this is how a heart breaks

Music had always been Aliana's one means of escape during her life in captivity, so it was easy for her to lose herself to the song she and Siren crafted together. The chorus of their voices in the air blended like milk and honey: sweet, mellifluous, and smooth as it cascaded through ranges of hopeful highs and solemn lows. Pitches rose and fell like the waves in front of them, dulcet vocals of two faes proclaiming their heartaches and pains to a cruel universe and crueler gods that cared little for them. This was their hymn for the lives they had been given to play, and each lady would play their role to its fullest. Ali, a wolf who had never known the taste of freedom for even a day, and Siren, the fabled princess trapped within her own life by fate and circumstance. Though the highborn and lowborn women shared vastly different origins, there was more similarity than met the eye.

As Siren sang through her final verse, Ali switched to singing soft a cappella notes to accompany her lyrics, fading off to a low hum as Siren concluded the melody, both faes slipping seamlessly into silence. This had been the first time Ali had interacted with Siren that didn't involve her bleeding or being sewn up, and it had felt so powerfully intimate. Aliana had never sung with anyone else before, and to do so with Siren, the lady of the island, and a beautiful vocalist, it felt like an honor! Ali slowly opened her eyes, aquamarine gaze drifting out over the dark sea as the sun began to crest the horizon and bring dawn to Boreas.

Her ears flicked when Siren spoke to eventually break the silence, complimenting her voice and making Ali's heart flutter in her chest. Such a compliment coming from the lyrical Klein princess, especially when she had been the one hypnotized by Siren's vocals! "Thank you, Lady Siren," she said with a gracious bow of her head to the tiny woman, feeling heat flush across her cheeks for having been so bold as to simply start performing with the caramel-colored seraph. "Your voice is... magical. I've never heard a wolf sing as beautifully as you." She decided to leave the thoughts of being bewitched by Siren's voice out of her mouth, lest she make a bigger fool of herself.

"How have you been, my Lady?" she asked after a moment, bringing her teal-green eyes over to Siren's delicate features, marveling at what sort of lineage the Klein siblings must have had to have created an Aphrodite and Adonis such as Siren and Chimera. "I haven't seen you out amongst the island for some time. I hope everything is all right...?" She didn't reveal her hand yet, or how much she knew. Dalila had let it slip that something had happened to Siren, something devastating enough that it kept the tiny she-wolf in reclusion and had devastated Dalila. Ali might not have known the details, but it didn't take a psychic to be able to predict the level of destruction something had caused in her life to hear so much pain and sorrow in Siren's alluring voice.

"Aliana"