The sandstone walls are rough against Florentine’s soft, pleated feathers. A cascade of dust falls in a plume from where her wings trail like fingertips along the rock-face.
 
Onwards the dusk girl walks, drowning in the sunset orange of the towering maze. Florentine had heard word of another maze. A thing of wild green, a vibrant hedgerow maze that grew up overnight, and harboured wild beasts. But this canyon, she thinks, surely surpasses it, with its labrynthine passages so high, so wild...
 
All about her the canyon whispers. It follows her with giggling echoes of loose rocks and clicking-clacking feet. It is alive this canyon, from the idle streams that chatter their winding way through the steep, steep valleys to the cry of birds that fly so high up in the sky.
 
The Dusk Court Emissary does not know how long she has been walking but she refuses to let her wings fly.  For this land is a maze of treasures. It hides its secrets within rock folds, darkened caves and glittering at the bottom of babbling brooks. The flower girl relishes each discovery she makes. Small, determined flowers, content with their parched spot, thrust themselves out from rock outcrops to bask in the heat of the sun. They shiver as she passes, leaning out as if to touch the petals that tumble from the girl’s rock dusted and wind tangled hair.
 
Too soon the stonewalls lean in upon her, and maybe Flora’s heart should flutter with fear. But do not fear, for she is the seasoned explorer and if not, with her wings it would take but a moment to be so high up as to see the canyon stretch below like red, red veins leading her in to Solterra’s heart.
 
With each step she takes, Rannveig’s commissioning words nip at her golden heels. Satisfy the urges of your heart. Go, and show them all you are of Dusk. Tell them that we are a Court once again.
 
And Florentine has. Into Solterra she brings the hazy gold and bruised purples of dusklight. She sets the light to set beneath the brilliant glow of the hot day’s light. Yet, even as she walks, placing one slender limb before the other, Flora is not sure which the greater urge is… To explore: to satisfy the wild desire to be free. Or the other, to fulfill a request from a woman that was fast becoming more than a queen… Rannveig was, quite simply, becoming more akin to a friend. Her words were sisterly, knowing. Flora’s heart ached with them, for they both lifted her and tied great chains about her. The dead dagger about her throat bore a power no more, but if she could regain it – what then? Would she leave Novus and her Dusk Court behind in little more than a blink of an eye? Her soul cried yes, but her heart could only bleat for the pain as it began to rend in two.
 
Oh the girl of flowers dashes each thought from her mind, casting them away like ashes in the wind. Maybe someone would hear her now? Maybe they would see the trail of lavender petals that fell like dusk-lit stars in her wake, plucked from the wild flowers laced into the snarls of her mane and thrown back by the wind.
 
As she turns a corner, a great wall rears up to block her path. From above, high, high up in the cerulean sky, a bird cries and calls her up. Through her honeyed mane she peers at the soaring creature and laughs, the song echoing off the canyon walls. She turns to let her feet find another route.

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

   She does not know what carnage he comes to her from; what bones he left rotting in the dirt. Though the Dusk girl is a dance of flowers and cool evening breezes, she would not be shocked by the stench of rotten flesh and stale blood. She had been a carcass once, after all… until they burnt her body and spread her ashes upon the winds.

 
Yet here she is, as alive as the churning sea and as vibrant as any flower.
 
Florentine does not feel the discontent of the lion that prowls after her. She does not listen to the hooves that click like claws upon the red, red stone so high above her. The Dusk girl is content with her slow, meandering path through the sunset maze. She would still be smiling, even if an eternity passed before she found her way to the Day Court’s walls. Flora is the butterfly that flits, petal wings beating against the zephyr that carries her this way and that.
 
The lion arrives and he is everything she is not:
 
He is the soldier; battle ready and battle worn, with the lion still roaring upon his back. She is the victim; the girl whose innocence once died with her as she painted the battlefield red with her fleeing blood.
 
He is the fierce sun, hot, direct, burning her skin with words and eyes, blue with heat. She is the girl who comes to chase the sun, to pull it from the sky, bruising it with the purples and gold of dusk.
 
Maxence’s eyes are a wave that crashes upon her skin, wild and fierce and pulling her in to drown. He is a drop of water in the parched day court – no wonder they appointed him sovereign.
 
Her laughs are gone, washed away by those cold eyes that fix upon her. She wonders how they can be all three: sea deep, ice cold and plasma hot. Through the tangle of her golden, flower-dusted fringe, Florentine peers up to the lion bearing down upon her. She is not the gazelle her mother was, but that does not stop her heart from fluttering against her breast.
 
This was not the Night King, full of dancing and revelry. No, this was a king whose claws were already upon her back. If only she knew who he was.
 
“I am Florentine.” She calls to him, though she has been called many other things: a nymph, an imp, a fairy, an elf, a time traveller… Too many things but at the end of all she is Florentine, “Emissary of the Dusk Court.” The title feels strange upon her tongue, but an even worse fit upon her skin. She shifts against its chafing. “I have come to extend our greetings.” And to explore. Are the words that do not follow, but play endlessly upon her tongue.
 
Black lashes flutter against her cheek before lifting to peer at the stranger and the sun that frames him with a formidable halo. “Won’t you come down? Whilst you do look quite fierce and splendid up there, I should like to look at you without a crick in my neck, if I may.” She says, inviting the lion down.


@Maxence

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

The lion turns from her, as though she were merely a bird he caught that no longer interested him.
 
His dismissal is a snort that arrives as a growl in the walled canyon below. It resonates around the Dusk-hewn girl and chases a shiver down her spine.
 
For all the warrior sets her nerves alight with his disregard, her eyes do not sway from him as he begins to move. Her pride keeps him chained in amethyst eyes of twilight light. Sunlight chases him, blinking between his limbs, filtering through his wings and outlining the sharp, sharp teeth of his lion-head cloak. It blinds her, it burns her and yet the twilight girl does not look away.
 
The Solterran's words offer her no choice and her answering laugh, the one she throws back to meet his snarling retort, is as sharp as a rose’s thorn within his paw. Yet she turns to the treacherous path that winds its slow and effortful way up and up and up the canyon face.
 
“This is no choice you gave me.” She says to him in a lilting voice, just loud enough for him to hear. Florentine was no creature to appease to his sarcastic bidding, nor stand in petulance until he caved in or left her. She would go to him, of course, but in her own time. 
 
The flower girl keeps her flitting wings close as she moves to the canyon wall. His sarcasm, a song in her ears, becomes a growl in her heart as she takes to his path of false steps and sheer drops. Up and up she goes, nimble of foot and light of spirit, even as sweat begins to bead her skin, pinning her wild mane down upon her damp, damp throat.
 
Still she rises to him, each step sure, each step soft, ascending through dust and sun, heat and fire-licked stone. This nymph was a creature born to roam, born to dance the ragged edges between worlds and tumble between stars thrown apart by Time.
 
What was it then to climb a cliff face?
 
It had been a canyon she climbed the day she ran into the war that killed her.  The thought has her smiling, has her soul laughing, and even when her feet do slip, even when her knees and shins and sides are bitten and grazed and worried by rock, still she goes and still she smiles.
 
She stops for the beauty of the flowers she finds and the views that steal her heart and breath. Twilight does not come at daylight's call, she seeps in, in her own time, stealing his light. Maxence, the king she knows nothing of, would wait.
 
She was not a butterfly to flit to his whim.
 
His voice descends, another growl, a play at sincerity that has her laughing. She laughs at his gall, at this anger he inspires within her with such rudeness. “But Rannveig is not your lady is she?” She says, her amethyst eyes lifting to snag on his, to dare burn in their blue, blue flame. “And yet, she is well. She sends her greetings.”
 
Maybe it was mere minutes, or maybe an hour went by, but when the dusk girl crests the rockface before him, she is hot and fierce and wild. She wears everything of the lion’s home: blood and sweat, dust and curling heat.
 
It is only when looking upon him now, stood close as they were at last, that she knows why the sun had crowned him so. Here, with it ceasing to shine down, but out, across and open, the lion king is no longer made of shadow and limned in gold. He is a picture of snow and soil, fierce fire and even hotter blue.
 
This man is a vision of war, stealing the breath from her lungs with the lion that roars upon his back. Her heart, at war with her body, becomes a battle chant, loud and frantic, raging against the beauty she finds in the rude, lion king. 
 
It is with surprisingly small effort, that her lips curl into a rapier smile framed in gold and lilac petals, as she thinks of his wait.
 
“Sorry I took so long.” Dusk sings to Day. “I just had to stop and enjoy the views.”

She longs to look away, but he is the sun and dusk cannot come fast enough.

@Maxence I will edit this when I actually know what just happened with this post... *blindsided* O.O


this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart