skӧll delacroix {district nine} fin

["Calypso?"]

Her name stains your lips.
Stars bleed silver against the infinities of black — drip drip drip against the darkness of the night. The moon wraps its arms around the wolves, a mass of black, gray, and white, and you are split between two roles: the little wolf and the curious spectator.

Your elder sister — the black phoenix, she has been named — does not allow you to peek behind her eyes. Something clandestine and dark lurks in the tangled shadows of midnight. Feral snarls and yellow eyes reflecting a kingdom of gold allude you. Calypso taught you not to fear the darkness for it is of the skies and the skies are kind. Earth-shattering thunder and lightning howl across its arms blackened by the night, the slumber of the sun, piercing your eardrums and rattling your tiny bones — but you are not afraid.

It is the sky that holds the sun, the greatest symbol the earth has ever bore: the beginning, the end, and hope.

You see the sun. You see the sun at the break of dawn, you see the sun in the dark of night — hope has not once left you in the dark. You are one to defy the laws, you yourself are a fracture in the rules — you have no beginning, you have no end.

The sun does not rise; the sun does not fall.

You had laid at the top of the hill, just a short walk from the church, next to Calypso. You would sprawl out upon the endless bed of grass, bowed beneath your delicate frame. You would toss your waves of tawny hair carelessly to the side of your face. It would be strewn around you, disorderly and wild.

You laughed — you laugh a lot, and you miss laughing as much as you did — until your lungs hurt and burned for air, and Calypso's once solemn face would break into a smile. You cracked jokes near to nonsense, you left behind the shadows you heard follow you out the door. You listened to Calypso's voice, so steady and so certain, weave her philosophy.

["The sun," she said, "it falls every night
and rises every morning."

You nodded.

"The fall of the sun is a new ending;
the rise of the sun is a new beginning.
And it is hope — forever burning, undying hope.
But do not fear the night, for the sun
is just beneath the darkness.
Hope is only gone when your heart is cold
and the sun dies in your eyes.
It's just a symbol, but an important one."

You nodded.]

(But you could never fully believe — you could never fully believe that hope could have an end.)

Calypso did not once break before the absence of hope and the cold — she welcomed them like old friends. Your elder sister tamed the darkness and made it her own with the sun still firmly in her palms. She does not fear the darkness, the does not fear a land barren of hope — you are unsure that she fears anything at all.
But you do not think you are so fearless.

On the hill, you remember the Church of Castiel looming over you in the distance, a great marble castle, stark white and ghostly, struck like a match against the scarlet and gold ichor of the sunfall. Stained glass windows, burning red, blue, green, and gold, glared at you accusingly. The ring of the church bells sounded like an omen to you, the harbinger before a dark wrath, and you did not know why. You only knew of your mother's fists clenched until they were bone-white and Calypso's lips, chewed until drops of crimson stained her teeth.

"Cult," your mother cursed it only months before the entire family ran for the hills. You did not know why, you only knew of the suitcase on your bed stuffed with your belongings and your mother's steady hand, tugging you along into the night. And there was a gaping hole in the pack of Delacroixs where your father should be, but he seemed to have been cast out into oblivion — you did not, do not, know why.

You stared into Calypso's eyes, great blue mirrors reflecting your figure back at you. She stared at you, blankly, as you asked why. (Why did we leave? Why are we here? Why are we suddenly wealthy, when our pockets were nearly empty not so long ago?)

Mother once said, perched upon her rocking chair at the old house, that you and Calypso have the same eyes, big and blue as the ocean. She once said, with a storybook folded in her arms, that you look just like your big sister. She once said, her lips bitten in a chaos brewing within her, that you remind her of your father, waves of pale brown hair and fair skin and kind eyes and all.
(Her words marked you with a curse.)

But when Calypso stared at you, you saw nothing within them, only your reflection — cherubic face of a little girl, contorted in desperate wonder.
(But those eyes are the eyes of your father and you have not once forgotten them when you dare avert your gaze to the mirror.)
Her lips were sewn shut but you could not comprehend the stitches woven between her flesh. Eventually, you stopped asking, but your curiosity is undying and nothing can stop you from wondering and wondering and building fables in your head.

Naive little girl, little wolf, your sister has tied a black cloth over your eyes, but you are oblivious to even that. Carried in an echo in your house, larger than life, you swore you heard Calypso darkly utter words that sounded alien fallen from her mouth.
"Drug shipment—"
"Mafia —"
"The Wolf Pack —"

You did not, do not, know why, you only know of her words, casting a shadow over something clandestine.

{ table: zoë }

LIKE A WOLF, A PREDATOR
I FELT LIKE A DEER IN THE LIGHTS
YOU LOVED ME AND I FROZE IN TIME
HUNGRY FOR THAT FLESH OF MINE