Ocean's Breath Plateau have some love

she needed to return to the grove soon.

but in the cool and still dark morning, she sat high upon the plateau.

i did not get to mourn you, she whispered into the winds now. i was not there to sing. those same winds drifted through fur that had began to become salt crusted. her stomach clenched up into her ribs and her eyes closed.

panuk grows.

ariadne has gone, but panuk still sees her in the grove we lost her.

did anyone hear? where did the wind take her words?

i wish i had seen your home when you were still here. i am sorry.

she wept as the sun came up over the sea horizon.

see me a second time
he witnessed.
before i leave here
he heard.
then i will say my name to your ears
the sun turned them to golden statues upon the salt sand. she cried her heartache. he sang a low note, lifting her voice to the dawn.

how did one turn nine nights of mourning into one moment?

she thought a spirit of grief had come to her, prepared to punish her for this. she wondered what her mother might think for her daughter to speak and cry to a spirit that was hopefully long at rest.

i know you will be a good anaa, as you have been a good sister to his mother.

and yet she could not help but feel grateful that it was not panuk who sung to her heartache now.

she did not know how long it took her (minutes felt like hours) to finally turn her now saltwater gaze upon him. too tired to feel embarrassment or shame.

no words yet, she silently ushered him nearer.

nearer, until he felt the hummingbird heartbeat of her pain stirring in the air around him.
it whispered and thrummed and lived in the tears that traced her face;
chakliux did not think. he only spoke.
"i loved her too," he heard himself say in a voice half living. "she never knew it. i did not want her to know."
but those songs had etched part of chakliux away, as did these now for ariadne. unfair. unfair. and he, selfish in the middle of it.

she was easy to love.

she whispered without judgement. it mattered not if the love was platonic or not. samani had been something beyond most earthly lives and she wondered if that was why sedna called back for her.

maybe you did not have to say it to her.

how did first warriors love and was it as fierce as their title, she wondered so selfishly as she gazed upon him.

"she was. and maybe i did not." 
perhaps he should have.
ensconced once more in that cold sense of his own selfishness, his own want in the face of such grief, chakliux did not know how to move his eyes from her face.
she was not samani. she was not ariadne. she was not them and yet she was both and a mystery in the same.
the seal hunter did not know if he could bear it.

too tired for shame, she had thought. hollowed out by grief that was fresh enough to be hunted.

he filled the spaces for this moment and she did not know what to do about it.

i promised you my name. she had not forgot. she thought of how he had very much earned it by staying here in such a vulnerable moment. but if i give it to you, i have no bartering to see you again.

she wished the second meeting had been less tearful.

"you do not need to barter for my company, mist woman. i will see you again." he had not been to the forest; he had not wanted to go there. she provided a way for the seal hunter to reluctantly enter the place ariadne had died.
and she was a reason all her own.
he did not say he waited. chakliux turned his eyes over the sea. "until a third time?"

yet she had come to worry that she might never be guaranteed to see another again. it could not promised. one day she had been giggling and speaking of charming men with her sister and the next —

no. you must know it now.

lest some force beyond them decided he could not ever know it.

callyope nuiruk.

guard the name, first warrior, until the third time.

callyope.
it sat on the end of one's tongue, the sound of the name. uplifting. a lilt in a bleakened world.
"i will guard it." his voice was hoarse and he did not look to her for a moment, knowing he would only dare to mouth it in silence when she had gone from moontide.

i know,

how did she? how would she?

because she had no choice but to.

she did not want to leave now, but if she stayed she might unravel once more. she might say things that should not be for his ears. she might ruin herself in it all. quietly she dipped her head and began to move off.

<3

when chakliux could hear her step no longer, he let the shape of her name live on his mouth for a moment.
in silence, in silence to keep its guarding.