The twilight is soothing.

If pressed to choose, Sialeeds would have chosen sunset over sunrise, even long ago. Others might have joked that sunrise was something she rarely saw and rarely cared to see, but she knew that fact too well, and the reminder that her life was not in as great a shape as it could be made her resent the whole idea of dawn. The sun rose each day, without her, almost without fail; if she'd thought about it enough, she might have observed that it could almost be a symbol of everything else that happened without her, everything else that left her behind. Perhaps that was what it was to her, underneath. She didn't look deep enough to know. The dawn just irked her.

But she'd always liked the sunset, liked to watch the sky take on unnatural hues, alien-seeming to humans even with their unbroken track record of appearing at day's end. It ushered in a softer pace of living, drew curtains closed, lit fires in hearths, and sent lovers out onto the banks of rivers laced with streaming pinks and golds. Not that she would ever have called herself romantic, but there were a lot of truths about herself that she had never been particularly willing to accept.

Now, perhaps rebuffed once too often and seeing need for more drastic measures, truth had thrust itself upon her-- quite literally. This curious coil of twilight had curled around her hand, sending searching tendrils into her soul, questioning: are you the one? Are you? For a while she thought she might be, and it was not for power's sake that she hoped to dream, but, perhaps, for the fulfilment of this strange, questing being that seemed to share her dreams. Of course, she would never be able to explain to anyone else what she meant by that. But when she let her mind go still and settle on the razor-edge of dusk, a precarious balance she could hold as long as she didn't look down, look anywhere but simply let the moment be, she thought she could tell things about it. As if anyone could tell what the Runes want, she thought in saner hours. But as if by intuition, in those strange moments, it was as if she felt things from it. Like the desire for peace, for wholeness, and maybe love. (The desire for love, for itself, for something that was not a self but something that transcended selfhood. Love, for her. All mixed up. She never claimed she could read it clearly; she wasn't some crazed Nagarean prophet. She didn't know if she was reading it at all.)

Who knew what it was to be twilight?; no one, no one knew what it was like to be that inhuman thing, that quality of the universe that could not even quite be called a thing-- for how did one encapsulate the twilight, pin it down even to a single concept? Yet there were times when she thought she might almost understand. She wondered if that made her crazy, like Arshtat had been. She didn't want to be crazy. She told people they were crazy almost on a routine basis these days-- and to be fair, these days, the jibe didn't have a hard time finding a mark. But it was as if repeating the notion, telling herself everyone around her was crazy, could drive the potential for accusation ever further away from her, because deep down inside, she was terrified of what had happened to her sister. The idea that it would happen to her had sent her to the liquor cabinet, her hands trembling like some elderly woman's, on many a sleepless night.

Then by all rights, she thought, she should fear this more, be treating this incomprehensible entity with more caution. She should be watching its every move lest it tunnel insidiously into her brain, her bones, her limbs, and make its nest there, and then it would be too late, like Arshtat was too late, too late to fight off the shrieking insistence of the light. But this didn't feel much like shrieking insistence to her. But maybe it wasn't like that.

Maybe that she was feeling this way meant that it had already won. Was it her family's fate to be tormented to insanity by this Rune and that, pulled and tossed by the faceless arbiters of the universe as their schemes saw fit, their goals unknown and unrevealed to mere mortals?

But she couldn't bring herself to be scared, because try as she might to make herself believe the danger, this didn't feel like control.

It wasn't anything as vague as the sunset; it was the perfect razorblade edge between night and day, condensing all that made the transition possible into a single blinding stroke no wider than a breath. She took a breath, and another, trying to drink the whole of it in within that slim moment, trying to grasp once again that ideal concept of it he had once possessed. Sometimes she managed it, and sometimes it slipped through her mind like dreams, the last vestiges of a memory mocking you on their way out.

It staggered her with its power, yet surprised her entirely with its lack of brutality; it was blunt, yes, violent in the way that being hit by a wave is violent, but there was no malice behind it, and she thought if she knew anything she'd know that. From time to time she was sure it had a personality, something understandable buried deep beneath the ever-shifting layers that made no sense to her, and she'd known enough self-serving cruelty in her life to know that wasn't it. The layers passed over it, shadowed it from view, like driftwood and seaweed and sheer lack of light obscure a scrap of metal on the ocean floor. She would stare at it for hours, waiting with a patience she hadn't known she had for it to glint up at her, just once. For it to tell her once again what she'd thought it said, just to be sure. As if she could ever be sure. But the idea that it loved her was enough.


The twilight is burning.

She feels hollowed-out and paper-thin, like the magic tearing through her is so much realer than her, as if when the burn stops flowing through her there will be nothing more holding her up.

And then it stops, and she feels light as an empty shell, a paper lantern. It's so easy to fall, was always so much easier to fall, she thinks, with dark amusement at her own double meaning, just before she feels her paper lungs crumple in and her paper heart struggle to keep up speed. She wishes for the light that burned once more. It hurt, but it was life. Being alive did that. There is no pain now, just a quiet and terrifying folding in of the self, on itself. She wants to think about something else, think about anything but this, give meaning and fierce, bitter beauty to this moment; but meaning falls away, and knowing a sure foothold from the crumbling wreckage all around her, her mind clings tenaciously to the truth. No, no. Dying is supposed to be raging and screaming and giving every last scrap of yourself up to the flames before you go, not wasting a single heartbeat on anything less than protest. It's supposed to feel like it did just then. Holding back the sun. I'd give anything to feel that agony again. I don't want to sleep, knowing this will be my last. Don't want to. Don't.


The twilight is infinite.

Every evening, as the sun draws down beneath the cusp of the world, and a heavy cast of dust motes tinge the light orange-pink, she is there, in them, among them, mingling with late summer heat and the scent of peonies in the air. There is no time for her, but eternal twilight; she is in every moment of the setting of the sun, and every moment lasts forever, the first faint pink ripples through the milky sky laid side by side with the last guttering wisps of light, fleeing from the earth like spirits returning to their celestial abode.

Sialeeds' spirit has its home, here in the dusky pinks and violet-greys, here in the half-light that heralds stars, here in the boundary between. Twilight is a time of transition, a waypoint where the world shifts gears, a halfway place. When she was alive, she might have said she'd be comfortable in a halfway place; she didn't fit anywhere else, after all, she'd have said with a smile that was pride and accusation on the outside, bitter underneath. Now she doesn't think about such things. Now she is content to be the spilling out of colour from fractured light, spears of warmth and comfort broken open against particles of dust, scattering their hues into the eyes of the weary and the unassuming. She doesn't remember what it is to be bitter any more. And not just because I never get the dawn shift, she would joke to herself, when first she felt it. She stopped finding that funny a while ago, too. Few things are funny here, but a gentle feeling of pleasantness surrounds her always, and she fears nothing.

It's even more beautiful from the inside. The romance of sun-streaked water seems a trivium to her now, like grasping at the reflection on a dragonfly's wing and saying you held the sun. Now when twilight comes she descends upon the land, and for a glorious hour or two the sky is wholly hers, and all who walk among it are touched by her. They know her better than anyone ever did while she was alive, though they may not know her name. Somehow, they know they are in the presence of something that has transcended beyond the lives they lead, that knows the secrets of life they have always longed to know, and their minds quiet for just a moment, though their hearts quaver at the knowledge. Some of them grasp at her with their minds, this streak of selfhood flickering through the evening light, enough like them to be familiar yet strange enough to be compelling; a maddening longing flutters in their breasts, and while once she might have thrilled that she could have inspired such need, now she feels only warmth for their brief brush with the infinite, tinged with sadness that, for them, it could not last. At least for now.

Living timelessly, it's hard for her to hold onto what it was to be human. She had goals once, but here her goal is simply to be, and this she cannot help but do. She had needs once, but here she needs nothing; when biology died so did the self that was forever unfulfilled. Once she prided herself in having made difficult choices, but here there are no choices to make, and the bitter pain of her former struggles seems distant. With each day, she is succumbing to the lull of the infinite. With each day, she lets a part of herself go. And with each conceit, each illusion stripped away, she discovers more and more of her reality. The truth was in her all along.