Delicate features cringe on her golden face as she watches the weather float on from outside her cover of trees. She really hated winter, it has been said before and it will said again. Elena is a child of summer through and through. She is a child of the sunshine, of flowers standing tall and beautiful, and she is a child of the warmth that she remembers surrounding her back when she had been with her family. This is not Elena’s first winter, she had experienced her first when she had lived in Windskeep, her birth land. She remembered having fallen asleep between the dark form of her father and the creamy form of her mother, feeling safe and snug as they kept close to her. Not too far off lay her buckskin grandmother, always staying close to the small family inside an even larger extended one. Then, those eyes had open beneath the fluttering of long, dark lashes and they opened wider still when the sights outside greeted her. It was a land cast into an alabaster shade, sparkling and shining in the morning light. Quickly, she had wriggled out from between her parents and raced to the outside, her feet sinking immediately beneath the flakes stacked on top of each other. That ash dusted muzzle lowered towards, touch reaching out hesitantly to taste the little creations only to find they tasted like water, and were cold to the touch. How strange! She stomped around in the strange landscape, kicking up her heels as her parents watched, leaning against one another like perfect puzzle pieces of contrasting colors. It was only when a cold breeze brushed by over the icy landscape and Elena felt a deep chill down to her bones that she moved back to the warmth and safety of her parents. “Okay,” she said in her young, little voice. “I think I am done with this, you can take it back to where it came from now.”
And has been her feelings on the matter of winter since.
She is counting the days until the tulips bloom.
Lilli? She wonders, asks, pleads, as she closes robin egg blue eyes, are you doing the same?
These past few years had been a whirlwind of emotions, but she has settled now until she was a numb tranquility. Maybe you can only feel too much before you have to stop. But being numb was worse than anything else, this she knows.
(He touches her, she can feel his warm breath. Everything is telling her to run, he knows she should go, tells her to do as much, and yet she stays. “Why don't you let anybody in?” Why don’t you let me in?)
Stupid, she had been stupid. Elena knows this now, but then why does she feel this heat under her skin despite the chill of winter. ‘Tunnel,’ she thinks, ‘get out of my head.’
She finds herself at the base of the tower in Terrastella. It looms over her like a shadow. She gets the eerie feeling someone is watching her and quickly those glacial blues turn to look behind her. No one. Tunnel. She still cannot get the feeling of him off her skin and it would seem her mind cannot leave him alone either, she was getting paranoid. Once more eyes turn to look at the tower, ignoring the way her skin creeps upon her spine. “No one is there,” she breathes. Her attempts at convincing herself are weak, but maybe she is not alone as she thinks.
* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.
"Good sense comes the hard way. And the grace of the gods (I'm pretty sure) is a grace that comes by violence."
From the comfort of the tower Mari watches a body walk, so small against the white ground, and wonders what, exactly, the girl is looking for.
It is bitterly cold outside, windy, and the streets are slicked with ice; whatever she is trying to accomplish, the sovereign muses, it must be important. The streets are otherwise empty. The world is otherwise silent, lacking the usual song of birds or children laughing. Even Marisol herself doesn’t go out in this kind of weather, not unless it’s absolutely necessary. (Although it could be pointed out she doesn’t even really feel the cold anymore. It’s closer to a force of habit.)
Her office, nestled up almost against the roof of the citadel, is a disaster. Papers are strewn all over the floor, books piled into precarious towers. Candles burn shakily against the incoming darkness. Anselm is laying sleepily in a pile of pen nibs, a white comma close to the fire that burns in the mantle, utterly unconcerned with the frazzled way his bonded is sifting through paperwork, history books, festival receipts and everything else that been foisted on her to complete before the next solstice.
You could at least help, Mari grumbles through their link. Anselm lazily blinks open just one hazel eye, the color of which is almost bleached out by the way the firelight plays over it, and closes it again without responding.
The room is closing in. The walls are folding forward; everything is getting smaller, pressing in. The sovereign flashes her head out of the window for a moment and inhales lungful after lungful of cold, sharp air, so cold it makes her shudder, so sharp it sends a prickle of pain into her chest. She closes her eyes and drinks in the wind.
When she opens her eyes again, feeling a little less dead, she looks down to find the stranger waiting, statue-still, at the base of the tower. The distance between them, completely vertical, doesn’t seem all that huge. She could just—fall.
Marisol holds her breath, unsure. Then, resigned, she trots down the steps and into the street.
Outside it’s bitterly cold; as soon as she steps outside she is buffeted by a strong gust of prickly wind, feathers flattened against their will, hair bristling in the breeze. The girl waiting in the street is only a touch smaller than she is, painted in bright gold like sunlight (burnished, now, in the purplish darkness). “By Her hand,” Mari calls, her voice half-lost in the wind. “Come inside.”
The dainty filly had run out ahead of her mother, her childish giggles floating behind her like footprints. The valley grasses that surrounded the lake were lush and soft beneath her feet, with flowers bloomed and bright clustering the landscape. Up ahead, she could see the sun sparkling off the water, and with an excited squeal she had immediately raced ahead of her pale mother. She ignored her mother’s sharp protest, nearly at the water’s edge, her large amber eyes taking in the way sparkles and shines. But those awkward, gangly legs are no match for her mother’s much more fluid, strong stride, and in a matter of seconds she is crashing into the side of her mother’s barrel. “Elena!” There is worry that crests every syllable of her name. “What have I told you about rushing head first into things? You don't even know how to swim, what were you thinking?” And it is not so much sternness that Elena hears in her mother’s voice, but a tremor of fear.
But Elena was so oblivious to the near heart attack she had given her mother, and instead she ducks under her creamy stomach to peer out at the water she longed to romp in. “I just wanted to play in the water like you daddy did when you met,” she says and there is a trembling lower lip as if she may cry, but Beylani has seen this behavior before and she smiles before moving the girl off in another direction. She should know better.
Elena should know better.
She always should have known better.
There are some things she would know anywhere.
Some of these are sweet, like the exact architecture of her mother’s body, the lilt of her voice, the way she had smelled like flowers that Elena had no name for.
Some of them, well – they are not so sweet.
Other things she would know anywhere—the hot breath of the matter destroyer, the sound of his hooves hard against the forest floor, the way his voice reminded her of rats scampering on broken glass.
The girl with pale locks knows a leader when she sees one.
Marisol is stunning. Her grey eyes remind her of stones that scattered up the walls of the giant overlook in that ancient valley that Elena sometimes feels like she can no longer remember. She is brilliant, commanding, beautiful, intelligent, and Elena does not know her, but she is like Kensa, like Valerio, like Aletta, and the rest.
Her voice is like smoke and ash, heated, but not dangerous, and she both blossoms beneath it and then grows solemn. For a moment she is quiet as she considers her, her face serene, her smile flickering in the corners as she speaks. “Thank you, it is a cold day.” She follows the mare to shelter, her body shakes with chill. “I’m Elena.”
* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.
"Good sense comes the hard way. And the grace of the gods (I'm pretty sure) is a grace that comes by violence."
Of all the things Marisol must deal with, this is, surprisingly, one of the most tiring.
She has always been introverted, turned off, even, from the idea of making friends (or anything more); to be the face of her city.and wear a smile, pretend to be friendly, offer a tour, to every stranger that passes through, is draining. Even worse, it often makes her think of Asterion. He probably would not have found it such a chore. And he certainly wouldn’t be caught dead whining about it, not even in his head. Mari knows she is Dusk more than she is anything else—more than a woman, more than a warrior, more than a person—but she knows, too, that she is not Dusk in the way people expect or think is right, and that has always stricken her with a kind of fear. Bone-deep imposter syndrome.
Do her people not miss the king that was Vespera’s own image? What a disappointment she would be next to them.
Mari’s eyes half-shut against the bitter wind. In the unsheltered courtyard, the air is rough with microscopic prickles of snow that settle in her short hair and ice it stiffly into place. Her muscles—already sore from training early this morning—protest even more harshly against the cold, but the Commander stands her ground, face impassive, careful not to wear the expression of anything but a pleasantly unworried interest.
The girl (girl, Marisol thinks, though they must be nearly the same age) is the summer-sun-gold of so many Solterran nobles. Even in the oncoming sunset her eyes shine a bright desert-sky blue, and her brow is marked with a perfect heart of white hair. Perhaps that’s where the need to call her girl comes from—the shy look on her face, the smile that looks like it’s about to ask for something—it reminds Marisol of the way the cadets act around her on their first days in the barracks, half awed and half afraid.
I’m Elena, she says. Mari nods as she steps back to open the door, following the stranger into the foyer without responding just yet; a thick wind of warm air envelops the two of them as they step inside.
The entrance room is beautiful but modest, a circular stone room with a spiral staircase, iron wall sconces and a few awkwardly thrown clay vases filled with fresh-cut flowers. “Commander Marisol,” the sovereign introduces, stopping in the middle of the room to shake a crust of frost from her hair. “Nice to meet you. Are you visiting?"
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Good soldiers may not make good kings.
Good men may not be good leaders.
And.
Good kings can be bad people.
In the lands she has seen with the silvery blue eyes of her mother, in the lands she has lived with the bones of her father, this is what Elena has learned.
Her loneliness was exquisite. She felt it in the blister of pain beneath skin stretched too thin, too tight, of broken bones and spilled marrow. Her heart would beat in her chest echoed by hurt, etched in a beautiful desolation that she so often refused to let end. Going back again and again and again, so convinced this time it would be different. There is a part of her, a broken, retched sliver of her heart, that stood selfish, that wanted them to know the same aches she has felt. But, that feeling soon passed like clouds over the sun in summer.
She isn't sure what to think when she sees the mare with that steely look and beautiful presence, while inside Elena has sorrow hidden behind those thoughtful blue of her eyes. There are nightmares that Elena still carries between her teeth and tucked behind her breastbone.
Elena has never been able to fully understand the capacity of her own feelings, the way they dip and fall and peak like the mountains of Paraiso she once stood upon believing she could fly. They are tangled things, messy, and for someone who longs for the cleanliness and beauty of black and white living, Elena wishes she could just ignore them. Breath in the cold air and rid herself of any of the things that form in the back of her mind—suspicion, sorrow, guilt, confusion—and let them melt away like spring. Perhaps she can be a little reckless, a little too bold and brazen, but she has found that things are things she can control.
Elena is not all light she has come to find out and she would have to learn to live with her sunshine and shadows tangled together.
She is such a malleable metal, bending and giving whenever anyone speaks to her. It is not different in the presence of this mare. Her smile is slow and soft, hazy along the edges as if hovering along her ash dusted lips.
The warm air is comforting and only lightens that soft smile on her face. Elena has been and always will be a child of summer. “A pleasure,” she responds, looking up at her slightly with eyes of blue sky. “I met Anandi a few days ago, I’ve been staying in the guest houses,” she admits sheepishly. “I was hoping to join your ranks in Dusk.” There, there is the request that sends a put into her stomach. “I am a skilled healer, starting as an apprentice at a young age, and a capable politician should the occasion arise,” she says, despite the words, there is a humble roll to Elena’s shoulders and modest duck of her head, as if there were discomfort in saying such things about herself. “The politics of my last home were—complicated, at best,” she admits. Beqanna had been a land of unrest and chaos, she sends a silent hope that Lilli, Kensa, and Caspian were okay. “I would be honored to serve this court.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
"Good sense comes the hard way. And the grace of the gods (I'm pretty sure) is a grace that comes by violence."
As she always does, Marisol spends the first few moments they have together sizing the stranger up.
It is something she has grown quite practiced at—an easy glance up and down, noting how Elena stands just slightly shorter than she does; her slightly awkward stance, as if cowed or impressed by the mute splendor of the citadel’s first room; the soft blue of her eyes, which sets Mari a bit more at ease, because she cannot find even a glint of anything but light in Elena’s gaze and her shy smile. The sovereign lets her posture relax. Her shoulders finally fall. Baked by their body heat, the room grows a few degrees warmer, and frost melts down Marisol’s spine.
The citadel is unusually empty. From other rooms there can be heard the clatter of dishes, the low voices of cooks and maids cleaning up the after-dinner mess. Somewhere windows are being shut against the cold, toothy wind. Mari does not mind the silence (she never has), but for the brief moment that she and Elena stand close without speaking, she almost misses the cushion that the usual chattering white noise of the city would have provided.
She wonders suddenly, briefly, what has brought so many strangers here in recent days. Mephisto, Elena—Lyr, who is not new but had never before bothered to show his face—is it something in the air or is it demanded by the stars? Is there something she doesn’t know, a spell that has been cast, a letter that has been sent to all Novus’ wanderers? But there is nothing she can do about it. To refuse any of them would be to spit on Vespera’s temple. So Marisol holds her tongue, and swallows her questions, and pricks her ears forward as the palomino begins to speak.
I met Anandi a few days ago, she starts. Mari blinks in mild surprise: she does not know whether to be pleased by the Emissary’s proactivity or disappointed in her own failure to find Elena first. Finally she decides it doesn’t matter and pushes the unproductive feelings to the side. I am a skilled healer and a capable politician should the occasion arise, Elena continues; I would be honored to serve this court.
Mari blows out a short, thoughtful, half-surprised breath. Often it is her champions that deal with issues like these, the smaller decisions of who to put where, while she spends her time wrangling cadets and dealing with citizens like Lyr who think they should be spies. But it’s nice, Marisol realizes, to make such a simple decision. Easy in a way that is still satisfying.
“It seems as though you would fit in well with our medics,” she answers finally, eyes a little warmer, “unless you were thinking of something else?”
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
The most exciting moments of her life seemed to have happened before she was even born. At a young age both her mother and father had to travel from their homes and both ended up in Paraiso and falling in love and so on and so forth until Elena came into being. Living proof of their love and devotion to one another. Of course, their story had been much longer, and more complicated that merely love at first sight. Despite her adventurous nature, and her love of hearing the stories from the ancients of Windskeep, her favorite story was of her mother and her father. It was the one she begged for again and again as her nightly tale before drifting off into a seamless slumber. For it always astounded the little girl with creamy locks and a perfectly shaped heart adorning her forehead, how at such a young age her parents had traveled in opposite directions, spending a half a year each covering miles, upon miles. That the whole entire time, they never had an idea that they had merely been moving closer to one another, one step at a time, until the day they met beside the glistening lake and her dark father had been captivated by Beylani’s elegance and grace. And her stunning mother had been enraptured by her father’s tough exterior, but a passionate fire burning behind his amber eyes. It had not been as simple as an ‘I love you,’ and an ‘I love you too.’ They had faced their trials, overcoming awkward teenage years, (Elena delighted in the part of the story where Starlett and Hoshi had stumbled upon them by the beach, “only to ruin a perfectly good date.” her father always said with a crooked grin towards his daughter.) And then Frostbane, and the strife he had inflicted, Beylani’s surprise pregnancy with Elena, leaving Paraiso and their little batch of ocean land behind, and then finally, Elena’s birth. And in that moment, Benjamin swears he didn't think he could love either of his girls more. “But you seem to prove me wrong, every minute of every day.” He would say with a sly grin and a delicate touch to each of their cheek’s in turn, signaling the end of the story. The sunshine embellished filly would then curl up next to both of her parents, shutting her amber eyes, content to be wrapped in the warm, embracing, love that was their small family.
It was perfect.
Too perfect.
Elena is convinced this is why it ended. Does God grow jealous when life he created on earth grows to be more beautiful than the heaven he sits in?
She does not know better to look the mare up and down, to scan the edges of her body, determine whether or not she is safe. Maybe, Elena would do well to learn from Marisol. If all the commander sees is light shining from her eyes, it is no doubt the tears of ghosts glistening in the sun.
She interrupts the air between them with sweet, lilting tones. “Novus seems…quite peaceful,” she notes, perhaps only because of the silence around them, or maybe because the wildness of Beqanna still burns if she thinks about it for too long. “Has it always been?” She questions because she needs to know if she has found herself amongst another war.
The breath that slips through her commander’s lungs, Elena is unable to tell if its intentions are friendly or if she should be concerned. The words that follow behind like a kite’s tail though relieve any worries. “Thank you,” she says quickly. “I think that would suit me just fine,” she adds with a smile. There is a glisten in those blue eyes, and it is curiosity that propels her tongue once more. “Have you always been Dusk’s commander?” She asks then, taking a step closer to the steely woman.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
"Good sense comes the hard way. And the grace of the gods (I'm pretty sure) is a grace that comes by violence."
Surely there are many differences between them; anyone, Marisol thinks, could tell just by looking that she was been run ragged and made sharp in ways Elena never has.
Neither of them can know it, but perhaps the vastest difference between them are the memories they hold of childhood. Where Elena’s reminiscence is bright and glistens golden, Marisol’s recollections are grungy, dark, even, and ripped at the edges; where Elena thinks of her parents with fondness Marisol thinks of hers with an ache in her chest like a spear wound and blood that feels like it’s becoming sticky and black.
Her mother—her father—their faces make her lungs ache. The grave plot with the bundle of hyacinths. The dusty, run-down boardroom at the edge of the city. The garden now overrun with weeds, the rusted watering can; the childhood journals, warped and water-stained.
None of it feels real anymore.
Mari is listening closely, with cool, intent eyes, when Elena ventures that Novus seems… quite peaceful. Her lips purse. It’s not wrong, per se; real war hasn’t broken out for years. But it’s hard to believe when she has been raised to find the danger around every corner, to parry the attacks before they even happen, and her habit of over-extending those worries to the edge of the known universe.
“Sure,” the Commander answers, running her tongue around her teeth; the look on her face is one of resignation, nearly an admission of defeat.“Yes,” she backtracks after a moment, “mostly. In my lifetime war has been uncommon. But Novus is certainly not perfect. At times… inharmonious.”
Mari’s mouth settles into a soft line as she thinks back to the mess in Solterra, Raum’s bones buried in the sand; Prudence’s appearance, Dalmatia’s decade in her cell: how can there ever be real peace in a place like this, rife with secrets and wild magic?
To Elena’s second question, she responds—“Not always. But for half my life by now, easily. Much longer than I’ve been sovereign.”
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Elena’s monsters, Elena’s villains. They have always been real. She can see one of them now, with his dead, demon eyes, and vile lips, the stench of murder tangled in his coat. He had been a monster. He had leveled cities and burned families and there had been nothing humane about him, but still, she had cared for him. Even when he had taken her away from her home, her family. He would not have cared for her back, she accepted this. Let him go. Because she knew, oh she knew, no matter what he could offer her, it would always be destruction and suffering he would give her.
(There are days when she still thinks of him.)
She knows the thoughts of him are coming because she will grow cold without there being a chill in the air, without a cloud passing over, or the wind blowing by. It was always unwanted, just as she had tried to convince herself how she felt about him. He was wrong. Everything about him and inside him and them together was wrong. Oh but she was so stubborn.
The creamy haired girl frowns slightly at the way Marisol’s lips purse suddenly. Perhaps, her initial assumption of Novus was incorrect. “War is…” Elena doesn't finish her sentence, she trails off. As the daughter of an officer and the goddaughter of a guardian, Elena has seen her share of wars and what it does. There are not words. She puts the idea to rest.
While the commander’s words do not comfort Elena, they are are enough to absolve any doubt that perhaps she left one torn land for another. Beqanna had been ripped apart in its separate corners, and Lilli and Elena had continuously blurred the lines between the north and the east, lines that now stand firm, written in fire.
“Well commander,” she says with a small dip of her head. “I look forward to serving you,” she offers. Elena’s blue eyes glance towards the window. “I should probably head back to my quarters. I don't think a walk in both the cold and the dark would be kind.”
And she departs.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
"Good sense comes the hard way. And the grace of the gods (I'm pretty sure) is a grace that comes by violence."
At times, Marisol almost resents how quickly the faces of her court seem to change—everywhere she looks, it seems there is some new vendor setting up shop, a cadet waiting to be booked, a courtier looking for work. At times, it’s overwhelming to know that the flow of citizens in and out will never really slow. How is she supposed to keep track of all of their needs, their wants and complaints? How can anyone manage a kingdom that refuses to sit still?
But then there are moments like these in which the Commander feels more grateful for this steady stream of new arrivals. Elena cannot compare her to Asterion, nor does she know of any of the scandals she has spent so long working to override with frantic success. She knows nothing—yet—of Marisol’s flaws, and so for once in her life the Sovereign can perhaps begin to relax, knowing that her past will not come to haunt her as long as it is only she and Elena here.
I look forward to serving you, says the golden girl, and Marisol’s lips curl in an unusually open smile. For a moment she debates asking where the stranger will be staying, or perhaps inviting her to sleep, for tonight, in the citadel; but it’s late, and Elena is already halfway out the door by the time Mari gathers her thoughts enough to know what she would even ask.
Instead she dips her head as Elena leaves, stands for just a moment in the warm silence of the foyer, then finally turns to climb upstairs.
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![[Image: ddg6quy-9d15dab5-339c-4b09-8b57-20a99fda...jvUop12efQ]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/c175b84a-409b-40aa-8b86-49ed65b989ee/ddg6quy-9d15dab5-339c-4b09-8b57-20a99fda550e.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2MxNzViODRhLTQwOWItNDBhYS04Yjg2LTQ5ZWQ2NWI5ODllZVwvZGRnNnF1eS05ZDE1ZGFiNS0zMzljLTRiMDktOGI1Ny0yMGE5OWZkYTU1MGUucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.j-t9RuUsmMyaVL-O1rvZqbyyPYdOvtjHLjvUop12efQ)
