[P] without you i am a lie

[Sabine]

sad birds still sing

She was a roseate shadow against the splendour of Delumine's festivities - decorated by those window-wide eyes to drink in the laughter and the floral perfume of happiness. Here, in these wild meadows and everlong forests, the world felt brighter, clearer. The sky overhead seemed to sing; harmonised by marshmallow clouds that drifted leisurely across the great wilderness of blue - a hymn to beckon the flowers closer to the sun - flowers that she had caressed with tiny, soft hands. Colours danced across the canvas of the Deluminian earth: scarlet, ultramarine, emerald - all pieces of a memory she would never forget: the first time she realised she was home. 

Denocte had been a chasm, filled with dark faces and darker secrets, and in the perpetual darkness she had wept. Her anguish had been the colour of nightshade - bruised and wicked - and though her tears fell only when she knew the world was sleeping, the pain of smiling at her father when within she felt she might drown was an anchor a child could only bear for so long. Because Sabi would never have let him down - not Raum, not her Papa, not her wraith, and so she had borne the weight of her sorrow alone; condemned to the night like a match set to burn.

And so, too, she had heard the tales of Solterra. Her mother's stories had hung around her neck like an aureate noose; dragging her down into a coffin tattooed upon her nightmares. For what hope could she glean from the legends of endless heat and cracked, hungry deserts? Her heart had shrank at the sight of Rhoswen's fervor, fearing what might loom out of the volcanic mire in those glittering grey eyes; how could she ever hope to rival her mother's faith in the sun? Little earthy Sabine - child of nothing, daughter of a void born from two tortured souls. Would she dare to challenge Solis for her mother's love? No - not Sabine, not she.

For Sabine was the gentle lilt of an autumn breeze; the first glimpse of pale coral light upon a brilliant blue sky; the rustle of dying leaves as they fall from majesty on high. She was the earth underfoot, silent and perennial.

And so it was, that the sparrow-boned girl watched the festival from afar; gazing at white grins and dancing eyes with a fascination that seemed to spread through her blood like a shot of some weak foreign wine. She felt warmth, only warmth, and then - the parting of her blush-tipped lips to stretch into a smile of her own; a private moment, one that she would cherish for years to come. Finally, there was peace in her little beating heart.

@acton <3