MABEL
Evelyn’s boldness crept into her bones and ignited her own, a defiant rise to her chin, we chose life settling into the void, crawling like roots and gnarled vows, promises, and convictions. They’d always choose survival, a way to ensure they remained on this damned earth (she’d gnaw, she’d scrape, she’d tear, she’d rip – marrow from flesh, flesh from bone). They’d move forward, not back into the glimpses and crags of desolation; and it seemed this was a pattern here, in the footfalls of nothingness, bubbles, and domes, a spiraling conflagration of conspiring efforts over and over and over again.
For the same had happened to the Wraith; no other chances, no other opportunities, starving for another chance when everything else deemed it impossible, improbable. They’d owe it all to the Voice, and Mabel wasn’t sure how to pay her favor back.
A new family haunted and loomed, and her eyes went instantly to Evelyn’s, to determine her measure in this script too. Then the cold gaze went to Wessex’s proffered hand, and she hesitated, only because the world was overwhelming, and the known was there, beside her. On measures of ferocity, on packs of wolves not meant to be lone figures, she sighed, stilled, and then finally moved, her fingers lightly taking Wessex’s fingers, grasps in grasps. Her words followed, brief and curt, uncertain of how massive this dysfunctional accord was; how powerful, how potent, when they’d spent so long trapped in their own nightmares. “How many are there?”
For the same had happened to the Wraith; no other chances, no other opportunities, starving for another chance when everything else deemed it impossible, improbable. They’d owe it all to the Voice, and Mabel wasn’t sure how to pay her favor back.
A new family haunted and loomed, and her eyes went instantly to Evelyn’s, to determine her measure in this script too. Then the cold gaze went to Wessex’s proffered hand, and she hesitated, only because the world was overwhelming, and the known was there, beside her. On measures of ferocity, on packs of wolves not meant to be lone figures, she sighed, stilled, and then finally moved, her fingers lightly taking Wessex’s fingers, grasps in grasps. Her words followed, brief and curt, uncertain of how massive this dysfunctional accord was; how powerful, how potent, when they’d spent so long trapped in their own nightmares. “How many are there?”
I bare my teeth
and stretch my claws out
and stretch my claws out
