RORY
He didn't know how long he'd slept, just that his neck was stiff and sore and the corner of his mouth wet with saliva. It could've been seconds. It could've been minutes. It could've been hours.How long had it been?
How much longer would it be?
The seconds stretched like eons of pitch black desolation, of memory and change and despair and swallowed hope. Rory remembered the darkness of Long Night, how compact and complete it was, somehow thicker than the black of his eyelids (even with his knuckles pressed into the sockets). For twenty-something years he had never once even peeked behind the window blinds, mindful and meek and afraid, and then last year he had rushed into its open maw and nearly been swallowed.
How reckless, how foolish, and how alive he had felt as he rode through the dark, spurred by Amalia's faith: how tired and how dead he felt now, sitting with his back against the front door, raising his mussed head to lean the back of it against the rough grains. He had thrown himself into the race like a greyhound, but he had been outrun. He had fallen to the side, fallen behind, unfit to partake in the world and its wonders.
Had Karlia truly gone into the night? Had she felt like this, too dry for tears, sitting with her back against the door—lonely and left behind—and scraping a heel against the floor and then making her decision..?
He raised his hands in front of his face. They were pale and slender things, pallid from the cold as he had let the embers go out.
He should do something about that.
There were a lot of things he should do something about.
He should get up and eat (how long had it been?). He should sleep, properly.
Yet all he did was sit there with his back against the door, one hand burrowing into Ella's fur as she slept next to him while the other traced patterns on the floor.
(It would be so easy to reach up and unlock it.)
as if you were on fire from within,
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
the moon lives in the lining of your skin.
