t had seemed like a better idea, in the moss-drowned bacchanalia of the ballroom. When wine had flowed like blood on a battlefield and names had lost their faces; when looking out into the crowd again, after two or ten swigs, had struck Aghavni with such vertigo she had dropped her wineglass, not entirely on accident, and watched numbly as it painted the floor in a shattering of scarlet. 

With practiced nonchalance, she had excused herself with a curtsy and vanished down a hallway before nameless faces could begin to titter. 

Solis' dogs. Aghavni grit her teeth as the vine-lashed stairway jutting from the trunk of the Hospital's massive cypresses rocked like a boat at sea; grimly, she resisted the urge to be sick over the railing and forced herself onwards, hoof over hoof. 

It was a discomfiting feeling, discovering her acute distress—she refused to say fear—of rickety, sky-reaching staircases. Had the Terrastellans lacked the sense to build a Hospital safe and anchored on, perhaps, the ground? The cypress answered her with a groaning shudder; she pressed her shoulder into bark and smiled wanly at the pleats of a passing skirt. 

The ember glow of a thousand candles greeted Aghavni like an old friend when she reached the landing at last. Flowers covered the floor in a bright, fragrant carpet, interspersed throughout with various offerings and sputtering paper lanterns. One lantern lifted up from the floor and bobbed towards her; as she picked her way across the cluttered space, it hovered shyly by her shoulder and glowed like a distant star. 

She felt like a child, peeking dubiously down each candle-lit room as she came upon them. It reminded Aghavni of the time a much younger her had poked her nose into a room she'd believed abandoned, only to gasp when she had found her uncle in the canopied bed with one of his 'pets'. She had fled, terrified; but that evening, after Mother had passed her to Nurse to bathe, she had heard vases shattering in the hallway and the high-pitched snarl of her uncle.

Father had been gone, sent on one of his much-begrudged diplomatic outings. She still remembered how Mother had come to her in the middle of the night, believing her asleep, to kiss her head and whisper that soon, they would be free. Father would take them away, she said, and they would be free. 

Tucked in the darkness between rooms, Aghavni touched her muzzle to a wilting bouquet of desert lilies and watched as softened stems straightened and greened; as satiny white petals shook out their wrinkles; as a closed bud unfurled into a tiny bloom, egg yolk yellow at its center. 

She still couldn't quite believe it herself, what she could make plants do. Her uncle would've called it witchcraft; magic had been banned in the castle. If she'd had this power then, she thought with malice, she would've made all the flowers shrivel into dust in his presence. Mother would reprimand her in front of the maids, but Aghavni knew she would be secretly pleased.

Plucking one of the lilies free, she placed it inside the lantern and sank down with it to the floor. "Isn't it strange, Mother?" she whispered. "This magic of mine. Solis has yet to forgive us, I suspect, to give me such a useless one." 

From where she sat, she could just make out a square of starry sky through the Hospital's canopy. As she stared up at it, for a single moment, Aghavni felt as if she had transcended the vastness; as if everything was as it should be, and she was exactly where she belonged.

Everything is white.

The entire forest is covered in a layer of hoarfrost. Orestes has never seen anything like it, and as they trek deeper into the forest he maintains, for the most part, a reverent silence. The day is early enough the sun has barely crested the distant, unseen horizon; the forest remains shadowed and cold, even as the sky paints itself in the colour of Sweet-Brier roses. It is nearly entirely silent; save for the crystalline tinkle of the creek, still unfound. 

Orestes glances back occasionally, to ensure Marisol is following. The sun continues to rise and as it does, the desert king’s tattoos begin to glow the molten gold they are known for. This sight is nothing compared to the hoarfrost; wind through the treetops dislodges particles, white and glistening. The rising sun catches them in orbit, and the silent forest takes on an ethereal, magic quality. Orestes can hear their breathing; intimate whoofs of air, that cloud like fog; even their footfalls are relatively silent as they progress up, up, up, following still the sound of the stream. They walk through drifting hoarfrost, lit to gold, and Orestes feels as though they walk among the stars. The cold does not reach him and there in his eyes there is a mischievous, clandestine promise; Orestes glances at Marisol as though they are conspirators and in the morning light they have discovered an untellable secret. 

They walk until the sun has risen and the hoarfrost as settled; the forest remains perfectly white, however, and the creek reminds undiscoverable because of the fact it runs beneath a sheet of ice. At last Orestes settles in a very small clearing—it can barely be considered such—where the creek once ran in a small waterfall through the rocks. Now it is frozen, and brilliant, and it makes him think of poetry and how everything will reawaken in the springtime.

It is now and only now that Orestes sets down the pack he had been carrying across his shoulders. He draws from it several pieces of dry tender and lights a fire. Nearby, Orestes sets down a tarp and a blanket above it, to protect them from the snow. Finally, Orestes produces a bottle of wine and a various assortment of cheeses, breads, and fruits from the pack. It is clear there the pack is not yet emptied; however, he pulls out only one more item.

Then, with an impish glint to his eye, comes a bouquet of celosia, zinnias, bells of Ireland, with accents of Queen Anne’s lace. He happened to know a florist capable of growing flowers from nothing, and he presents them now with a decorative flourish. Orestes rises for a moment, only to uncover from a nearby alcove a snow-covered tarp, beneath which is a stack of pre-staged wood, dry enough to tend the fire. 

It begins to blaze and at last, with utter shyness, Orestes says: “I wanted to…” he stammers for a moment. It was much more eloquent in his mind. Orestes had thought of everything he wanted to say as they had walked to the location he’d chosen and… everything he thought now escapes him. His silence is filled by the tinkle of the water beneath the ice; the quiet wind through the trembling, frost-covered pines; his breathAfter a long and self-conscious pause he settles on: “I wanted to share an experience neither of us has had before.” 

For a moment he is struck with a fear that, perhaps, she has had this type of experience before… and it would cheapen this moment. Orestes is taken aback at how mortal the thought is, how… vulnerable. It is something he has never thought before. 

What Orestes does not even realise is in all the time they have been walking, he has not thought of his Court, and more significantly—

He has not thought of the sea. 

Of course, good things can never last; and from his peripheral he sees Ariel drift, ghostlike, through the trees. The lion's gaze, although impassive, feels as leaden as Atlas's burden. There is disapproval there, and Orestes knows the lion believes his time better-spent attending to duties in Solterra. Yet, Ariel says nothing. He merely leaps atop a fallen tree and settles, the snow sizzling from the luminous heat of his fur. 

Orestes only dwells on his companion's presence for a moment, before redirecting his attention to Marisol; if anything, the lion's arrival diminishes some of the tension the desert king feels. It is not often that Orestes is nervous when discussing emotions; but today, today... He wants it to be perfect, and knows that things rarely are.

@Marisol || “Speaking.”