Despite his companion being mute, Cera is far from it, and yet it has nothing to do with their silent encounter. Words were meaningless, overused, and full of hollow feeling and crafted emotion. Words were only to be trusted at random, and they caused more heartache than often intended. Misplaced words and angrily spat insults that tore hearts and broke relationships, caused rifts that turned brothers into strangers. They spoke with their bodies, with their eyes, and they never needed words to make the other understand what they wanted to convey. Though communication would have been easier had Rasta been able to speak, it was not a necessity. Somehow, despite not having known each other all their lives like most who communicated in silent gestures, the two were close enough in mind and spirit to bypass time and simply know one another. Inside and out. So, as her tiara tilts and she bumps his wing, he lifts the feathered appendage, the angel gift he was born with, and allows her shelter. He doesn't feel like an angel. He feels downtrodden, a sparrow with flight feathers cruelly clipped by the one to urge it from the nest.

As he speaks her tiara becomes a violent weapon, a tool of communication as it shakes and thrusts against his bodice in outraged denial of his deprecation. She sees in him light, beauty, where he can only see dust and ash. Destroyed by the harshness of life. But haven't they both been? And maybe that's what granted them their closeness, their understanding of one another. It's hard, to believe her. She is wordless, but in her eyes, finally granted the ability of sight, he sees a world of infinite soliloquies. Poems and sonnets, eloquent crafts of words that will not pass her lips. There is a universe of words inside her eyes, all speaking to him, describing to him in ways that do not exist in their language precisely what she is feeling, thinking. It touches him more than anything she could have spoken, chokes him with the intensity of her denial, of her faith in him. How can she have such faith, when he is but a battered shell, denounced by his father and lost on the path of life? What light guides her? Where inside of him lies the hidden strength that she believes is capable of pulling forth a better man than he is convinced resides in the skeletal frame of his mortal body? He understands what she intends to say as she casts her eyes to the sun above, but he cannot understand where the light shines from that she claims to see emanating from his soul. The sun does not shine in a wasteland of failed goals and useless dreams.

There are no words to convey all those thoughts, the conflicting emotions tugging at the strings that tie him together, the ligaments of his mind. Instead, he lends her a telescope as he turns to her, showing her the parallel stars and planets inside his eyes, a world of deep green and fissures of emerald that play a song on sad soprano strings. A song she can translate so well, played in a key her ears will know and eyes will recognize. Lets her see the conflict inside, the war that rages, the desire to believe her and the inability to see what hides inside that has any type of worth or value. And even as his head falls she is lifting it higher, liftinghim higher; the air beneath his wings, the sturdy earth beneath his hooves, the encouraging word that inspires hope and bravery in a heart too scared to lift wing on its own. Lending him her strength to keep looking towards the sun, when he desires only to fade into the darkness of the shade behind his eyelids.

Breaths puff softly against his chest before he can recover his wits, and he looks down upon her with gratitude swelling tears into his eyes. She is smiling, a rarity, and the fissure in his chest widens with emotions that he's not sure he's ready to feel. But he knows she will be there to aid him through them. "Thank you, Rasta." It's choked but sincere, coming out on a gust of a half-woken sob. But there is a tidal wave inside him, and a tear slips free, Ilaria cooing sadly from his spine. He feels ashamed to be so weak. That's all he ever felt like he was. But there's so much more to say, and he doesn't know where to start, yet the flood comes before he can pick an end to begin at. "Why, Rasta? Why would Father come here at the beckoning of a God, but not at the begging of three children and a mate? Why is he angered by my hurt at such a fact? I have been abandoned too many times, Rasta. My mother, my best friend. He is...was...all I had left." And the past tense is what breaks him, for he fears that Midas wants nothing more with him, and the tears trickle down in an unstoppable river as a frail chest shakes with sobs that are valiantly held back out of sheer will to not appear any weaker than he already is.