Her heartbeat was in her ears, a deafening throb, a bass drum set into the rhythm of her paws. Each stride ate up the earth and still it was not enough, there was not enough land to run across. Caithe could never get as far as she needed to go. Her lungs filled and emptied, and filled again, burning with each new breath. The world snatched up by her dark eyes, was nothing more than fleeting pictures of places and things she had no desire to stop and see. A doe breaking across her path here, a river cutting out of the wilderness toward her and away again there—all of it motion and emotion that she refused to process. Muscle quivered with fatigue, acid building up in the fibers that strung her aching bones together. Nerves fired a single message to her clouded mind, Stop! Stop! and the reply came down the telegraph lines as No. No. No. She tried to run herself to death, but the desire for death was not there, not really. She wanted to live, but not to feel, never to feel again.

You’re a beautiful soul, my love. You feel everything with your whole self… How strange those words were now as something consumed her that was quite unlike the excitement that had overflowed the day those syllables were murmured. Caithe could not outrun the wretched sorrow that clenched its jaws around her throat. Foam had formed at the corners of her mouth, and her respirations became labored as the resolve to continue crumbled. Her head ached from fighting back the wailing between her ears, and her empty stomach churned with bile as though she’d swallowed the foulest thing she could find. If she could go back, run all the way back until that moment when a single decision stood between her and all this inevitable heartache—no, she wouldn’t have been able to stop herself from giving in to that anchor-point, the moment where it all began, even knowing that in the end she would wind up here. Wherever here was. As the sable woman returned to herself, sapphire eyes roving blearily over the sandy lake shore, her tired legs finally settled into weary walk. Caithe was ragged and twilight was falling, bringing with it cool night air that was a balm to her overworked lungs. It was time to stop, it was time to swallow the coppery taste of sorrow and live. The wisdom to reach this conclusion was in her, but she doubted that the willpower to make herself equal to the task was there.

Love and hatred waged a war within her skull, breeding together to create a new sentiment entirely. There was no word for it in her vocabulary. Her gaze turned skyward, where stars began to squeeze into the blue haze. Her siren song, the notes rising into the air as poignant as life and death, this would be her gnashing of teeth, and tearing out of hair. Smashed dreams and screaming, quaking heart, hopelessness, shame and longing…All of these were her song… and also, something else… Hope, the tiniest sliver of it, a promise to herself, this was not an end.