#dr: fl

[starling-dear]

“I had to leave that place. There was nothing there for me. The Professor is a stubborn man, he is convinced he can take care of himself. Fine. Watching those damned predatory peacocks watch us with all of their contempt shining from beady eyes. Fine. Gorehounds, fine. Still being insulted by my neighbors of Gatorland, fine. I saw that creature. That... thing. I saw it. That abomination stitched together by a sick person.

I was not the one who cut off her face. I was the one who was told we do not do things for revenge. It is not my fault it came for us. I am a weary woman. I am weary of being told what I do and no not know. Weary of the deceptions these people seed amongst each other. I am weary of being looked at like something that crawled out of the woods. I am a Doctor. I am following the calling of Ma’at and I will preach it. I do not understand what must be done to find myself on equal footing in this place. Two years I have called Gatorland as good as home. Still, I am an outsider. I worry for my family. For my Full Dead. For Shi’ron. Perhaps it is time to take one further step back. I See what I need to See. But who Sees me? Who Sees Lady Ishta’ab of the Egh’drasi, Mouri Gade of Gatorland? They see my blood and my paint. Where I am from, that is enough.”

[starling-dear]

Silence and frost pressed in on the house, several miles out from the borders of Gatorland. The fireplace inside had not seen attention long enough for a family of mice to have lived under the ash grate and moved on in the autumn without Mrs. Grier knowing. The old corpse, collecting dust on her clothes, sat at her desk in the dark, as she had been doing for perhaps days. Time slipped by in quiet fits and starts, the same as a rope through unsteady hands.

The old woman was frightened of a few things, but loneliness had never been a fear. This was because when she was alone, she never noticed. The whispers kept her company until such a time that it mattered that she was still alive. Her lungs sat still and empty, save for the water and dust that had almost always been there. The only parts of Vivianne that betrayed her condition as being animately existent was the occasional twitch of her eyelashes as she watched something far-off in her thoughts.

Though the lonesomeness was a fact of Mrs. Grier's existence, it was a ghost that haunted her less frightfully than others.

Sometimes the ghosts that haunted her came to pay visits. And on this evening, one of them knocked upon her door. When she failed to answer, it drifted open, allowing one of these phantoms to begin gently asking her to come back to town. To tell her that no one should be alone on Candlemas.

[starling-dear]

“The idea of being lost is an intangible concept. Nothing is ever really lost. No one is ever really lost. Just because a thing or a person is not where we hoped they would be, does not make it a failure. All things move through space and time as Ma’at has planned, more or less. To be lost implies one knows where their destination should be. We can expect where our path will take us. We can aim, we can hypothesize, we can set goals, we can try our best or we can go where we feel we are being taken. But we are never to know where we are meant to be next. I have followed my path as diligently as I think I might have. I am thankful for where it has taken me. I am thankful for the people I have beside me. I do not feel lost. Understanding that nothing is ever really lost... Has anyone seen Shi’ron? He said he would not be long...”

[starling-dear]

“I held the cup in my hands and he told me a story I could not comprehend. He told me that if I drank the liquid it held that I would See a vision of things to come. No one can know the future, I said, no one knows what Ma’at has mapped out as our destiny. Nevertheless, I wanted to know if he was deceiving me or not. I have always Seen things differently from others. Even as a child. So I drank. It was not like the vision of the strange place and the black crystal. It came to me in flashes, from somewhere far away, like glimpses of lightning on the clouds. I Saw packs of masked strangers. I Saw shards of broken glass. I Saw faces of red and blue... I looked down at my hands and Saw myself holding a pair of eyes. I Saw the face of a child I had never seen before. Yet I felt I knew them. I Saw this child without eyes. I turned my face upward to see the moon and the planets turning. The arrows and patterns in the sky. The lines connecting all of life together. I Saw all of this. I looked to the heavens and above me in the night sky, above me, I Saw.”

[starling-dear]

Anna Mason-Fitzgerald, Gatorland, November 2016

[starling-dear]

“...Always so far away. I’m not there yet... Hang on. I’m trying... I’m trying... I’m so sorry... I’m so sorry... I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready...”

[starling-dear]

"Whatever. I wanna come home. Miss Terra will be happy to see me, at the least.

I ain't got the-the-the-the, uh. APTITUDE. For bein' careful. I'm not known for a remarkable sense of self control. Not sure what it is I am known for, but whatever it is, it's gotta be something I CHOOSE. I get to decide who Ave Venture is. Don't care what it is, I'll fight it.

I'm gonna fight it."