Sawtooth Spire a silver whisper, take flight and steal into my mouth

wow i really gave you nothing to respond to here 

she was too many fragments on the floor. better suited for an urn on a dusty shelf than being bore upon someone else's shards as the gold dust inlay of kintsugi, to forge some ornamental but otherwise useless crockery. 

the atoms holding her together were tired. 

how was one to transform ashes into something so symbolic as kintsukuroi? smelt it down into some grey lacquer, mix in copper and call it gold? was that what he wanted to add to his life?

a composite only useful as asphalt repair for the potholes in her soul. likely even less useful than that. they were a karmic mismatch; everything he deserved was everything she did not. 

esme spoke firmer through his heated interjections, brows sinking to form a V. there is no skeleton key for you! i'm inside and everybody is out, i've boarded up the windows and i've clapped the doors in irons. must i also be bare from skin to bone to even feel seldom at home?

when everything seemed to come to a lingering pause, and he dropped his head at mention of his father, her gaze nested searchingly into his features. two blazing comets hurled into the black hole she felt enter the atmosphere between them in that moment.

they burned out so quickly she looked away, sights crash landing as craters in the earth beneath their feet. 

then she was back, the ferocity of his response to her accusation of his mother leading her by the nose. "i think i'm getting warmer," was singsonged upon seeing the resentment go up like brushfire on his formerly downcast look. she pulled back, rather, in a way, pleased with herself for provoking embers he rarely (had he ever?) made manifest to her.

by her final remarks, he was visibly pulsating hurt. she was unsure what particular reference had done the job, but if she was surprised that her words domiciled any deliberate malice with which she could injure him again, she hid it without conscious intention.

a lapse of silence fit between them, the gavel in suspension— 

"you. it was you." he indicted.

she made a dismissive noise and watched him a moment longer, her gaze loitering on the properties of his face. if it was her, she thought, then he hurts himself willfully by coming to me.

a museful silence followed, no immediate indignity jumping to the tip of her tongue. he had to know by now that there was nothing in esme for him but pain. wasn't that what he said? "you always make me feel stupid." 

she hasn't missed that. thus so, she wouldn't make him feel stupid anymore. 

drily, "as you insist." a shade of doubt passed over her face, but she didn't dispute it. her eyes cooled. there was no apology coming into flower, what else was there to say about it? so his lacquered heart was glazed by an implacable grief in the end, by her own hand. 

the wolf tilted her chin upwards and looked out towards the misting crag,

considering considering.

she turned and padded to sit by the cliff. again, wordless, presenting him ample opportunity to leave, as dignified as he wanted to be with her back turned to him.

the mausoleum-quiet silence was crannied by sudden pealing and stentorian thunder.