Her prize for him would be a grin, as gleeful as a girl’s, if she knew what he had decoded - a reassembling of her name that had never occurred to her. Elif would feel pride like a sunrise to have him tell her so.

But of course he does not, and she feels like a sunrise, anyway, with the wind full beneath her wings and the cold stinging her eyes and the entirety of the world spread out ahead of them both.

Whatever made up the water of the gods-pool, it must not have been real gold, for it does not sit heavy and sinking inside of Elif’s stomach. She knows well the weight of that bright metal; Solterrans have always been over-fond of it. Instead, if there is any change at all wrought in her, it lives instead in her blood, which feels sparking-hot and quick, warm even as the cold wind drags tears from her eyes and whistles through the gaps between her feathers.

If they were racing - truly racing - she could ask the wind to buoy her as soon as she sees him alongside her. But the urgency in her is not asking her to win but to live, and instead she only grins like a fool at the way he yells at the darkening sky, and stretches out a wing-tip to see if she might brush one of his.

It passes like this, in silence but for the wind rushing in their ears, in darkness but for the way they are still lit by the sun so low on the horizon, until they reach the peak.

Elif has not come to the gods’ mountain as often as, perhaps, she ought; piousness and femininity were lessons she never learned. She prefers her god as wild as she is (and so it is still difficult, to reckon the knowledge of Solis with the idea of him). So it is with unfamiliarity and a little awe that she touches deftly down to the ground, hardly kicking up a cloud of dust with her landing, and shakes out her neck and shoulders as she looks about.

The view from here is almost like flying, the way the fields and hills roll flat below. If it were not so dark, she thinks she could see the golden flare of the desert, and the distant blue wink of the sea. Oh, but her heart has grown heavier since her hooves touched earth, and it is not long before she turns to Mateo, stepping closer to the man, her heart still racing and full.

Among the clouds, silence is expected; here, it feels like a different sort. They are above the treeline, but still she wonders where the nightbirds are, where the crickets. It is cold, as her blood cools, and she fluffs her wings up against the side like a chilly hen.

“They say the gods trapped the regimes here, two summers ago,” she says to break the silence, and at once wishes she hadn’t.

 

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

For a moment, when he doesn’t answer, she worries that she’s offended him - that he might see her as a blasphemer, and their friendship (which feels to her fragile as a new flower) will already be ended. It was never like Elif to worry about such things before. But then, the whole world is changing around them; should it be so surprising that she is changing, too?

She is relieved, then, when he does answer, though at his low tone the slant of her eyes is curious. At the time she had only been two, and not permitted to go; still, she remembered well the almost festival feel of the court that day, when the queen and those with her marched out to meet their god. “To teach us something.” Her answer is automatic, though so is the way her brow furrows afterward; like Mateo, she is thinking of all that came afterward, the blizzard, the war, their court once more isolated. All those deaths. But if mentioning it at all made her feel guilty, to suggest it was anything other than a lesson…Elif gives a little shake of her head, a shuffle of her wings, and turns her chin away so that she’s looking not at alters and stone but at the whole of Novus, spread below them like a twilit map.

The girl is wishing for more of that golden, sleepy-warm water even as he speaks, and the timing of it makes her shoot a look at him, a little of guilt and a little of a grin. “Freezing, she agrees - but he is already turning away, and the small glimpse of his expression as she does steals her smile.

Silently, then, she watches him step out between the pillars (from which it was said the gods had woken). As he spreads his wings she tucks her own tighter about her, and shivers; she can’t remember the last time she was this cold, other than that unnatural snow that had been like a curse from a djinn-story.

But once he begins to sing it isn’t the air whispering over her skin that raises the satin-short hair there.

It isn’t just his song, either, though at first she thinks it is, like something her nursemaid had sung to her once. His voice, though, is boyish, and gentle, and insistent; the words are soft and lovely and though she tries to keep watching him her eyes slip closed, dark lashes fanning dark cheeks. The wind quiets in answer to a question she is unaware she’d asked, and the only sound is his singing.

That is when the colors begin.

First there is gold, just a blush of it against the dark of her eyelids, and she thinks it is some reaction of the pool still with her. But then it blooms to rose, and the colors move the way she had only seen once, on the coldest night of the snow, when it was clear enough to see the sky. Then, as she draws in her breath, they are joined by hues of purple, and of blue, like a sunset over the sea or over the world entire.

She can’t help but open her eyes, even when something in her wants to resist - and she makes a soft sound of wonder to see that the colors are here, too, in the true night. They wind around Mateo, they shimmer across his skin, they fill the places his body leaves as he moves in a way that makes her think of how the wind loves her, leaning into all her hollow spaces like a cat curling up, content.

Like all such things, it is over too soon. As soon as she sees the glint of his eyes all the colors begin to run out like dye wrung from cloth, and she can’t tell if she is paler or richer for what she has seen and as quickly lost.

When he faces her again, Elif’s mouth is open, her eyes are wide and soft with awe like spring’s first leaves unfurling. His question draws her back to herself and one ear twists sideways, uncertain. “It isn’t so pretty as that,” she says, suddenly self-conscious. Rather than meet his eye she steps over to Solis’ altar, pale marble fast-cooling with the night. With the unnatural colors fled, the dusk seems more bleached than it had been before, everything muted and dim-growing-dark. “We begin by lighting a candle,” she says and touches her nose to the cold stone. For a moment she is silent, and still, and then she backs away and turns back to her companion. Mateo is gilded by the last of the fading light; his green eyes gleam like fireflies. It makes her want to smile, and to shiver. Instead she continues, matter-of-fact, trying not to feel defensive that she had not come prepared to pray, that even if she had hers were in no way remarkable as his had been. “Light to represent Solis, and smoke to carry our words up to him. Most of the proper prayers are very long, and very—” Elif stops before she can say boring. Certainly there was something to be said for those long, long prayers that she had grown up hearing priestesses speak - all power and violence and strength - but they had never caught her the way Mateo’s simple song had. Which, then, was holier?

“very serious,” she finishes instead, a little lamely.

 

“Do not be afraid to bare your teeth -”

little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.

It is hard to look at him the same, after that, although Elif tries.

His first impression on her (so important, those first founding moments, a beginning) had been of someone not so different than herself - young, curious, but decidedly mortal. Now she can’t forget that overlay of color, the way it had shimmered and pooled, a wealth of hues greater than any she could have counted in her four years in the desert.

She wants to ask him about it, to demand that he do it again - but she is no spoiled noble girl any longer, to stomp her foot and be given what she asked. Or maybe she is, and it is the world that has changed, the order no longer set up to cater to what she knew. Either way, something hushes her tongue, and neither of them speak of what had just happened, and the moment passes. (Except it doesn’t, it lives in her still, and every time she sneaks a glance at him she half-expects and wholly hopes to see those colors swirling.)

Of course nothing so wondrous happened as she explained Solterra’s prayers. Maybe, if she had brought a candle, and a match - maybe, with their bellies full of god-water and the wind a hymn weaving through the rocks - maybe if she believed enough -

Well, she’ll never find out.

She’d braced for his dismissal, after such a dull explanation, and so his laughter comes as a surprise. Elif smiles, soft as the hazy colors pressing the horizon to darkness, and wonders if all the courts used candles in their prayers. If they were more the same than different (a strangely sharp thought, after a lifetime of being taught that the Day Court was the best, the strongest and the fiercest, born survivors who had to shape a home from an unkind world).

Or any of them, he finishes, and her head tilts like a bird’s. “”Do you pray to the others, too?” she asks, and then wonders if it is too forward, and as if to make up for it adds “I can’t remember the last time I sang. But I know it didn’t look like…that.” She shrugs her narrow shoulders like shifting beneath an itchy cloak.

Even the scratchiest wool would be welcome tonight, as the darkness increases and Mateo is almost lost to it, all his edges blurring to softness. She steps nearer (so as not to lose him entirely, she tells herself), and grins when he mentions Solis. Hush, she tells the wind, and what chilly breeze there was, laden with the scents of night and wild, high places, falls still. The night is pinpricked with stars, so clear and close it seems almost possible to catch them like fireflies, to touch them with her wings.

“No. I wonder where they go…” It seems right, for her voice to be hushed in this open-air cathedral. When she shivers it is not entirely the cold, though it’s a large part - she wonders if they could extend their wings over one another, a hen gathering chicks. She can’t remember the last time she touched someone she hadn’t already known for years.

Up here the wind is too strong for her small magic; it has a mind of its own, one that clucks at her like a parent. When another breeze rises, pulling at Mateo’s long dark hair, Elif thinks longingly of her city, and how it held the heat of the day close to its heart all through the night, as though storing the sunlight in the streets themselves.

His question shouldn’t surprise her, but it does, and she is filled with a warmth that has nothing to do with the desert. “Yes,” she says simply, grinning, and Elif doesn’t feel the guilt she’d expected, doesn’t feel like she’s degrading her own home by wanting to see a friend’s. Up here on the mountain, after all she’s seen today, the world seemed an awful lot bigger and stranger than it had at dawn. It makes her feel bigger and stranger, too, like her heart is full of doors she’d never known could open and each one opened to another, and another. Like the whole world is a mansion and she’s been lingering in the hall (or perhaps the solarium). “I’ve never seen Viride,” she admits, shy and almost breathless with the confession. “Or any forest, really. Is it true there are trees there a thousand years old, that grow taller than any building in any of the courts?” Elif laughs then, a little breathless, half because the cold has stolen it and half to imagine something so unlikely. The trees she knows are stunted, wizened by their lives in the desert.

By now the cold is impossible to ignore; her feet are feeling numb and she stomps them the way you might rub your hands together for the illusion of warmth. She guesses that Mateo feels the same - from his question and the restless way he shifts, the way their breaths are becoming twining plumes. Elif leans away from him, shuffles her wings against her shoulders, the ticklish way the feathers slide against her ribs. When she glances back at him he is hardly more than the glint of green eyes in the dark, and she pulls in a breath that aches with cold before tossing her head with a grin.

“Race you down?”


 
@Mateo I literally did the same thing! It was so easy once I began. I'm not sure why I have the biggest mental block with her.

little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.

She has lost count of the number of times today she has been surprised, and the number of times Mateo has done the surprising. Surely she’s never had a day at all with so many worlds shifting and opening before her, making the world larger and larger yet, filling her head with questions that were itchy and uncomfortable, but not unwelcome.

That he prays to all the gods is only the latest (she hopes it will not be the last, even as their time draws to a close, and the darkness and the cold make them no more than any other wild forest-creature who knows it’s time to go home). In answer she only shakes her head, bemused, and her green eyes shift to his; it takes her a moment to realize his next question doesn’t relate to the first.

“I wouldn’t call it odd,” she says, uncharacteristically soft - but Elif does not say what she might call it, instead. She isn’t sure she has the words, or that they wouldn’t be insignificant up here, less meaningful than her silence.

It might have made her feel not herself, sitting too long with these strange thoughts in her head, on a day that altogether fell far outside her usual. Luckily, before she can begin to doubt, they are young again, and his voice is loud with enthusiasm, and she is grinning and ducking her head to itch against the inside of her foreleg and wondering just what it might be like. even the library sounds like a dream, and she is not a girl overfond of libraries.

Elif remembers then that Aion is from the Dawn Court, too - and this solidifies her decision to go.

“I’m not sure that I can take your word for all that,” she says, and there’s a laugh in her voice but it is not at all unkind. “It sounds more outlandish than the pool we saw earlier. And so that settles it, I shall have to visit.” And how eager she is already; this, too, is a surprise, one that feels like warmth.

When he lifts his wings she does the same, and a few heartbeats later they are gone, the wind in their teeth and their feathers, and the sound of her laughter echoes in the cathedral air.

@Mateo <3 likewise