"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
Does she know, how it happened? Not really. She tries to look back, to delve inward to the years (was it years?) when she knew nothing but the rock around her, the dark gobbling at her knees, but her memories are simply thick and a shadowy, vague hints of things but nothing she can articulate. Her head aches if she thinks of it too long. She knows the world around her hurts. Her eyes are squinted against the sunlight. Her skin is drawn tight against her bones. Her stride is cautious, pained, as if she has not moved in some time. (was it years?) She walks, and walks, and walks. She passes place after place and none of them speak to her. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, doesn’t know if there is anything she can find that might fill the ache she feels inside. She is a homesick girl with no home, this gaunt thing walking, pale as a ghost and looking half as dead. The forest isn’t home, but it’s where she finds herself, finding relief in the shadows cast by the towering trees. Her eyes open wider, taking in the world that seems overwhelming, the noise of birds and other smaller creatures, the footfalls and murmurs of other horses that do not turn her way. She is back, but was she ever gone? She is here, at least, for now. She is here.
isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She is alone, but she does not mind it. It has been years since she has stopped trying to assimilate with the masses, stopped trying to pretend that she wanted to be here. In her isolation she reverts back to the ways of her youth to staring at the sky with a longing that no one from here could ever comprehend, to wrapping herself in starlight as if that could make up for the fact that she is earth-bound. If her heart had ever learned to love, those feelings are long-lost, stripped clean like the memories her father had taken all those years ago. She doesn’t hate him for it; she had never pieced it together, that he is the reason for that void in her mind.
For all she knows, she has always been this way; solitary and quiet.
She is not often out during the day; the sunlight didn’t appeal to her.
She did not believe in fate, but it is a strange occurrence that today she does decide to walk through the forest, the faint glow of her body amplified by the shadows of the trees. She sees her, a haunted version of what Islas had once known her as, but she recognizes her instantly anyway—the closest she has ever been to anyone, and maybe the only one that causes that dull, uninspired heart of hers to flinch.. “Cavern,” she recalls the name that she has not said in ages, has not thought about either, truthfully, because Islas thinks of little else besides the stars.
She knows that she looks different, that something is wrong, even, but she does not know how to articulate that. Words escape her, as they so often do, but she knows that she should try, that she cannot leave her sister standing in the awkwardness of her own silence the way she unabashedly does to others. “Are you hurt?”
She does not think, truly, of how she looks to others. Her odd skin, pale – not the angelic glow of her mother, but something sickly and pallid. Her skin drawn taut against her bones, the membranous wings that she is, truthfully, too scared to use. She doesn’t think of her appearance because she hasn’t really seen herself since leaving – or being set free, she isn’t sure what the word is. Not escape – she had never managed to escape – but a loosening of the rock around her, the sharp stab of light where there had so long been darkness.
Most of these memories are indistinct, jumbled as rockfall.
And then there is a star among the sunlight.
How long has it been, since she thought of her?
You’d think there might have been jealousy – Cavern kept in darkness, Islas, the stars – but jealousy had never been her lot. There isn’t much, really, she feels dulled still, a slow waking after slumber. But she knows her. A part of her, a primal kinship in her blood, cries out to her, wants to wrap her thin body again Isala’s beautiful one.
Instead, she merely lifts her head, and meets her sister’s eyes.
“Islas,” she says. Her voice sounds stronger than she’d thought it might – she’d expected to taste dust on her tongue – but perhaps the strange sweetness of seeing her twin washed that from her mouth.
Islas asks a question and Cavern isn’t sure how to respond. Is she hurt? Her body aches, dully, but it has always ached – often the pain much sharper – and the light hurts her eyes, but lord knows she’s known much worse.
“No,” she says simply, then, “not today, at least.”
She smiles – smiles! – a motion she did not expect her lips to know.
“How…” she begins, and there are too many ways to end that question – how are you, how are you here, how did I get here, how did we survive everything - so she stops, begins again.
“It’s been a long time,” she says instead.
isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone
She wishes she were better at this—at talking, at knowing someone, at simply being. Even after all these years of watching them from the edge of the world, she never quite mastered how to mirror them. She could smile yet it felt hollow; she could laugh, but the sound was always discordant and strange. There had been a time when she envied them, thinking that it would be easier to exist in this place if she could, but that longing had died with everything else.
It’s only now, looking at her sister, that she wishes again that she could be different, better. That she could find the words to lift the weight from her shoulders, or at least let her face speak where her words fail.
But Cavern knew her; even if the years had stretched between them nothing could change the way their lives had started as intertwined, or that her twin was still the strongest thing that anchored her to the earth. She did not have to stumble her way through pretending, and simply knowing that is enough to loosen the knot in her chest. “It has been,” she agrees when she mentions the time that has passed since they last saw each other. She tries to remember what has transpired in her own life — she remembers Pangea and Loess, and all the ways that Beqanna had broken and remade herself, but that gaping hole in her memory, that unmistakable feeling that something is missing, has her diverting her thoughts elsewhere.
“Something happened to you,” she tells her, her tone not cold or blunt, but still plainly spoken, where someone else might have found a softer way to address the subject. She has stepped closer now, reaching out to gently touch her nose to her sister’s shoulder. “You can tell me, if you want.”
Like her twin, she is ill-fit for the world around her. She knows stone better than she does open air, knows darkness so much better than sunlight. She does not know others at all, locked away as she was – the proverbial princess in a tower, except she had no windows, no world to look out to and dream about.
(And now that she is out in the world, she thinks too often of the darkness. She does not long for it, exactly, but there was a sick comfort to it. This world is all so vast and strange.)
Something happened to you, Islas says, and Cavern fixes her eyes on her twin, her beautiful twin, and she wishes so dearly that they could have grown up together.
“He kept me,” she says. She does not specify that she speaks of their father, does not think to – He is forefront of her memory, the only interaction she knew for years.
“I don’t know where,” she says, and continues, “it was a long time. It was often very dark. He visited, sometimes.”
She had loved and loathed those visits. Sometimes he told stories, for she was the most captive of audiences. Sometimes he didn’t speak at all, instead drew blood or worse, and the darkness flashed white with the pain of it.
“Are you safe? From him?” she asks, then. She does not think Islas was kept in the same place she was, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t kept elsewhere, or hurt in some other ways. She knows his imagination is endless.
