“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
Warset knows better than to stray too close to the silken tents of shed-stars with their gazes heavy with a religion they know far, far too little of. In their eyes, she knows, they’ll see the truth of it and some (she’s learned the hard way) will seek to drink that magic straight from her heart. And so she rolls past them like a stone, her eyes tucked behind the protective shroud of hair and curled forward wings.
She tries not to feel the gazes that linger on her like knives instead of looks (and she tries not to tremble in both fear and a vicious sort of hate).
Onward she rolls, head tucked low, until the meadow opens up into the song and the joyous laughter of children painting themselves in a mess of colors. Warset tries to see the stories in their art, she tries to turn color and shape into something more like a mockery of star song. All she can see is the brittle chaos of mortality and the joy of a thing she does not know how to be.
But she wants to learn, desperately so.
Her eyes unfold from the darkness of lock and wing. They shine far from the vicious gazes of stars shed instead of lost. Each of her steps is less hesitant than the last as she walks towards the music and colors caught in buckets instead of rainbows. And when she pauses before the stallion singing a ballad her head tilts like a leopard at a hare snarling instead of rearing.
Teach me, every inch of her lost heart cries in between the silence of sonnets.
Her hoof dips into a bucket of blood-red paint (of course she’s chosen the color of mortal blood). And when she draws lines of red across the grass she does not understand the strange look the children give her as she stumbles through this mockery of living, and healing, and looking up to see sun instead of cave-wall and winter frost.
Warset does not join the stallion in song even when her brittle and broken heart laments against the silence in her soul.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
As he walked through the meadow, Azrael had seen the flames. Higher into the sky they rose, with them the song of celebration – but fire brought the shed-star little cause to celebrate. Instead, it reminded him of the fateful day when the People were lost to the dragon’s whim. It reminded him of death, of defiance, of endings. He blinks against the brightness of the fire-light, quickly wandering past to hide his fear and the way his breath catches in his throat. For today, he was called to this place in celebration. It wouldn’t do for the past to haunt him, he thinks with a sigh, pushing away the memories and moving toward the children who danced gaily among the flowers.
They came marked in all manner of paint, some intricately painted with others merely wearing a splash or two. As the children danced nearer, they streaked his own body with blues and greens, which Azrael simply smiles in response to, leaning down to let a small girl reach his neck and face with her brush. While they dance, he sings a song of old – a song that the stars used to sing to the night sky. It is a beautiful and haunting tune, one which tells the story of the great sky mare and her midnight blessings.
Some listened, but most continued to play and dive about in the poppies, his voice rich and warm in the spring weather. As the magician spun his tale through song, his bright eyes ripple among the crowds which gathered to listen, falling on Warset as she watches him. He nods toward her, recognizing one of the People by her demeanor as much as the molten silver of her gaze, and as his song grows toward its end, the shed-star bows to those who clap and slowly makes his way toward her.
“Star sister, what brings you here?” His voice is quiet and kind, acknowledging the kinship they shared while curious if the fires bothered her too. Was she there, he wondered, when the world they had known burned to ash? It wasn’t a past he wished to relive, but Azrael dreamed of his lost home far more often than he’d care to admit. “I am called Azrael,” he offers, pushing away the memories and offering a thread of recognition for her to grab as they stand among strangers in Delumine.
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
It takes her no time at all to feel the leopard slip to the surface of her chest. She can feel her snarl, and spit, and ravage her claws against meat and muscle. And she can see, in the kindness of his gaze, the marrow of her curse smiling a mockery of home at her.
Her bloody lines of paint stretch out between them like wounds in the battle-field of the comets and the constellations. The snap of her wings, as she spreads them wide as a war-call, is nothing more than another wound stretching out between them in the air. It stretches on in the violence of her gaze until they are not two chewed-out things but a pure-thing and a mutt-thing. And between them, in the wounded air and the wounded earth, there is only a song of war.
The glare of the sun is forgotten with the metronome sway of the ruby moon at her still healing throat. She wonders if he is star enough to catch the warning in the diamond and bloody stones.
“I am no star sister of yours.” Her voice waivers between star, leopard, and mortal girl. There is a memory of fragility in it and an echo of all that hate she discovered in the belly of the god mountain. A part of her heart breaks anew to hear the cruelty on her own lips.
And a part of her rejoices at the sound.
Warset does not think she’ll forget walking by a vial of her own blood in the tent of a shed-star. She does not think she’ll forgive either. Both thoughts are in her gaze as she steps to toe the line of war she’s carved out between them. She tries to swallow them down, just enough to bare her teeth and find a song in her belly. Nothing comes.
Her wings settle at her sides just as suddenly as they were snapped wide open. “There was nowhere else to go.” Dejection, and a small trace of the agony she still feels, hangs just as noose-like as her curse on her tongue. But it is a small mercy, the smallest of them, that she remembers to swallow her name back down when it clamors at the edges of her teeth like a song.
That song, that single note, belongs to her and her alone. It is all she has left.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
If Azrael were easily shaken, the shed-star might have turned to walk away. But there is something in the girl’s vacant silver gaze, something hollow and haunting. Something broken. And Azrael cannot stand for broken things.
His voice is quiet and thoughtful, as he merely hums at her assurance that she was not one of the People – for the stars on her back and the mercurial silver of her eyes said otherwise. Still, he cannot fault her for turning from the pious, for not all had love to spare for their broken and splintered brethren. Not all would remember the dragon fire, or what had come before it – the time when their world had been one of curiosity and reverence. The time when Caligo had smiled upon them. There were days it was hard for Azrael himself to pull at the thread of a pleasant memory, too tarnished at the ending to remember the beginning.
Her lostness draws him in, even as her walls keep him out. And so he simply nods at her indifference, watching the children play with hope blossoming anew in his chest, as vibrant and anew as the spring which unfolded before them.
For too long, they stand in silence, until a flurry of wings clamors upon them and it’s source (a tawny owl) settles comfortably atop his withers. “She is Noctua”, he offers to the haughty mare, not daring to look in Warset’s direction and incur the bite of her response. “There’s something poetic here…” His voice is a murmur, warm and kind as he turns to the stranger. “Spring has come to Novus, a time for rebirth and newness… a cycle which keeps turning even when we are not ready for it.”
The owl fluffs her feathers, cooing and picking at a bauble on his staff, before launching once more into the sky and toward the treeline. “I for one am glad to see the winter fade… for the spring brings the rain – clears the sky in the mountains for the stars to shine brightly upon us.” He lets the small-talk be enough, for while the girl didn’t respond to his questioning, perhaps the silence would prompt her to speak her mind.
Or perhaps they would simply wait beneath the dappled sunlight for what came next, two strangers, tied inextricably by Caligo’s stars.
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
Following his gaze to the children leaping like locusts around bonfires fading out into the noon sunlight reminds her of all the reasons why a star never wished to feel a wish forced into their belly. Each of their mortal smiles, and their fragile lashes blinking soot from their eyes, reminds her that this is nothing more than a tiny sliver of all the things she was born to watch (and shape, and create). One reflection of their joy, of his quiet joy, settles on the mirror silver of her eyes so deeply and so cruelly that she cannot blink away the scars of them.
This, this chaotic word of scars, this tiny little sliver of a shard, is all she has left to experience. And Warset knows that she will die here as another forgotten scar in the smallest part of the cosmic wonder she once knew.
It all, all of it, makes it her want to cry just as much as it makes her want to lay her teeth at the throat of a stallion and drink until he bows broken at her once-holy knees.
Her wings flutter at her side as butterflies flutter in the first frost when they have forgotten to migrate. Her hooves shift restless as the children are joyful and her teeth freet in her jaw as if there is a bar of metal between them. Somewhere her spirit, holy and blinding, strains for the flavor of his starstuff eyes upon her tongue and his wish to settle in her belly like a stone. Day by day the walls between girl, and star, and leopard are becoming more and more pitted with maggots and flies.
And someday, she knows as she turns her gaze to the owl as it leaves him again, there won’t be a thing in her soul that does not clamour, and crave, and weep as it shatters.
“You are a fool if you think that is what we do as we look upon you.” Each word is a scar carved into her own heart, an ache of her healing wings, a memory of marrow that grows black and rotten instead of strong. Somewhere a child screams as it’s toy falls into the fire and Warset, the terrible wreckage that she is becoming, feels her heart leap at the sound of a very mortal sort of agony. This time when she turns to him it’s to follow the trail of his owl’s shadow as she flies fast and far (but not, Warset thinks, fast and far enough that a leopard could not find her one night).
When she speaks again she does not look away from that small speck of darkness on the horizon. “Do you pray to your stars when you look upon them? Do you wish?”
Not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
Azrael cannot know the pain which haunts her, though even he can feel the hurt which eminates from Warcry through her icy glare and the bite of her words. It is written on every inch of her as she sizes his up, the way it edges at her voice when she tries to push him away… but still too, he stays rooted. For even her walls are not enough to scare away the dreamer, his own gaze warm and bright on hers, as if willing the girl to break free from her demons and allow herself a chance to live. True, it may be a shackled existence, devoid of the cosmos she so loved, save to witness it from the confines of the world below… but an existence of regret was hardly one worth living, at least in his mind.
He could bite back at her, meeting fire with fire… but instead the male simply stands strong against her words, buffering himself with the reassurance that she was simply lashing out in pain, lost to the emotion and unwilling to bend. So he is patient as he smiles at the girl when she calls him a fool, refusing to dignify her retort with a response, simply staring back at the children and letting silence fall uneasily between them.
It is she who speaks first, curiosity edging in her words. Do you pray to your stars when you look upon them? Do you wish? For a moment, Azrael stays silent, considering his response. “Sometimes.” He admits with a shrug. “There are nights when I cannot get close enough to the stars, when I climb to the tallest peaks just aching to listen to what they have to share. I talk to the stars, thinking perhaps that they listen, hoping they might.” It had always made sense to him, for the stars had been his constant companions in life, when all else fell to ruin and chaos. The skies had remained steadfast and true to their course, despite what changed around them.
“Some say wishes are for children, but why not ask if the wish might grant you hope? I do not think it so far-fetched that Caligo would grant us the pleasures of mortal life, for I have seen her some, in dreams… she has walked beside me, guided me back to my stars. When all seemed lost, they remained. When hope waned, they still shone through the darkness. And if the stars are to be our only constant, should we not pray to them for our salvation too?” He felt that Caligo would agree, for why else would she have left their night alive with brilliance, if not for the hope which came along with it.
He had to believe in the power of the stars, for if that wish too was lost, their world might have been a dark and lonely place, indeed.
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
In this world she is reminded, with each word he speaks, that the stars appear as nothing more than dancing specks of light in the dark night. Here they are constellations instead of battlefields, and stories finished instead of stories still racing to some nameless end the cosmos have yet to discover. Here the world is full of shed things, so diluted that they are no more a star than she is a dragon, and none of them can understand all the things to which they pray.
Warset knows she should be gentle instead of cruel, understanding instead of hateful. She knows so many other things that to wear gentleness now seems like a lie of magnitudes that no star will ever lie by.
And so she turns her gaze to him and swallows down her stories of all the things that stars really are. She wants to snap her wings wide as a warcry and ask with violence instead of curiosity, do I look like light and nothing else to you? The night is not so very far off that she cannot feel, below the stab of his ignorance, the hunger of the leopard as she wakes and starts to walk.
But the child in the distance is still crying and his gaze is still heavy as a thing looking into her very soul (and she wonders how a gaze like this can see nothing at all, nothing). The world, this pale echo of a world where stars are only light in the darkness, is pressing in too hard now. And she is trembling with the weight of it when her memories take her back to war-fields, and singing dragon wings, and harpsichords spun out of the moonlight of a million universes that sung so sweetly each time she breathed upon their strings.
Somewhere, in the darkness when she blinks away the image of him, she can see her sisters gathered around her as they all wept for the carnage of a war they had all long forgotten the reason for. She remembers too, the strange sensation of a desperation that drove her to rage, to violence, to anything to dry the tears of light-dust from her sister’s eyes. But when she opens her eyes the memory is gone and there is only Azrael with his god and religion that hopes and prays on the distant light of which they understand nothing.
Warset cannot help the way she snarls at him when he says, wish, like it is prayer instead of funeral dirge. “You talk to light and never wonder at the real source of it. You wish and pray and never pause to wonder what it makes of the stars.” Perhaps in the months before she was bled for the magic in her light, in the wonder that her blood can carry a wish when it is outside of her instead of it, she would not have been so eager to lump him in with the other diluted shed things.
But she is not that star, that Warset, that cast out thing that was never chewed.
She hums. The melody is as tragic and full of heartbreak as the child’s cry that has still not fallen silent. She hums and hums until every star-dust tear on her skin shines brighter than the daytime fires around them. Until she is a galaxy of light she hums, and sings, and carries a eulogy with only sound and not a single mortal note of language.
And when the first star falls at the boundaries of the meadow and sets the crowd to screaming, she only turns to Azrael with his deep gaze that sees hope instead of truth, and light instead of the soul of a star. “Look shed-star, look and see what your wishes make of us.” When she leaves, her anger leaves with her, and only three stars fall into the forests.
But three is still too many and when she is alone, in the hour of twilight, she mourns for them.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
The stallion is helpless to do anything but stand and listen as her tongue lashes at him, as bright as the stars in the heavens. When she speaks, her eyes find his and hold – betraying both anger and hurt, as well as something other. Disbelief. Disdain.
It wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a look, for there were all manner of Stars with the People. The pious. The dreamers. The scholars. The pure. Azrael was none of these, and all of these at once. He did not fit nicely into a mold, tending more toward warmth and mortality than his brethren, never quite finding his place among the true holiness of Caligo’s chosen. But still, Azrael finds his kindness as his strength as much as his weakness, and he cannot help but feel anything other than sorry for Warset as she watches him with a gaze that screams of lostness.
“You’re right,” he murmurs to the girl, a quiet sound in the otherwise jovial festival tone. “I do not wonder… for it is of no consequence what matter makes the stars. Without hope, without heart, the stars are empty as they shine upon us. The cosmos loses its wonder, the dreamer loses his wish.”
She sings, the sound a haunted thing which sends shivers down his spine, even as he watches with horror as the stars begin to fall. And when she gazes upon him once more, there is a darkness which he sees in her despite the light she wears – something beyond his capacity to save, even if she had been a creature who wished salvation. He watches her go, wiping away a silver tear that stings at his eye, unwilling to give in to the darkness which threatens his light, even as he stares to the smoldering ruin of her star. For hope could always be found in the darkness, if only it was sought. And so the shed-star breathes again, willing away the shadow of doubt as he turns to leave the festival, too lost in thought to join the revelry once more.
