Falls

She was no stranger to ghosts, this slender silver-haired creature. No matter where she fled, they followed her, taking the forms of those both living and dead. Sometimes Uriah ran beside her, his white-stockinged legs lifting high with each step. Sometimes she bedded down beside Bondurant or Solomon, and they would curl protectively around her— the memory of their warmth and scents so real that she could almost touch them. Once or twice she had even seen Morrigan, though the details of her mother’s appearance had been lost to the sieve of time. Seen as if through a veil of mist, only one detail of this vision was ever clear— the dark eyes that were as cold and unforgiving as if they’d been carved of stone. But the ghost that she turned to face now was a stranger, familiar only in the lines of sorrow that had been carved into her face. Lines that matched Sabriel’s own.

Does your heart weep as well, lady of the water?

The pale figure shifted closer, and the shadowy one flinched away from it instinctively. And yet… despite the careful steps that pulled their bodies apart— and the unease that fluttered her nostrils— Sabriel did not flee. If anything, there was more animation in her now than there had been moments before; a flicker of something that might have been hunger in the depths of her cobalt eyes. After an eternity of solitude, it was a treasure just to hear the sound of another’s voice. So she clung to the sound of it, marvelling at the elegant dance of the other woman’s words even as her mind puzzled over their meaning. I heard a tale that all bodies of water were made from the tears of the broken-hearted…

Silence followed the buckskin’s strange pronouncement, stretching on and on until it was as taut as Sabriel’s body. She could think of nothing to share that wasn’t too much, nothing that wouldn’t bare her wounds for the other to see. But she was already guilty of speaking to the shades who haunted her— after that, could it truly be so mad to share her pain with a stranger?

It didn’t matter. Like the Falls tumbling endlessly before them, the force of her sorrow could not be held back forever. Not without turning her heart as cold and implacable as winter.

“An absurd tale,” the silver black finally responded, her voice rusted from neglect— but not harsh or cruel. Instead, there was a strangely gentle note beneath the disparaging words, seasoned only lightly with the bitterness of her sorrow. “If the sea was made from tears, then by now there would be nothing else left.” She had not truly wept in seasons, but before... before, she’d cried enough to fill a pool like the one they stood in now. And nothing had ever come of those tears but more— tears and pain and tears filling her hollow chest until she’d thought she might drown on them. Only in surrendering herself to the care of her children had Sabriel been able to break that endless cycle. And in their absence, her grief threatened to suffocate her again.

“Tears have brought me nothing, not even solace,” she continued, the words a soft hush. “And so now, even when my heart weeps, I hold them inside. Why should I give that much of myself, and gain nothing in return?”