PROSE – FOWC & RDP

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Before gods bore names and before stars had patterns, she was promised to the beast.

She was not born—she was forged—beneath an aurora that tore the heavens open, a raw seam of color bleeding across the void. The elders spoke of it in fearful whispers: the girl born beneath a wound in the sky must one day walk alone into the dark and not return.

And so she did.

The tiger awaited her at the threshold where the world ends — not as a beast, but as a remnant of a forgotten order. His fur shimmered with the dust of collapsed stars, his stripes like scars left by ancient battles. He was more than the creature, less than a god. He was a memory of what the cosmos used to be before time taught it to decay.

She should have been afraid.

Instead, she felt something deeper: the pull of recognition. The silent knowledge that she, too, was a relic — born out of step with the age that claimed her. She had carried it all her life, that ache that no mortal hand could soothe.

When their foreheads touched, she did not kneel. She did not beg. She listened.

In his steady breath she heard the slow exhale of dying stars. In his pulse, she felt the ancient patience of mountains that crumble and are reborn as sand. He spoke no words, but she understood: to be mine is not to be possessed, but to be remembered.

Her hands, steady now, sank into the thick, impossible warmth of his fur. She thought of how the world would forget her, how her village would carry on, how even the memory of her name would dissolve in the slow acid of time. But here — here she was seen. Known.

And if oblivion was the price, she would pay it gladly.

Above them, the etherlight burned brighter, fierce and beautiful, a scar that would never heal.

When she vanished into the folds of the night, no one marked her passing.

But somewhere beyond the reach of history, she still walks beside the last Skyborn, two relics out of time — bound not by chains, but by the quiet, immutable truth that even in a universe of endless forgetting, some things — some bonds — remain.