this is not your end

Safrin watches him with the kind of expression that makes stars turn in their constellations. For all her splendour, for all the light in her skin and the galaxies braided into her hair, she does not tower above him now. Instead, she sits beside him on the stairs like a queen lowering herself to the altar of a single prayer. "You kept me in your thoughts," she says softly, her gaze drifting down to the shawl once more. She brushes her fingers across its edge—tender, reverent—as if Cordelia’s memory still lingers in the fibres even if she hadn't been alive to receive the gift. "Even when your voice could not reach me, your heart did. And that—" she turns her head, and her smile is luminous with understanding— "made the silence easier to bear." Safrin’s smile deepens into something uncontainable, delight flickering across her like starlight scattered on water as he makes his offer. "A shrine," she echoes, and her voice is all warmth and wonder now, "A new shrine for me?"  A laugh, rich and pleased, spills from her lips like champagne poured over crystal. "And where would you build me such a thing?  At the edge of the city, for all to see? Or tucked in the wilds, where silence and stars might keep it company?" Safrin the devil is not as black as he is painted