Before she crawled legs over elbows into his ribs, she was first a beaten thing. Unsouled.
Tremors lining fingers on behalf of the dead, silent skin they touched. So unfathomable was she dark; a familiar depth but a new drowning. Fingers reaching for a light they cannot see nor feel, blind trust failing them for once, for the first time. For granted -
a notion they’d hoped to never understand when it came to their indigo, but here they were. Missing the indigo, mourning the midnight in their stead. The flesh severed from the abundance of feathers, rotted to a darkness those fingers vowed to never be accustomed to.
Those fingers that, in seeking to lace with hers, tore a cry, a devastation from their brothers: a throat that sighed a dying howl, two eyes that bled a grieving sea. Her fingers, they cried; ashy where they used to glow, echoes of an ember. Her fingers, these fingers held to warm (for warmth) in vain. There is no fire, they lamented, tracing from midnight neck to midnight shoulder to midnight elbow to midnight wrist and back. Her wings were gone. Her back a plain - her fingers coal - her skin midnight - her wings were gone.
Save for a lone feather. Lodged between fingers that were corpses of a fire; a prayer. A lone blue feather, a beacon of hope, a last resort - for ember fingers, and now for trembling ones.
Elsewhere, in a study. Population: an abundance of archives. Ink on papers, penned and printed, phrases in academic minds. Observations, documentations - subalterns of a tyranny that is the name of curiosity.
Population: an abundance of archives, an abundance of feathers.
Population: an abundance of archives, a disappearance of feathers.
An exhale against fingers as shaky as their resolve was not and an orphaned feather was returned to its sisters into a different life. When her eyes opened, they were wild. Untethered as punishing waves released unto the shore and cliffs alike, untamed as soothing ripples on the ocean surface.
Elsewhere, elsewhen, a population of archives is graced by vengeance shadowing midnight-skinned, ashen-fingered, righteous fury.
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