Ciel

We found her in a great smoking crater.

At first, she never spoke. She seemed to be missing something important, something vital. When she thought no one was looking at her, she would be looking at the sky.

At first, I wanted to be that piece she was searching for. I would hold her hand everywhere, and when she let words slip past her expressionless stone lips I was lucky enough to be there to hear them. She would scale rooftops while I followed nervously behind. She would stretch her frail stone arms out to heaven, but she could never get close enough for her liking.

She spent years like this while I worshipped her, a silent stone deity.

At last, she said she was looking for a way back home. Little tears, the little droplets that drip from stalactites, dripped from her eyes as she told me that after she fell in that crater, she couldn't find her wings. She had to get home somehow without them. "Don't go back!" I wanted to scream. I wasn't what she was missing, but I wasn't going to let her leave me behind. I wanted to tether her as long as I could.

At last, I had seen enough of her quiet agony that it wasn't worth keeping her all for myself. I took her to a mountaintop, as close as either of us could get to the sky. While I said my last goodbyes, she stared all around her, bright-eyed like a child just discovering the world.

She told me the sky—her home—was already here, and I swear I could see wings unfolding behind her.