Ni'Srilan: The Desert: To Irene: --

“ We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. ”

- Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

Irene taught her a lot of things:

Irene taught her elegance: she had always been a flighty, inconstant young mare, more interested in her games and twin sister than anything else; but she can’t run flighty and wild anymore. Instead, she has learned the art of moving slowly, delicately, to bend her limbs just right, to place them just so; how to tread softly, purposefully. Every step is calculated, every step is planned. No longer will she run thoughtlessly through the mountains; she knows better now.

She learned it, because the joints are gritty and the skin brittle; it hurts to move when it didn’t before. Thus, she has to think where and how, when she didn’t before.

Irene taught her silence: she had always loved to sing, and talk, and laugh with her twin. But now her mouth seems to be always dry, her tongue swollen, her throat inflamed with sickness; the voice is harsh in her throat, almost inaudible, full of smoke and ash, whistling through her teeth and lips.

Thus she talks as little as possible and sings and laughs no more, lest she lose the voice she so loves, her father and mother’s heritage, forever.

Irene taught her darkness: she had always delighted in the beauty of the world, in sunlight and the wind, in the colors of flowers and the blue, blue sky. But there are moments when the world slips out of focus, when her sight fails and she sees nothing; the sun hurts her eyes more than ever before, and even the wind sends spikes of pain through the gaping maw of her wounds.

Irene taught her ugliness: fire is beautiful in its light, smoldering and constant, but deadly. It’s the shallow, muddied pools that offer her comfort now, not the bright light of the fire, not the impossible glow of the sun. She had always been beautiful, the way wild ponies are beautiful, the way only horses can be beautiful.

But she isn’t anymore.

Irene taught her pain: it hurts to breathe, to move, to talk. But she’s also learned that pain isn’t permanent, that others can suffer to and be worse for it. Because even as she learned about pain, she discovered empathy and love, things she hadn’t known before, at least, not as she does now: she knows what it feels like to burn, to suffer, to wake and sleep with your body tender as if skinned raw and your mind full of your twin sister’s hollowed eyes, limp as if dead.

It’s the latter that haunts her nightmares: Alkonost lying as if dead.

Not the fire.

“Chiya?”

When she comes to Irene, even in the desert’s edge, it’s with a small smile. She knows who has hurt her; she knows not the name, but she remembers the face, the words, before she burned.

The word she uses, half-remembered, means loved child.

“Are you alright?”

She isn’t beautiful. Hair clings in half-molten locks upon both sides of her neck, catching in the dark, sick fluid that sometimes flows from where her skin has split open, unprotected by fur, blending with blood and whatever else slicks her now. The voice feels dry, leathery, dredged up from within her by sheer will; they are slow, slurred, but intelligible.

Her eyes, however, are the color of blindness, though she isn’t blind, and very, very clear.

***
jörmungandr
there is hope, but not for us