It is quiet.
There is nothing but the long autumn shadows and the sound of wind.
Michael groans to life then; a calm breath in the cooling air, then another. Once more, he has woken up somewhere he doesn't recognize. Michael doesn't feel scared. He feels... tired. Once more, Michael has woken up when he had hoped to sleep, and sleep, until every sun burns down to ash. One calm breath turns into a sigh, heavy and sharp.
It's been a while, Michael thinks. So long since Kirk and Makenna and Eleven and Inwe. So long since the heavy weight of a crown or the looming threat of actual, biblical demons. So long since the Dark. So long since he's done... literally anything. Moving feels strange. Breathing feels strange. He had hoped to retreat to some long-forgotten corner and wait out the apocalypse but, as usual he had walked too far for too long and wound up in somewhere else completely new.
He is a dampened sun, molten gold and glittering white, and when he lifts his head and lurches to his feet, the thick curtain of his mane falls over his face in every awkward direction. Probably, he can't see as well as he should; probably, Michael no longer has it in him to care. He gives an unceremonious, full-body shake, and begins to walk.
Michael is always running from things. He didn't used to be like that. He used to be so bright and so vibrant and he wants it back, wants that carefree laughter and not having to question whether or not he sees color correctly because everything is hazy and gray anymore. He decides, at this point, he's done running. While he walks, it is not the frantic pace of a hunted man, but the graceless meandering of a long and worn-down traveler. He has set up camp in too many storms. He has walked too many deer tracks to not see the patterns.
So Michael walks, without purpose.
And Michael waits.
Isra of the blood-red satin
“… That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home—someday, somehow. … ”
There is a moment, thin as a web, in which Isra inhales the cool air and thinks silence is the loveliest thing she has ever heard. It washes over her like a sermon, all long shadows written out in inky blackness, and breezes that whisper in chorus. Even her steps slow and move as if it's red silk beneath her hooves instead of long grass.
Of course in some places, when she thinks only of silence and something that throbs in her heart and sounds like love, the grasses flatten out and turn to satin red as blood. Isra looks at it once, long enough to blink and tell herself that the meadow isn't dead now that she's leeched magic into it like oil.
Perhaps it's that thought that quickens her steps from a walk, to a trot, and then to a run. She runs quick enough that the grasses tickling her belly are only stalks of wheat and autumn blooms. She runs because when she thinks of death, and magic, and love the silence feels like a reaper instead of a sermon.
She runs because she wants to fly. She wants to shed all her scales and darkness for wings and fire. Maybe she would have run forever (or until the grass turned to the cobblestones of her city) if the stallion didn't rise up from the horizon like a low, dying sun. Something in the way he walks (like a deer instead of a horse) reminds her of herself when she only wanted to drown. He reminds her of dust and apples and boys brighter than she could ever hope to be.
When she draws close enough to pick out his golden colors between the meadow grasses he reminds her of home. It's the memories of deserts and sadness that are in her voice when she draws beside him and asks, “Have you been walking long?” Isra remembers walking until the mountains and the sea swallowed her whole. She remembers how it felt to never want to stop because stopping brought dreams and gravestones.
Yet when the silence rises up between them again, she thinks once more of sermons and fire instead of darkness.
It sits in his bones like melting ice, drips through each and every cell of his trembling body. Michael runs not to escape this feeling of deep hopelessness but in spite of it; he is driven forward by his one, thin shred of self control, that little voice deep in the desert of his heart that tells him if he never stops, he never loses. He's not sure what game he's meant to be playing, only that it is tiresome.
He is familiar with desert animals, has a special fondness for dry grass and dunes. Makenna was a desert flower that came to him at his desolation, breathed life into his dusty bones and rekindled the fire in his ancient soul. Makenna is a long time gone. To some extent, everyone Michael knows is a long time gone. Probably for the best.
The mare that approaches is not unlike her, honestly. When Michael hears the thrum of her hooves he turns his sunshine face toward her, giving one last vigorous shake of his body before donning the armor of delusion - a smile that quietly pleads against questions he either can't or won't answer.
She looks sad, he thinks, or at least something is off; he can see it even from behind the wind-mussed mess of his forelock. He knows that expression well. It rides him day and night. The whiff of her motion startles him into clarity.
Have you been walking long, the sovereign asks, and this makes Michael laugh. His smile is stunning, if manic, and his laughter sounds like soft blankets and apple cider in the dead of winter. He's been walking for so, so long.
He says, "Probably have been," and winks, even if she can't see it. "How long have you been running?"
And then, a moment's pause before he adds, "Michael, by the way. I, uh, guess I live here." This he tacks on with some approximation of a shrug, where he tilts his head and smiles again, softer now. Finally, silence. He's comfortable in silence. Always has been.
Isra who seems strange
“You don’t have to say everything to be a light."
It makes her almost jealous to watch him wink and drape himself in brightness. There is something in him that suggests, to her, the dawn. Perhaps another horse wouldn't have noticed the too bright way his teeth flash in his golden smile. They might not have heard the sun in his laugh and the whisper of eternity in his voice.
But Isra is a golden horse in a unicorn skin and she is a story-teller who drowned in the sea. She wants to write in him ink, put to word the way all the layers and layers of him already make her ache. There is a story already pooling behind her teeth, black script that makes a sea of ink.
Suddenly she doesn't want to run anymore, not today, not when the fury is sleeping instead of roaring in her bones. “As long as I have been free.” Isra taps her hoof until her chain sings like a cracked bell. It stings when it taps against her joints. Her attempt at matching his smile fails and looks strange on her lips (as if they are made for sorrow instead of joy).
“But,” She steps closer, until they are almost shoulder to shoulder. “I'm learning how good stillness can be.” Almost do the words of ghosts and mountains and poison slip through her lips. She almost tells him answers to all the questions that no one yet knows to ask her.
Maybe it's his steady walk and his silence that make her feel almost easy in her own skin. It has been too long since she's felt so easy without the night-sky overhead. Whatever it is she can't help the way her hooves already move in the same direction as his.
Her own smile when she tries it again is dim compared to his own but it looks a little less strange on her lips. “I am Isra.” Her chain still sings softly between her words, as if that piece of steel hates the silence as much as she loves it. “Are you sure you live here?” She laughs at his almost hesitation and it feels like fire cutting through that still there sea of ink behind her teeth.
At her hoof a single blade of grass turns to a snow-white owl feather, and she's too busy looking at the brightness of him to notice.
There is the roar of ages in his ears, the steady thrum of tired blood.
His bones creak like an ancient ship and still he walks, as if searching -- though for what, he cannot quite recall.
She makes him calm. He is beginning to realize that the ground does not pass underfoot so much as it rises up to meet him. It has the hum of ancients and its voice is much deeper and much older than his own. When she speaks, Michael lets out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.
As long as she had been free. Michael stares at her for a moment, then another, with some indefinite, searching expression, before the quiet clang of metal draws him downward. Interesting, he thinks but forgets to say. He sees it, now. A queen in chains.
He levels his eyes, blue as the summer sky, on her again. This pause becomes pregnant, heavy. And then, "Toward? Away from? I can't tell."
Michael wouldn't be able to tell her if she had asked. He doesn't know. He's never known. Sometimes the dark and freckled sky speaks his name and he has no choice but to go. Sometimes he falls asleep for days on end and wakes up somewhere else. Sometimes he falls asleep and wakes up in the same spot and those are the times that send him reeling.
Perhaps he is possessed by the spirit of wanderlust.
Perhaps he has not yet found the door behind which all those things he doesn't dare to consider are kept.
Perhaps both.
"Honestly, Isra," Michael laughs. It sounds like apple cider. "I'm not sure."
I mean, what is a home? Liridon was home. Ilir was home. Wherever Eleven happened to be was home. Eleven is probably dead now. He doesn't know. Michael clenches his teeth, tilts his head back, away, looking at literally anything else.
Somehow, it takes until now: Michael in all his infinite wisdom but very little awareness realizes three things at the exact same time. The first is that there are structures, here and there. Buildings. Roads. Michael doesn't know if he's seen buildings, except in dreams. The next pulls his attention back to the chain wrapped around her, and the feather that blooms in her wake.
Michael walks on, thoughtful. Whatever expression he has is lost to the mess of his mane because it does not touch his mouth. "Does everyone do magic?" Something takes root inside him, something small and timid and fragile. It trembles when he breathes. Michael lifts his head again, brows furrowed expectantly. The air hums with the music of things he doesn't understand.
Isra and the string of pearls
“I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile."
“Sometimes I don't know either.” It feels like less of an confession to say the words when her chain sings like an anchor at her knee. “But then I remember every step has a direction.” And right now she's walking away from the lake and the mountains. She's walking home and each sharp press of metal against her skin carries her back to all the things she loves.
Isra wants to brush her nose across his cheek. She wants to nudge back the shroud of his mane and think of all the ways his eyes match the noon sky. She wants to paint him in a hundred different patterns of the word home. Maybe it's why her smile is a bright thing to his cider, all midsummer night and moonlight against skin the color of dirt.
“I wish--” She says and the word wish tumbles over itself (again and again like a dandelion seed in the breeze). Just like she wants to paint words on him, she wants to tell him that she wishes he were sure. She wishes, she wishes--
She wishes she could fit a whole world, or a million worlds, in her city on the hill that the moonlight loves.
But she never gets to say what it is that she wishes when a shadow covers them. It's darkness in the shape of wings that becomes a dragon the lower Fable flies. Isra smiles then, and it's brighter than before, brighter than she ever thought she could smile. Drops of seawater land in her eyes when she looks up. She blinks away the pain and thinks that nothing has felt sweeter than that sting of brine on her skin.
There is a tear born of salt instead of sorrow in the corner of her gaze when she looks back at Michael. It turns into a diamond when she blinks and it makes no sound at all when it falls into the grass rising up to meet their hooves. “Some of us do.”She almost tells him that there is wonder and horror living in the blood of the horses here.
Isra almost makes him a sea of pearls and golden stones from the dirt and grass leading them onward (or is it backwards?). She almost asks him if there is magic in his skin too. But something in his gaze and the autumn on his tongue keeps her silent. It's that same thing that kept her from brushing her lips against his brow and telling him that the city on the hill isn't a maybe. It's a home.
In the end she only makes, in the silence between them, a single blade of grass into a string a pearls. It looks at if it's waiting to be plucked, like a wild-rose waits for someone to fall in love.
Every step has a direction.
It sounds less and less convincing the more your direction becomes anywhere but here, but he supposes that just because he isn't sure he adheres to a mindset doesn't mean that it's not true. Probably, if Michael took more than a second to think about it (which he doesn't, because the concept burns white hot in his throat and it tastes like the desert, like burned wood, like sand and hot wind) he might realize that even his direction is onward, no matter the stakes.
The look he gives her is as long and as level as the autumn afternoon, those ocean eyes fixed and curious.
I wish, she says. "You wish," Michael breathes, barely audible as the breeze pushes the words back into his mouth. Words that were probably better left unsaid. The planet turns beneath him and the sun will come up tomorrow and yet Michael has this distinct rock in his stomach that tells him things are not quite that simple. They never would be.
"That might be interesting."
Michael still hasn't decided if he misses his magic. The mind can be a dark place and walking its labyrinth had never been something he considered an integral part of himself.
He thinks it was his daughter that caused him to change his mind--Inwe was so dark and so haunted and so fragile that it made Michael cold, sent all his bones trembling, opened wide the pit that separates from everything he could try to cherish.
He gazes at her across that yawning gap, this twinkling creature and her city on the hill. His city on the hill. That gaze lingers a little too long; the head angles away a little too slowly. His smile becomes unfocused and blurred, more like a lamp in the dead of winter than the bright summer sun.
A shadow passes over them and Michael's skin crawls, first with caution then delight. The shff of heavy wings drags his attention from Isra to the dragon above and for the first time the hair falls away from his face, soft and gold and enraptured by the beast. His heart sings. "Alright, I'll bite," Michael laughs, "tell me about this, and you. I think I literally might die if I don't get to know."
Isra of the sharp whistle
“The stars beckoned. And she had to go.”
She falls a little in love with him when he finally shakes back the shroud of hair that keeps him half-hidden. There is something there in the way wonder shines through him like moonlight through the windowpanes of her castle. She falls in love him the same way a queen learns to love her shining city on the hill.
Isra wonders if she might look inside him one day, past the hair and the maps of his endless steps. Part of her thinks she might find a well of ink there, ink that is golden instead of black. She wonders if she might read the words, home or adventure or sorrow on his bones.
She wonders but she doesn't ask.
His laugh feels like that word wish when it echoes off the wings beating above them like a stone echoing down, down, down a cliff. Her lips feel like sand against the wave of laughter that boils against her teeth hungrily. It wants to escape that bell-chime and brine laugh, it wants to join him until the meadows are alive with the sound of their amusement.
Perhaps it's understandable then, why each wilting petal around her turns into a bell. They chime in the breeze beneath his laughter that is beneath the beat of dragon wings. Isra thinks it's the loveliest song she has ever heard. Already she knows that tonight she will put ink and poetry to the meadow so that this moment might become immortal.
She finally joins the bells, and the wing-song, and his laughter with a whistle. At the sound the dragon turns with a hum of his own that maybe sounds a little like amusement. Isra didn't need a whistle to call Fable, but of course a whistle feels more dramatic. (and something in her wants to seem like more than a plain unicorn before this man with golden skin)
“Would you like to meet him?” The question is belated. The ground is already shivering finely as the dragon lands just ahead of them. For a moment Isra is trapped in the ocean-gaze of Fable and it's painfully clear that there is between them a deep sea of devotion. She blinks it away quickly.
“This is Fable.” The dragon reaches out his nose to the horses, laying his neck on the ground so that he might seem smaller than something that could be called a sea-monster. “He is companion to the Sovereign of that city you don't know if you live in.” Isra winks and the dragon hums and they wonder if he can figure out just who she is.
A thing can look like a thing without becoming it. Michael has taken this into his heart and wrapped it lovingly in colorful paper. Every fold is just so. Michael hopes that someday he can again feel as bright as he looks on the outside. He hopes that, at some point, he will see things like dragons and queens and the fire that flares in his chest will last longer that minutes. He feels emptied out already. Michael is a dying flame but he is trying to ignite. Every second of his life he is trying to ignite.
Michael is electric before the dragon and the queen, life breathed into his ancient bones by some humming voice that promises him things he doesn't dare to entertain. All his nerves feel ready to run but perhaps not away, this time. Perhaps toward this dragon and this unicorn and their city that comes alive in the moonlight. Perhaps Michael's away has shifted in the wind and his away is from everything that is not them, their Court, their night-sky city.
"Are you kidding?" Michael says breathlessly. He reaches a pink nose toward the dragon, always afraid but never hesitant. "Hi, Fable. You're sort of making me want to cry."
And he does want to cry. Proverbial arms outstretched, Michael is hit like a meteor; everything crashes at once. Isra and her dragon and her city and all the unpsoken things between Michael and every horse he's ever met and the alternating chill and sun of autumn and the vicious, raw delight he feels in this moment--each leaves a crater deeper than the last. If Michael does cry, it's because he's too happy. If Michael does cry, it's because he hasn't been anything in what has to be decades. If Michael does cry he wants it to be under the mess of his hair but it's still brushed back by the settling wind from Fable's landing.
If he does cry it's because he knows that this, too, is a fleeting and dull emotion. The only thing that he feels properly is frustration.
Michael retracts his reach, lowers his head and shakes it so the tangle of his mane falls back over his face. He sniffs. Michael's eyelids sting and when he exhales his breath is shaky and wet.
"Um," he begins, suddenly overcome with the urge to flee. Run fast and run far. Michael cann't for the life of him decide why it is that he doesn't. "Thank you. Did you say the Sovereign?" A long second passes where Michael is trying to compose himself and can't quite seem to do so.
"Thank you," he says again. "Thank you." A third time. "I think it's time I go." Michael had meant to at least try for an excuse. Michael had meant to say 'time I go introduce myself to everyone else,' 'time I get the lay of the land,'--literally anything but what he does say. Alas,
He hasn't stopped smiling. It is the one constant. "Seeing as I'm yours now, I'm sure I'll find you again soon." Michael is not satisfying. He is not whole. Michael is erratic and inconsistent and he hurts in more ways than he can give a name to. He thinks he'll try writing. Michael sniffs one last time, nodding at Fable as he turns to go. He turns to bump Isra's shoulder with his muzzle as he goes.
Isra who is left behind
“and I built my rituals in farewells.”
Fable looks at the stallion and thinks of the sun on the waves of his sea. He always through the color was more golden than yellow, more metallic than matte. It is a color that he has never seen anywhere in the sea, only above it. When he was a baby, in his egg made of pearls and cloaked in barnacles he dreamed sometimes of that color. He dreamed of gold.
So of course he reaches out to brush his nose to the stallion. One of them is salted and briny, the other smells of fresh grass and sadness. Each has something of wonder dancing in their eyes. Fable hums happily as the stallion pulls away. He is a dragon so he doesn't hear the wetness in the stallion's breath or the fluttering shift in her voice.
Isra notices it though. She notices sorrow and sadness like she notices each constellation in the sky. It is that part of her that wants to draw lines between all the pieces of Micheal that dampen his voice and make his legs walk, and walk, and walk until the direction no longer matters.
She would walk with him, if he let her.
But she doesn't tell him not to cry. She doesn't tell him that she wants him to belong to her city on the hill. She doesn't use the words, love or hope. Isra says nothing but, “you are welcome,” because she understands all the things in him that make him tumble out words, like stones running down a mountain.
When he touches her she only smiles, soft and fresh as a heartbreak. “Don't forget.” She's not sure what she's telling him to remember. Maybe it's don't forget that you're mine. Maybe it's Don't forget to find me again. Whatever it is that she's asking him it sounds like a demand instead of a request.
The unicorn and her dragon watch him leave. I like him, Fable says and she replies, As do I.
Fable does not want the stallion to go. Isra understands why he does. They watch until he's nothing more than a distant, golden bloom in the hills. Only then does Fable roar a goodbye.
