Chapter Text
Seff had been alone for a long time before things changed. It had never felt strange, not really. For a while she had even thought it would be over, had adjusted to having Wynn by her side, but though the grief never quite subsided, once she was alone again it felt as though she had never not been so.
It was comfortable. It was familiar. That was why she had stopped reaching out, had sequestered herself to the cabin, hunting, chopping wood, picking through her savings to pay the utilities on the occasion she felt like it. She had stopped taking jobs. Once in a while a call would come in, so she disconnected the phone. Wynn's friends stopped visiting. Her own friends stopped visiting.
She sat outside most nights and looked up at the stars. On nights the moon was new and gone, there were hundreds visible, like white paint splattered on the underside of the endless black dome of the sky. On nights it was full, they faded into the background and vanished between the trees. Most nights she tasted blood.
Often she asked herself why she was still alive and found she could not come up with a good answer. She thought about trees falling in the woods without an audience. She thought about the proof of her existence: a hundred carved clocks, a cabin that was slowly pissing off more and more utility companies day-by-day, tracks in the forest, a dresser in an eccentric, extravagant house.
The stars had been pushed back by the light of the full moon the night she considered dying.