What the Eye won’t swallow

They watch the ever-eye that was the sun glaring down, peaceable, affable, at first, toward them. To spite the threat it held bare to them both. “We’re running out of time.” One of them says, a horrid admission. Their too soon failure.

Their daughter half finished and lonesome. Their allies lost to a system in longwinded collapse.

Cowardly, his wife thinks, martyrs all for a cause long lost.

They were doomed.

“It doesn’t matter. We can rebuild.” She doesn’t say it. They can’t he knows. Not that quick.

Not without a mate.

Afonya would go alone.

Lastly thyself, her blood alone. She will have no one without grand charity.

Not simply the end, but more so unwieldly.

Their only, made the only.

Why did they take the children? He wanted to think. What monsters were they to steal? What fools they were to go unburdened by those who they’d made their own.

“We will.” she says. And they almost forget her. Their daughter. They never do, but without a single moment to spare, how could they waste them on the last girl of their world?

Afonya, as brilliant as she was, was listless. The only child in a family broken by its own hubris. She could see it, and without anyone to share this silence with she was cracking. They were not a people meant to be lonely.

He hopes as she reads, and breathes and lives, that she will not simply beg for death when she lands so far from them.

He sees it in his mate, nothing but the ship that will save their child, unbound by such things as affection. This was her last gift. So that her daughter would not die with them.

Across from her, every day, he understands.

Bared to neglect, Afonya doesn’t.

Their was no one around, no child with her, beside her, to force such things as the faith to conform to the madness that was stealing what little time she would have with them.

If she died between the teeth of their Sun she wanted it to be quick, and the horrible selfish child she was wanted their every last moment to be hers. Afonya was a good child this her father knew; she would never ask for attentions they couldn’t give her.

But loneliness will do it’s worse, and she wanders.

A lone child of sure character, it was fine even where they’d ended up.

Hopefully, she found something, anything that gave her want for the world she’s a gift to.

He watches her every day.

He thinks this will be her life.

She will be lonely.

And she will walk.

And he will not see her, because she will be on another world without him. Or her mother. Or anyone she’d known before all this.

They would all be dead even if the nation they lived under would be merciful.

He hopes that this will be enough of their world, that if she misses it she will only need to reminisce.

That in her minds eye, she will remember.

Its selfish, she’ll think later. But he won’t know this.

He won’t live to learn.

That isn’t his fault, the sun will eat everything. But he will never learn. Even if he loved her.

Afonya thinks these things, even a little to herself. Young enough to hate her parents, old enough to hide it.

She doesn’t mean it she wants to believe. That she hates them for all of this.

She doesn’t want to recognize it.

But she buries it because no one really speaks to children that hate their parents and she falters more from the cloistered nature of their now tiny cult.

She will see it one day. Everywhere after she lands, closed, proud, mean, people who wanted nothing less than a perfect world, and would ignore everything to make it so.

Afonya’s gaze long before it means a thing will land on calf’s horns on a mother’s head, and on the cloying stare of a self-same child. The kinds of people they’d never let in to read with them.

That child will say they were like Lime and Crocus one day.

But she’ll never tell her who’s who.

And it will never matter because Aiga wouldn’t mean it like that, like too direct a metaphor. She’ll speak to this woman, warmed for once by the presence of anyone in her guilty world filled by three.

Anaida would be her name. And in the coming months her father will kill this woman. He will kill her. He will kill her.

And he will never face it.

And she’ll never forgive him.

Because in the coming months as they finish her escape, she will want to stay with this woman, while the sun eats everything. Because this child will laugh at her finally, and everything will fall away. Because even if she deserved to survive it could never mean more than her dearest first.

Loving anyone really.

But he will kill Anaida, just to save Afonya from another moment deconditioning from the notion that she was all that mattered.

That her body in their ego as the only people of this world, was worth the sun eating everyone. He will think its anything near kindness to let her keep the China-doll Aiga. The child whose mother was killed.

A last gift for the birthday girl, like that’s how it should work.

He would see it, his daughter led astray the only child left of the flock. And he will forgive her. Not because she deserves it, but because their was no one else.

He leads her away, holding the one-day horned child, and he accepts it. He accepts it. he accepts it, because she’ll at least have a head start on this horrid little temptation of hers.

The last words he has with his mate are angry ones.

“Why would you do this? How could you let this happen!” but she lets go eventually. All the power to be expected, as she watches Afonya who’d long nailed it down.

They’ll die soon anyway.

They let go.

She leaves the pull of their world, their sister-worlds, and the sun center all. In the chaos they watch as their Afonya leaves the world they wait for it also.

For death. For the Sun there before all to feast ravenous on the world, and for the decadence of their only child to taint its memory.

He watches the lake before him, boiling confused as existence became vapor.

For all that had been, the sun in its corrupted nature the moon rose, to show itself as embers against a hungry Star. He hopes as the end swallows all, that his child could ever be happy with the faith she lost.