swallow my doubt,turn it inside out

[Alight]

This would have been too much for her, had it not been for the pain she had followed, herself, to get here. The falls and scrapes, bloodying her knees and lathering the curves of her body; dust sticking to sweat in the creases of her chest. She had never been so dirty, so travel-worn. Alight is not yet hardened (such the opposite is true – she has been shorn naked, bent low and alone for the first time in her life), but has tasted the first bitter sips of hardship. Hardship. Something both mother and father know so well; Alight, however, knows not even the enormity of her own blissful ignorance – so savagely guarded. 

(It would rend her into a million pieces, of course, to know the full-throated truth. 

...to know all the things that revolve around her like false stars.)

Alight is not a strong creature.

She is a flawed one, perhaps fatally so. Her flesh bearing the intimations of some original sin – a crooked back and bones against bones; something prying and hungry resting in the pit of her gut, though hungry for what, it is unclear.

But somehow, though bleary-eyed and weak against her mother (together they stay standing, if it can be believed; shored up, blue and gold) Alight does not hide her eyes or wander away in search of prettier things. Even if it becomes too much for her chest to hold, there is nothing beyond this. Desolation has laid waste. All around them games of lost and found play like the knell of bells or the wail of end-times, names loosed from lips to chase ghosts through their deserved hinterlands. She is afraid to join them, again, so she nestles in close.

She watches her father, soothed like a babe by her mother’s cooing and fussing. She lets her weight sink, and when needed, bears the load herself.

(Short years ago, this would have been romantic. Something played out in dusk between her and Giver, read as if from a floral script; acted like a theater.) When her mother inquires about her, Alight shakes her head (and her body follows, trembling with stuttered inhales), “no.” But they both know it is not as simple as this one word. It is a desperate, hurtful ‘no’. “I looked.” So, so hard. Down that mountain’s unfriendly sides. Through the brambles the land had laid for her, like traps. She had followed hope like a wisp around deserted copses of newly planted trees. Hope, in abundant supply, because she had to.

Of course she had. (Had he? Once shaken loose from his tumble through space... had he?

Silly question. He must have – they are same-hearted, one-minded, single-fleshed.

Giver must be returned to her.)

That was on the horizon, looming heavy like the glare of an oncoming sun. She would have to scour again, comb everything until she had him back in their welcomed chains, side-by-side.

Her mother’s answers are calming ones. It is a gripping, icy thing to see her father plead with truth. ‘I will always be yours,’ is like a balm, because it is what Alight has always assumed to be so. Enduring and unshakable, these are the foundational things upon which her life is built (but for today, never lending a thought to the insidious nature of love; the unsure way her fortress leans-to). She chooses to say nothing, but smiles at her father her nose snaking towards him to breathing warmth into the gap, impelling the pieces to fall together.

Of course, that puzzle is scattered, so irrecoverable. The Chamber is gone – no soldier-stiff pines to jog his memory. Where is Victra? Ivo? Milia? Roque? Giver. (Were those faces obliterated, too? The ones even more his than she?) Is there enough left? A heavy weight sinks into her belly, "you are all of ours," she murmurs, frowning, as suddenly it seems an impossible task to mend a lifetime.