She’d gone through the trouble of climbing on top of the overlook in Summerland to be alone. Miles of landscape stretched endlessly, the sands turning gold under the sun, the ocean gleaming under marigold skies. She tried to replicate the colors on a canvas, but the paint didn’t mix quite right, and the shapes were all wrong. The brush felt stiff in her palm, the bristles prickly against her skin.
A frustrated groan hissed from her lips. She threw black paint across the canvas and smeared the dark oils until no other colors were left. The sunset, as if sensing her derision, melted below the ocean. The sky turned black in response, and the world enveloped itself in the night. She stared into the darkness and watched ocean waves turn so black it blended with her ruined painting, as if it were a colorless void.
The night was quiet except for crickets and a quiet stream of waterfall from the cliffside. If she listened closely enough, she could hear howling in the distance, the tides of wind that swirledaround Autumnland and threatened to pull her legs down the cliffside. Perhaps that was why the island kept calling. No matter how terrifying the nightmares were, that pain was still the most familiar thing to her. At least in the darkness, she knew she would get hurt. Better the comfort of familiarity than the possibility of loss.
“Our minds are such messy things.”
Corin pulled away from the cliffside, attention snapped to the figure approaching. Malicine emerged from the jungle’s foliage. Their fingers flexed in the awkward absence of their staff as they sat beside her at the cliffside and observed the island in the distance.
The clouds surrounding Autumnland rumbled. Corin thought of the beast that ripped through the bloodred moon with his horns, the echoes of laughter as he’d taunted Malicine with lies that they would never belong in any world. He’d been the darkness within them that kept everyone tied to the island. Corin had pushed the darkness at bay, but it never truly left.
“She’s a good kid,” Malicine said. Corin didn’t need to ask who they were talking about. “I like her. And I don’t like most people.”
Corin shook her head. “You’ve never even met her.”
“I met your memories of her. She lives there, too.”
But memories weren’t enough. They couldn’t change the reality that Elly was gone. Corin refused to see Elly in her dreams now that she acknowledged the aching truth of her sister absence. How could someone escape from shame and sustain themselves with imagination? How could she do that with the knowledge that none of this was real?
“I don’t understand how we’re expected to just move on,” she said.
Malicine let out a bitter laugh. “You think the pain goes away? It doesn’t. We just make a bigger space to contain it.”
“I don’t know if I can,” she murmured, “or deserve to.”
Her gaze dipped below the waterfall, watching the stream make its way to the rest of the ocean. Dark waves rolled gently across the surface. They glittered underneath stars and buzzed in dormant strength. But there had been nights when the waves were wilder, when tides grasped her ankles and tried to pull her down to the bottom.
“I told her I never wanted her,” she whispered. “It was the most horrible thing I said to her, because it was true.”
That was it, the very thing that kept her from embracing forgiveness. Maybe she could have fooled herself into believing Elly’s death was unpreventable, but she couldn’t deny this. She wasn’t meant to be a parent, let alone a sister. There were too many tireless days she worked to feed two mouths, too many sleepless nights where she came home to a crying child, and she couldn’t stand dealing with that burden.
She hated Elly, and yet, she loved her. Corin loved her so much more than dreams could ever make of her.
“She died thinking I didn’t love her.” Corin let out a sob, then covered her mouth, biting into the skin of her palm. It wasn’t fair for her to cry.
“She knows,” said Malicine.
“No, she doesn’t. I never told her.”
“You did.”
Malicine gripped Corin’s shoulder, forcing her to look at them and listen.
“You tell her every time you warn her to be careful or ask if she’s eaten. You tell her every time you hold on to her the second there’s danger. You tell her every time you look at her when something amazing happens, because you want her to be there. I know whatlack of love from sisters feels like, Corin. And it is not you.”
Malicine’s gaze dipped below to the shores of the beach, where a girl had been walking across the sand. Briar was a speck in the distance, yet her skin illuminated from the stars sewn in her dress. Her toes balanced across rocks as Talon circled around her. He perched on her fingers, and she talked to the raven in a secret language, like they were friends.
“Humans speak about love all the time as if they have something to prove,” Malicine said. “But love isn’t always obvious, and you don’t need to state it to be true.”
Stars emerged from the sky like tiny lights. Constellations danced across a dark canvas, glittering into delicate lines and shapes. Corin pictured Elly’s fingers tracing each spot. In the abandoned building they slept in, Elly had often positioned herself beneath the hole in the roof to see the stars. Corin used to yell at her to stop or she would get sick.
In the dreamworld, a shooting star leapt across the sky. The motion was so sudden that Corin blinked and nearly missed it. The star descended to the shore and drifted toward Briar. She caught the light in her palms and cupped it like a firefly. The rock shimmered on her skin, a moment of life before it disintegrated into colorful dust. She looked up at Corin, realizing who was watching. When Briar waved, her hand glimmered in the darkness.
Corin held her breath, watching stars twinkle between Briar’s fingers, remembering Elly’s own hand stretched to the sky. This was the fairy tale Elly had been talking about. She hadn’t searched for gold or some grander power to rule over a kingdom. She had been looking for the magic of ordinary things, seen the possibility of an infinite night sky.
A new dawn broke through the atmosphere. Fractures ofsunlight whisked away clouds until a crown shone over the ocean. An itch to capture everything in memory compelled Corin to grab the black canvas and return to work. Careful strokes painted golds that hit the peak of the mountains. Green shimmered over moss-covered rocks, while specks of white dotted the pale sky to show the remaining stars.
She was so absorbed in painting this scene that she didn’t realize Malicine had spoken.
