon, isn’t it?
The older daughter had stayed as close as she could to Pangea because it was the last place she’d seen their father. (Embarrassing to think now how much she had depended on him, how she had barely trusted herself to breathe outside of his periphery.)
Those days are long over now. She had found some semblance of bravery when the darkness had descended, she had learned what it meant to live on her own when she had searched for both of their parents and not found them. And she had perhaps come to terms with what it meant to be independent.
She’d know her sister anywhere, though.
Just as she’d know their father, their mother. (The other children, too, probably. Simply because they shared blood.)
Her approach is quiet, tempered, and she smiles softly as she lays herself down beside her sister. She exhales as she lays her own porcelain head in the grass and says quietly, “stay out here like this too long and you’ll burn, sister.”
The sisters look uncannily alike. All of the stardusted sisters do.
Margot immediately senses all of the familiar love wafting around Amathea. The love they share between each other and their parents washes through the younger sister’s brain like a pastel ocean. She sighs again, barely blinking an eye open as Amathea rests beside her.
“I don’t know that our skin can burn, sister; but I appreciate the concern.”
There’s perhaps a bit of a sarcastic bite at the end of Margot’s sentence; but she is master at crafting her saccharine voice, and even one as skilled as a sibling might not feel her venom.
Amathea might hear it. That family connection thrumming through the pair, almost tangible.
Margot rolls slightly, blinking up at the blue sky. She remembers how blue and vast the world looked against the bright red and dull browns of Pangea, then blinks the gentle memories away.
“Where have you been, Amathea?” she asks. Not probing, not overly curious—certainly careful and always partially interested.
Amathea loves Margot perhaps most desperately of all of the glass sisters. Because they are closest in age, because the two of them are porcelain, because Margot reminds her the most of their mother. Strong, certainly stronger than Amathea. Because there is an edge to her younger sister that Amathea has never fathomed for herself.
She smiles despite the venom (and she does sense it, because she knows her well enough to know that their mother’s blood runs strongest through her veins). “Just because we haven’t yet, that doesn’t mean we can’t,” she points out and exhales a long, languorous sigh, grinning her own placid grin.
Where has she been?
It should be a simple answer, for it is a rather simple question. But she has been everywhere and nowhere all at once. She had lost sight of their father in the darkness, discovered her ability to teleport through water quite by accident, and had rarely made her way back to Pangea. The only noteworthy place she had traveled to (also by accident) had been Baltia.
“Everywhere,” she says, though it is not as fantastical as it sounds. She sits up, drawing her porcelain legs up under her chest and studies her sister. “Where have you been, Margot?”
