Her knees touched the earth with immeasurable delicacy, the rain-studded grass bending beneath her cannon bones without protest. She made no protest, either. 

Since she’d sailed over the lake hours ago she’d been flying, the sullen rawness in her muscles tamped down by the profound emptiness of her mind, her throat stoppered with feeling. All she had at that moment was a wealth of silence. Even Snapdragon was quiet. Only the wind spoke – and it was always the wind, wasn’t it? – combing through the fields in whispers; the storm had its back to them, traveling further west, and in the vacuum there was nothing but calm. Before and after, she thought, there had been calm, broad and unfathomable as heaven.

Numb, she thought, was a better word. 

Whether it was traveling the long night through a frigid Orangemoon deluge, or the frightful words that had been said to her, the girl felt bottomless with nothing. Pure void, existing somewhere in the middle of a triangle of rage, serenity, and grief. Echoes, negations; she hadn’t felt quite so blurry and vast since a year ago, living that half-life in the Meadow. Perhaps she should have stopped there, instead, for old times’ sake. The sky, at least, was the same, if a bit closer.

“We’ve lost a friend,” she said eventually, the words hoarse and hardly distinguishable from the wind’s murmuring, eaten at the edges by little moths of fatigue. Before she’d spoken Snapdragon clambered down from her back and curled into a tight circle on her knees, pressing against her narrow chest. Inside, her heart beat unperturbed, as if this were any other pre-dawn beneath the cold autumn stars. Numb, she thought again, her gaze wandering through the paling constellations. That still none of them were familiar didn’t faze her; they reflected in her eyes strangely, with all the value of words written to the blind.

Yes. Blind. Dumb, too, and numb, one last time, for the charm of it; tremors rolled softly from head to toe and yet she couldn’t feel herself shivering. If Snapdragon hadn’t been a part both native and separate from herself, she might not have felt him, either. But he made himself known, plucking gently at their bond until she curled her neck overhead, damp hair tenting around his tiny white body. He butt his head against her jaw, crooning quietly in the dark. 

“What do you think about that?”