grave of the fireflies /rafael day 4
Mar 22, 2022 2:50:55 GMT -5
Post by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ on Mar 22, 2022 2:50:55 GMT -5
The world ends every few hundred years but you've gotten used to it by now.
Civilization is wiped off the face of the map in a single breath and starts again in the next. At the beginning of your existence, an hour felt like a lifetime, now a year passes in moments. You've come to realize that time can be unruly and it often slips out of your grasp. It runs through the caverns before you can catch it, it gets away from you.
It blends together.
The walking ones disappeared long ago and you haven't seen them since. Their shelters have crumbled, their graves fallen into ruin. Even the fountain stopped flowing. Still the sound of the river grows louder every day, the current that you will one day return to.
But not yet.
The only constant in all of this time has been the other one. In the dark, your companion bobs along beside you, bright as ever. Their wings click together every now and then and it sounds like the wind chimes the walking ones made to try to communicate with you so many years ago.
You chime back, fly a little closer until the glow of your two contrasting lights meld for a moment and then you move away again.
It is rare for one of you to be seen without the other. As far back as you remember, your darker glow has kept the other grounded. Rare in your colouring, it was difficult for you to fit in with your own kind, but your companion never seemed to mind. While they flew up towards the sun, you preferred the darkness near the floor of the cavern.
And once you tasted the walking one's flesh, your light only grew warmer until you hardly looked like a Nakom at all.
Even then, your companion didn't leave you. You have always been like this, together.
There's something in the cavern ahead, you know this by the stutter in your partner's otherwise rhythmic flying. It is rare these days to find a new prize, rare to see any change at all in the caverns except for the slow march of moss across walkways and stone monuments.
But there, in the clearing ahead, standing among the glass ponds, is a walking one.
The two of you fly closer, breaking away from each other to fly laps around the walking one's head. He seems weary, you smell the iron on his skin.
Maybe he is dying.
Your companion flies upwards a little so you fly down. Then you meet again in front of his face and for a brief moment your two lights meet again. Your wings chime together and the sound echoes through the cavern.
Hello.
