She climbs up and up. With each step taken, the oxygen in her lungs is stripped thinner and thinner. Winds swirl the paltry air around sharp rock and rubble, then up, over the snow capped crown of the great mountain. The mountainous winds get rougher and wilder as they circle the girl of dusk and earth. There is nothing unique about the honey-coloured girl, but the flowers she brings, offerings for the gods, are like none they have ever seen up here upon the mountainside. Their touch is rough as they tug at petals, pulling them free to toss, to play, to throw across the mountainside.
 
The dusk girl ignores the wild, curious winds and the petals they steal. Her attention, her eyes, are on other things for there, before her, lies a cathedral of stone and flowers. Florentine stands at its mouth, a creature of golden sunlight and wild lavender. She brings earth and light to this dark and grand temple.
 
She enters, bolder and braver than she had any right to be. Petals scatter hither and thither into a cathedral train that ripples behind her. Her grazed limbs and tangled mane are the wild clothes she wears with bold, bold pride. It is no god she comes to marry, no illicit romance to find in the shadowed corners of this hallowed place. No, she comes to sate her curiosity – this girl who cannot believe.
 
Beneath towering arches she walks, fingertip wings trailing along the smooth, cold stone. Her breath is a weak wind in her lungs, her heart a fluttering of feathers against her ribcage.  
 
Believe, it beats, it begs.
 
This girl of fine bone and slender torso stands, so diminutive, at the center of Novus’ sacred, beating heart. She is so small here, but oh, Florentine is the bird that will not be caged, the weed that will not stop growing, the sun that will not stop shining; but ultimately, she is the girl that cannot start believing.
 
She drinks in the inscribed names of each god, plays them across her tongue and tries to find a place for them in her too-full heart. Beneath each name she lays her apologies in flowers and petals for her heart aches only for Time itself. That too-full heart twinges and her wings quiver. Those gods press in, their names reaching for her…
 
But Flora is the bird that will not be caged and in a flurry of tangled hair and wild-flower incense, she spins to run, to fly, to flee.
 
But the night is there, cloaked in Calligo’s dark. It is guilt that has her lashes lowering to hide her amethyst eyes as she passes the night court sovereign in a rough caress of feathers and lavender scent like incense. Her wings flare to fly, to run and to escape these trapping gods. But suddenly she pauses as she passes him, a breathless question playing upon her lips as she smiles wryly, “You won’t tell anyone there was a non-believer here, will you?”

@Reichenbach

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

She came to find religion, but found only night.
 
She came to find gods, but found only him.
 
His gaze upon her skin, heavy with black and soft like starlight, is like nothing she has ever known.
 
If his skin blisters with her touch, it is nothing to the fire he sets upon her body with his roving gaze. She will surely burn to ash before these gods.
 
The Night King’s gypsy coins sing on, their jingling pulling the stars from the sky. His presence commands her body to stillness and, as she stands before him with breath so heavy and so wild, her eyes blaze purple starfire, brilliant and wild as they fight the growing dark.
 
The boy moves closer and the touch of their bodies commands her eyes to close. There, in black of her being, where she expects only silence, she hears the raking of her breath and the wild beating of her heart. This creature of starlight has turned her heart into a frantic bird; wings thrumming worriedly against its cage of bone.
 
Her nerves ignite with his touch, golden skin burning with the friction of night pressing closer, closer. She wonders what twilight bruise might glow from her golden skin with this new press of night or would she, like starlight, shatter here and fall to nothing.
 
Twilight eyes open at last and see only his dark skin. Florentine’s breath is the only thing that stirs between them for he is a statue beside her, as still as stone. “Breathe.” She whispers when at last she realizes that he has not. It is an irony that it is the girl so new to love, who reminds the boy to breathe.
 
The night will always chase the dusk… you know that as well as I.
 
Those words stop her heart for they are dangerous, even when whispered intimately in the quiet of the temple...
 
Would he dare to chase her? Bruise his knees upon the temple floor and beg her to go with him to Night?
 
But above all - would she go with him?
 
The lure of night has never been so strong, she has never heard the stars keen like this, nor felt the satin touch of such darkness upon her skin. He is temptation; a siren call of beautiful gestures and prophetic declarations.
 
He goes on, breathing his words across her skin; promises across gold. If you ask me to stop…. Florentine knows what he asks of her and what she should say. But the allure of night has her tongue tied tight.
 
From its grip she slips, just enough to ask, “What if I don’t?”  The words are curious butterflies across his skin.  What would the Night King really do? And yet, what if she told him to stop?
 
She thinks of the words coming from her lips and her teeth grit with worry, with pain. Her soul splits open for the pain of not being free, for the pain of being tied to one place: Dusk. “I don’t want to.” She bleats, aching, little more than a bird with wings clipped beneath this draw of the night.
 
For a moment, for a second of wild abandon, before either of them can say more, her lips press to the groove of his throat, to the corner of his jaw. Her lips linger, breath hot over his pulse. It is here, touching darkness, succumbing to night, that her most damned revelation descends like a death knell.
 
Her gasp is ragged, every part of her filled with the scent of jasmine and him, as she whispers, “We can’t stop it.” For Reichenbach was right. He could not change the worlds.  Where was the point where dusk ended and night began? They are fluid, seamless, for a moment, for a brief time they are one – neither just night nor just dusk.
 
“I can never be without this pull. I cannot make it stop.” The stars begin to weep for the dusk is all but gone. The night has arrived and it is satin: deep and dark and lovely.


@Reichenbach - I am so utterly out of control in this thread lol!

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

The Night King moves from her, slowly, so slowly. Each step he takes away pulls back a dark, dark veil that covered her.
 
Soon, too soon, the veil and the boy are gone. She looks to him still close, still near enough to touch, yet she feels a world between them a chasm that she longs to breach.
 
Just as her heart frets, as her wings threaten to burst, to open and carry her back to him, the world slips back to her from where the veil had been. The temple returns, silvery and beautiful, bathed in moonlight. Silver-washed flowers watch them from their places, twined up and up each marble pillar.
 
The sky commands her, but it is effort to pull her eyes from the night, to lift them from his inky black skin. When at last she does, the stars begin to pull her. Up and up and up they tug her soul, through their multitudes that shine. On and on they go and she blinks as she watches them. The sky shimmers and moves each star twinkling, each star calling, humming its own song through the vast, vast worlds.
 
Her breath returns, strong and vibrant, and easy at last. It is a breath still so full of jasmine, still so full of stardust and Denoctean magic. Her gaze falls down, and his silver eyes snag her there, with their siren call. The Dusk girl realizes then, her soul was still among the stars. Maybe Reichenbach would find it one day, dusted in stars, hidden by moons.
 
Her body draws her back from the darkness he pulls her into, with nerves that still tremble, alive and desiring of his touch.
 
Rannveig would kill me if I stole you away.
 
Flora’s eyes close for the pain the Night boy holds within his words. But it is nothing to the agony they inflict upon her. For a moment, she is not sure she can survive this night for all its pain, for all its blissful highs. As her eyes open, she wants to resent him, she wants to hate the Night King with his wild, wild magic and feral allure. For he is the sun and she is Icarus and he just keeps pulling her in.
 
If that is where you end, may Vespera watch you. Rannveig’s words haunt like ghosts.
 
“She won’t but… I cannot,” twilight whispers, weak against the force of night. The confession pours like blood from her lips, cut by the ultimate two words. Rannveig had become no more a queen to the twilight girl than a sister. Could this girl of flowers and gold truly turn on the love of a sister? Had Reichenbach still been closer, had her lips still been pressed to his skin and the veil of Night upon her, she might have done.
 
But he is not closer, her lips tingle only with the memory of his skin and the veil of night has returned to him alone. Stood here, the air is cool and her longing less, just slightly less.
 
Florentine has never felt so exposed, so alone, even with that longing in the Night King’s eyes.
 
Slowly, the girl steps back, away from him, away from the tide of night that pushes her to him, relentless and bold. Amethyst eyes watch as it eases its black, black way through his tangled mane. She watches it go, wondering how his mane felt there, how darkness felt upon his skin…
 
She could not touch him again, not now. No matter how they both stand, unable to leave, unable to give in.
 
Another step back and her wings begin to flare, caramel light pooling beneath the silver moon. “Keep the flower Reichenbach, it won’t die.”
 
Don’t forget me.
 
Her leg lifts to step to him, to step away from him, she doesn’t know which, not until she is a step closer and only then does she flee before he could stop her again. Scattering petals roll along the ground, spreading this way and that, bumping across his feet morosely.
 
But it is not just petals and a small, undying flower she left in the charge of the Night King, but a piece of her, something unseen, something that would ache, when she comes to realize it is missing.


@Reichenbach - saaaaaaaad

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart