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“Shorekeeper.”
“Yes?”
“Have I ever asked you why you wear that veil?” Camellya yawns into her hand. A careful side eye, but not intentioned enough to hide that distaste. “Doesn’t seem like a very efficient choice to make — doesn’t it blind your peripheral?”
“Shorekeeper doesn’t need to look, of course.” Aalto chuckles. “Look at her — do you think she really depends on her eyes to detect everything?”
The red maiden says nothing — but soon enough a vine wraps around Aalto’s mouth before Camellya stalks off in the opposite direction, humming to herself. There’s no one left to hear her answer — except Cosmos, who sits in her hands limply, left behind when Encore came by to do something earlier.
In some traditions, veils are worn to mourn the dead.
But does she really have the emotions to mourn?
“You’ve never told me why you wear the veil. Have you always worn it?”
There was a time in the past where she did not. A time when she newly emerged from the Tethys System — and the world was amassed with chaos and impending doom, but golden eyes had held firm with their devotion to salvation. An unwavering determination. A broken realisation — a desire to hit restart.
Like a butterfly that carries the last bit of its cocoon on its freshly wet wings — the veil flutters in the cold winds of the Black Shores.
“Not always.” But how does one explain, the desperate comfort in a blanketing weight upon her head, she who should feel nothing, should feel no emotions, no longing, yet yearned so dearly to have the weight of a hand resting atop her head, soothing her like a child? Encore doesn’t like it, Camellya doesn’t understand, and Aalto only laughs it off whenever she asks why humans choose to do this, a hand on the head and a smile so warm. What she has learnt she cannot unlearn, cannot undo, cannot forget the gentle touch of a hand to her head — wait for me here, for when I return.
“It shimmers.” The Rover smiles, perhaps admiring the weave. “But…”
“Hm?”
“May I remove it?”
She has no breaths, no heart, no true natural life to speak of, but her chest feels compressed; stuck, with something that should not be there, when her head slips and she nods.
The veil slides off her head ever so lightly, like a brushing touch. Like a hand to stroke her head and to soothe her.
But it’s not an illusion. Even from her eyes she can see — Rover’s hand has never left her head.
“Why do you always bind yourself?” Golden eyes blink, soft as the dawning light, but brighter than it all, blinking into warm laughter. “There’s a thing or two you could learn from Camellya.”
But they are inherently different, and perhaps they all wear their pain differently — Camellya who has given up, and she who persists in the hidden shadows of the shores. She who walks the lead in the absence of their leader, hollower than all else, in the footsteps of one she could never dream to become — if only because she can never replace her, at all, in her heart.
“In my journey to Jinzhou, I’ve learnt something from the Grand Library, knowledge imparted by Lady Changli, and Magistrate Jinhsi. That in some cultures,” Rover leans in to whisper. “A veil is worn on a wedding night — and to remove it is to step into an intimacy that is uniquely one, unparalleled.”
She who can feel no heat — detects a burning in her cheek, a malfunction in her voice, when Rover pulls her close, and they have never been closer before, in all their years of recognition.
“So listen to me, my dear Shorekeeper.” Rover kisses her, with a tone so languid, a composure ever patient. “Love me freely; unbound and unrestrained. To exist because of me — I now request that you love yourself, as you love me.”
The veil flutters back into her hands, an invitation to let go, but how could she?
“I love you.”
It is the way they do, in the Black Shores, as a family, as one.
Serving for what they believe in; and perhaps hers is just love, hidden like veiled secrets, only for Rover to see.