Youth was beginning to bleed away from her the way that the darkness carved away the moon. It was a gradual process but one that she felt all the same—the knife’s edge of maturity beginning to peel away the childish layers to reveal the truth of her underneath. It chipped away the soft roundness of childhood. It lengthened her limbs and sharpened her cheekbones. It brought a somberness to her full mouth, a wonder that she kept alight in her slender chest—a deepening love for the muted hours of the night.
Her night, she had come to think of it.
A possessive thought softened only by her love of sharing it from afar.
It is a soft thought indeed tonight though, with the moon hanging high above her. The darkness has faded from her body entirely, the skin underneath once again glowing a pale, persistent silver. With it, she feels the pieces of herself beginning to fall back in place as though born anew. The change got worse, she thought, over time. With each new moon, she felt the rut of change becoming deeper and deeper. The waning moon brought with it a sadness, a loss that she felt more acutely—a more pointed sorrow.
But the counterpoint was a deep, abounding joy as the full moon hung above her.
She tips her horned head back, wings flaring slightly over her back, and then angles it toward the creature that approaches her. The words leave her. He is the night sky. The darkness that swallows the moon. The darkness that buoys it. He has no beginning. No end. And something within her chest rings in response.
The moonlight around her intensifies, washing down and spilling over itself. “I do not look at the stars,” she finally answers, unsure how to handle the sharpness in his voice and the accusation in his eyes. He is not as gentle of a night as she has known and she wonders how many layers of it have existed just outside of her. “I look at the moon,” she follows it up and wonders how she could possibly explain what it is like to look up and see yourself reflected back down. To know you’re separated from that which makes you whole. Would he know? Could he understand what it means to be a heart carved from the chest?
She flinches from the disgust on his face and draws her wings closer, feeling exposed.
“I like this view,” she says quietly, drawing her gaze from his face and focusing upward instead.
@[illum]