Light of Stars [2]

Chapter Five

♕ Them; Both ♕

There was a certain amount of electricity around her at all times now. That was the thing that made her feel the most different. It was not something easily ignored, not when lately, everything happened a second too late, and she reacted a second too early. No one seemed to notice yet, but it was everywhere.

She could feel the darkness coming from Mason's body, could follow it into every part of the ship. She could feel Zander's eyes staring at her for way too long, thinking she could not notice because her eyes were somewhere else. She could feel Aubrette's sorrows and sometimes she could not distinguish between them both. Her own seemed to water down into barely a drop.

The world was clearer than before, the waves rippling above the other, splashing against the side of the ship, louder than she'd ever heard them.

She hated the quiet the most. Sensed the growing tension, a pit in her stomach that warned her to be alert, even when there was no one around.

Maybe it was all in her head.

Her hand brushed over the empty space on the bed next to her, still warm even if it had been empty for hours. Sybilla wondered if he noticed those small details too, if she ever left her spot on the bed too warm, or if it faded away quicker since her blood did not carry the dust from the stars.

Except now she did, because her blessing had been once the one of a king, and her warmth would always linger for longer than his.

Sybilla made her way out of the bed, changing her clothes for something cleaner, even when every piece of clothing they had was still stained of blood and mud, no matter how many times she had tried to clean them.

There was a certain stillness in the air.

It didn't matter that she could almost hear the flutter of their heart, that she heard every breath they gave, their slow movements as they shifted from one side of the ship to the other.

There was stillness. A sort of silence that felt unbearable on the best of days, an resembled death on others.

The sun hit her skin for the first time in the day, and the thrill of the pure heat rippled through her blood in a endless harmony. She finally understood why Aubrette had spent so many nights out on her balcony, or on top of the crooked tree. Sybilla understood why Bree had always been searching for moonlight to touch her skin, because as the rays of the mid-morning sun touched her the world started making a little more sense, her heart became a hell of a lot lighter.

She had not expected to settle so quickly into her new... form. Maybe it was because she hadn't yet been able to look at herself in an actual mirror, not one that wasn't broken or where shadows did not blurred pieces of yourself. Yet she still could sneak glances at the new color of her hair, she felt the warmth of her skin flooding through her cheeks and neck and chest and every single part of her body, and she had gotten used to it.

More than that. 

As much as she loathed to admit it, warmth was much easier to love than coldness, and perhaps it was that her blood had always sang towards heat, towards the sun, even when her heart had fallen in love with the dark and cold, that she found herself so enamored with this life someone else had chosen upon her. 

She'd grown used to this new skin, and  did not wept for the girl that died in the coldness of that cell. She'd left every one of her weaknesses buried beneath the mountain, locked behind metal bars, rotting next to the corpse of a king.

The deck was mostly empty, it always was, except for Zander who usually locked himself inside the cabin and left them alone to stare at the sea. Today however, he seemed distracted by the look of the ocean water.