The Sunspire Act One, Melodrama

    Those heartless stars above her made no reply to her plaintive cry, but another shortly did. With measured grace, holding her silence for the moment, she turned her sorrowful mien toward the speaker, figuring the stranger could easily see the hollowness within her mournful gilded eyes in the moonlight’s soft glow. So young, so beautiful, and yet filled with such suffering! The mere sight was enough to break any wolf’s heart, surely. Even a very young one who had not been driven to descend into the depths of despair as had she by the vagaries of life. She allowed the echoing quiet of the night to build between them for a moment longer before replying in a quavery voice. Her head drooped toward the earth, as if the mere utterance of words was such an effort that she had to give over the energy that had kept her slack neck straight in order to speak aloud. “O, young Mistress, ’tis not a matter for levity, I fear. I weep because my one true love is gone, lost to me forever by the merciless cruel hand of Fate herself!”

    To speak of the matter wrenched at her heart anew, and the slight swaying of her willowy frame was not entirely feigned. She threw back her head with the smallest and softest of wretched moans, and allowed her hindquarters to dip, catching herself in an uncomfortable half-sit which she allowed to slump into a half-recline. The child’s eyes seemed as hard and cruel as those unforgiving stars above, such that Ophelia could not bear to look at them. She gazed off into the night, her eyes dulled with sadness as they slowly traversed the landscape with its moon-etched silhouettes. They came at last to the more authoritative figure who had now entered the scene, a wolf-gray bitch who stood watching them with her tail held assertively high. Ophelia’s eyes were almost cartoonishly large and sad, and her head gave a slight cant as she gazed with wretched desperation at this second stranger. Her voice was soft and breathless, her words like to be snatched away at any moment by an errant wash of wind. “Have you too come to mock my words, foreigner, or rather to offer comfort in my trials of distress?” She surmised there was a passing chance the two were related, or that the elder was at least here to check up on the wayward youngster; as the elder of the two held her tongue, confirmation of this thought would have to wait until speech was elicited and the presence of a similar accent either confirmed or denied. Ophelia’s own muzzle tilted upward an anxious fraction of an inch, a pose aping that of a loyal supplicant and baring the pearly-white fur of her throat a little more. Her neck kinked a little and grew stiffer, sitting there like that, but she sat and suffered these physical pangs silently, in favor of voicing the more painful and emotion-charged notion that had just crossed her mind. “Or are you of the silent footsteps,” (for she hadn’t heard the other’s arrival—could she be a ghost, or potentially a reaper? Or another of those creatures she had once heard tales told of,) “perhaps here to take me to the other world whence the spirit of my beloved has crossed? Oh, to be reunited with him now! ’Twould be the most welcome of mercies, if it were so.” Agony and hope warred in her expression, as if she dared not let one or the other win for fear it would overcome her entirely.