My North Star

She arrived complete, with scars and mannerisms we did not understand. At first timid, but soon filling each space she entered. Unfurling. Attempts at deciphering her just brought more questions, darker suspicions.
I had known immediately that she was special. Saw the star in her red eye, it flickered and flared at me. It sealed the deal. I fancied I recognised her as one of my own.
Each time I left the house, she cried. Returning I would find her curled under a table at the back of the building. The star in her red eye winking from the depths of her lair.
At dinner, she separated her food before she ate it. Calmly unpicking each meal, before she devoured it in huge gulps; as if it might be taken from her.
When the sky filled with fire and the death comets blazed, we hid under her table, out-waiting the storm. In the black morning after we emerged to a toxic dawn.
We wrapped ourselves in layers doused with the last water from the tap. She led me through the maze of carnage. We fled the aftermath. Out of the city. To the mountains, then the forest. My feet and heart bleeding. All left and lost behind me.
She had sought sanctuary here before, it seemed. Never faltering she forged ahead into the wild wastes and tundra. Teaching me, as we went, how to get by.
The star in her red eye is my North Star now.