[P] find life in the swan's breath

[Isra]

Isra who begged water to dream

" I have thought some dreams should never be dreamt, but I would hate a world where that was true.” 


The waters of the lake look less like mirror glass in the daylight when they are green with algae instead of silver-dark. Whippoorwills tickle at her belly and the round rock feels as flat as coins beneath her hooves.  Sometimes her eyes catch on the pale pink of a conch between the gray rocks and other times she smiles to watch a crab that does not belong catch a tadpole. 

Behind her there still lingers the traces of war but also the traces of something else and it all catches in the sunlight like rusted metal and stained glass. When Isra turns to look with just a fragment of fear tightening down her spine she feels as if she's looking only at the corpse of a story. 

“That just will not do.” She says to herself while she begs that silver pool of magic in her bones and below to her soul rise like the sea and drip from her like rain.

 Someday she will tell the court it came to her in a dream. One night she'll tell a gray stallion that it really came to her when she flew and sailed on and over a sea that lived in a universes where there were only two creatures alive to walk the shores. Someday, she thinks, she will share this thing with Eik. 

If she can figure how to bring it to the real from the deep dark of her dreams. 

And so Isra wades into the water and her skin shivers for the needles of cold that sink past her skin and into her bones. It will help keep me awake, she thinks.

 Beneath the waterline where her hooves sink into the soft waterbed the soil melts like molten metal and turns to textured gold cut through with dapples of wood. The metal and the wood stretch out behind her, back to the shore like a path to a dream space that lives only beneath the surface of the still water. There it fans out and diamonds rise up from the soil like plants to line the edges of the pathway. 

Then Isra begs the water to change, to turn to mirrors instead of liquid and curl around her like a rib-cage. She begs until sweat pools above her eyes and along her spine. But try as she might the water refuses to listen and only the soil seems eager to dream of another existence.


@Asterion

Art

[Asterion]

He is drawn to the lake like a boy to a locked door in a dream, drawn like a hand to a scab that itches and itches.

Asterion has not been back to the lake since his first night in Novus, the night he met a girl like a storm who wore a crown of fireflies, who made him feel like a waking dream.

She is gone, that girl, and so are the fireflies, and so are the nodding flowers that carpeted the banks that long-ago summer evening. And yet his feet remember the path to the lake, and his dreaming heart remembers all the things he had felt, and the mountains watch solemn and silent.

And when the king looks into the waters of the lake there is a girl there and his heart trips. It is deja vu, he thinks, it is an errant memory -

it is Isra.

He sighs as soon as he realizes it, with relief and with something else, but as he looks closer from his green hillock those feelings turn only to curiosity sharp as hunger. Asterion had not known of the queen’s magic, but there is no other explanation for the things happening around her now - the glitter and dark of the shoreline, reaching out to her in a bridge where there was no bridge. The gleam and shine of diamonds, the similar gleam of sweat and lake water on the unicorn’s skin.

Asterion has never been to the rift, has never seen wonders quite like these - the thing he thinks of then is the maze of Ravos, all those strange and echoing pathways, the descent into darkness and then terrible light.

The late spring sun feels cool, then, and a tremble passes over him like a cloud-shadow, but the bay has never been a coward (nor has he ever been truly hurt). For a moment his jaw tightens, and then he swallows and descends to her with the sunlight on his back, throwing up a thousand shattered reflections from the diamonds and the gold.

At first he keeps his distance, standing with the water up to his hocks, still cold this high up. The crescent moon of the lake bends away in both directions, alive with the sound of frogs, the splashing of fish, the graceful-strange wading of herons. But Asterion notices none of these things, for there are wonders before him. Only when he realizes she is struggling with something does the King of Dusk walk out to the Queen of Night. Now he realizes the water is cold enough to bite; now he is close enough to see her shiver. With a thought, the barest motion of his head, the waters part around them, pulling back so that they both stand, dry, on gleaming gold and rippling wood. All minnows and trout recede with it, and the crayfish scurry for the water, surprised to find themselves bared to the air.

“What is it you’re trying to do?” he asks, softly, his glance lingering on her only a moment before turning with wonder and curiosity to the things she has transformed. He almost touches her, then, his muzzle to her shoulder, but magic is a private thing, and sometimes a tricky thing, and he would do nothing to keep her from her task. But -

“It’s lovely, your magic. Is there something I can do to help?” Still the waters flow around them, giving them space, quiet as a cat’s purr.

And Asterion does not think of Aislinn at all.  



@Isra

if you'll be my star*
 

[Isra]

Isra of the glass crop

“The only freedom you truly have is in your mind, so use it.”  


She does not hear him step upon her golden and wood-streak pathway. Her magic does not whisper warning to her and the soft slap of the water on the shoreline hides any traces of horse-sound. All she can her is the heavy sigh of the air in her lungs and a cicada humming in a tone so close to the way her magic hums and sings and vibrates like wings beneath her skin.

All she can hear is the wonder of dream stretching out its smoke and stardust chisel and molding the world like soft, molten gold.

But oh! She notices the water when it parts like the binding of a book. It rises up around her like small walls made of weed and scale stones. When she turns to wonder at it, thinking this seems a strange thing for her magic to do (shift instead of change), the water glints beams of silver-light when the sun catches on the new sharp edges of the water. And then it's not glinting off the water at all, but off-- him.

“Asterion.” She sighs in relief to discover her magic has not betrayed her and turned into something else inside her own skin. Part of her always feared that her magic would end up belonging to the sea and the surf and never to her at all.

A crayfish scurries back to the water before them and Isra laughs at the way all its movements seem angry. “I wanted to build a tunnel made of glass so that the world might see all the things that live in the dark and dream, perhaps, of air and sunlight.” Isra closes the distance between them. Her hooves ring like song on the gold and the wood. The touch she glances across his shoulder is a song too, a plucked harp string that rings even in a fading echo. “But the water does not love me as it loves you.”

In the empty space between the water and the pathway Isra begs more muck to change. It turns to more wood and gold. Steel edges this part, dark as ore and threaded through with glass and glitter. But the water, even parted will still not change.

So Isra returns to the shore and begs the weeds to collapse and turn to panels of something stronger and more flexible than glass. It spreads out like a hay-field before her, squares of glass instead of crop. The sun seems fire-hot when it reflects off that strange field, and when she looks back at Asterion she has to blink back her weariness. “Will you help me? It's harder than I thought to make real a dream.”

Around them the world looks like fire and bright, metallic light. Isra thinks there is not a moon in the world that could make Asterion look as perfect as he does now.

@Asterion

Art

[Asterion]

For a moment longer he watches her, before he is noticed.

In those scant heartbeats he realizes that her magic is nothing like the feral and wanting sorcery of Ravos. Asterion has never seen anything so beautiful, has never been so near to magic without smelling the sharp iron tang of blood. This is something else, like a gift with no cost that he can see.

He would have watched her forever, if she had never noticed him.

But she does, of course, and he smiles when she names him, and dips his head like a prince and not a king. The bay is still too caught up in wonder to see her relief (and what might have happened if he had? he has always known his magic is given to the sea and will one day return to it, as all rivers do).

As she speaks his smile fades to seriousness, for talk of magic to him has always been a solemn thing, as near and real to his heart as dreaming. His dark-eyed gaze strays out over the waters, still quiet and level and waiting, and he pictures her words like a child’s storybook. Only when she touches him does his smile return, soft as a butterfly’s shadow, and he regards her then. “It’s only fair that something was left for the rest of us,” he says, teasing. Once more he watches her work her magic, and when she returns to shore he lags behind for a few moments, considering the lake with the corner of his mouth drawn down in thoughtfulness.

He is quiet when he follows her back to shore, though he wants to laugh at the marsh-birds that scold them from the shore; Asterion wishes he could promise them they will have their home and nests back, in time. The sound of his hooves on gold and wood punctuates his thoughts, but when a bright gleam catches his eye and he looks up to see the new wonders she has wrought they fall silent.

Everything is gold, a shining plain more grand than any city as it throws back the sunlight a thousand fold. It is like angels worshipping, like a mass of glass people who sing and sing (no matter that they are silent). And yet when he comes to her side again he sees that the panes are clearer than the windows of their kingdoms.

At her words he catches her eye again, and she is weary and gleaming with sweat but oh! Asterion can hear the blood running like a river in his blood, eager and leaping and wanting to change its banks, to shape the world as she is. He can’t hide the smile that shapes his lips then, though it could never rival the brightness of the field before them.

“And we’re lucky it’s so difficult - else everyone would be shaping their dreams, and I fear they are not all so pretty as yours, Isra.” He does not say I will help; he does not need to. For already he is reaching out to Cirrus (never far, his gull, though they give one another their space), asking her to find who she can, to bring them to the shore.

Even two dreamers such as they are not strong enough to build such a realm as this.

And as she wings off, a white speck against the blue sky like a flaw in sapphire, he turns back to the queen of stars and shadow (and magic).

“Do you think you can move that glass? Or shape it. If you can, to keep back the water, I think we can make your tunnel.” Now he is eyeing the lake again, already looking down and down within himself, searching for the well of his magic. He has hardly used it since the flooding of Terrastella; it is full again, brimming, waiting, wanting. The king has no doubt he can shape what she pictures, if she can find a way to keep it there. Asterion blows out a breath and a wave leaps and curls, forms a perfect cylinder with the opposite shore clear through the middle, the walls of water sparkling like glass. He holds it for a moment, and lets it fall with a feeling warm as satisfaction and light as joy. “I would also like to see what lives below the surface.”



@Isra

if you'll be my star*
 

[Isra]

Isra of the dead magic

“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”  


It feels like a month that she ponders the rows of glass before her. All her moments catch on the slick surface for each pulls from her a hum of her heart and a sigh of her lugs. Isra blinks back the weariness even as her skin trembles finely. Sweat darkens her eyes until they are more bits of gemstone in ore than eyes inside a skull. Even her lungs sing of slower song and her heart a waltz inside of a reel.

At first Asterion's words lips over her like shadows and his gull in nothing more than a spot of something in the corner of her wavering vision. Slowly, they sink in like dull knives and each makes her tremble a little more with exhaustion as her magic takes and takes and cares little of what is left of her. “I can try,” Isra offers as bleakly as a lamb sent to slaughter.

She reaches deep down into that ocean sprawling at the very core of her. She reaches down into the current of it, over that path of stones she once walked with Eik. Down, down, down she goes and she begs the magic to come up, up, up.

Isra begs each piece of sand and loam beneath the glass to become an ant. She begs both the earth and the magic to give her any army of any, of worms, of anything that might move the glass because her legs feel made of stone instead of bone.

Nothing comes-- the dirt is still just dirt beneath all that glittering, blinding glass.

“There is nothing left. I have nothing more.”Isra laments and she turns with something like fear glittering darkly in her gaze (fear that he will look at her and see a useless queen, a slave in a unicorn skin). Just as she is about to give up and let the glass become fronds and weeds again an outline of horses crests the horizon.

The merchants and builders of Denocte have come. They have rallied to the call of king who is not their own and followed the elegant gull to the lake. Isra doesn't question the gift, only smiles at them through the quivering of her skin and the sweat dripping around her eyes. “Thank you.” It is clear she has never been more grateful for a thing in her life than the energetic faces of her court, her citizens, each of whom she loves.

Each of them needs little instructions. All of them have grown accustomed to their queen's strange dreaming ways, to the way she's is not satisfied to just let the world 'be'. So they look at the glass, and at the lake that still waits strangely still behind invisible walls, and they know almost exactly what is to be done.

Four of them gather around a panel of glass, and look to the sovereigns to see if this time they correctly guessed how odd their queen will be today.



@Asterion

Art

[Asterion]

He should have seen it earlier, her clear exhaustion - he is intimately familiar, after all. It is the only thing he had felt, there at the end of the flooding, when every day dawned with a new need to use his magic. At first it had seemed a bottomless well, a thing he could draw from again and again, as limitless as the sea.

But it was not the sea.

He sees it only when she fights to change the sand, when her eyes close tight with her lashes casting shadows on her sharp cheeks, when sweat prickles across her skin and is no match for the gleam of scales on her belly. When she turns to him he cannot bear the look in her eyes; it is too familiar, and not one a unicorn should ever have cause to wear.

“It’s a big dream you’re building,” he says softly, and closes the small distance between them, pressing his dark nose to her cheek. “It will come back.” He does not tell the queen that she has worked herself too hard; Asterion does not think it his place (and besides, he knows the impulse too well. It is a fault he shares).

So he does not see it, the line of horses who crest the hill, who walk down to the moon-crescent of the lake that is becoming something More. He only turns when Isra looks beyond him, when she speaks (with the timbre of a queen in her voice, despite her weariness and her fear). When his dark eyes find them he cannot stop the smile that curves his lips, the way his heart warms like coming in to a hearth. How lucky they are, these new sovereigns, for the people they lead.

They gather around the glass and Asterion nods, pausing only to press his shoulder against Isra’s before going to them. “Follow me,” he says quietly, and as Cirrus circles overhead (a beacon, for others that might come) he leads the horses and their pane of magic-made glass onto the path where there was once water. They do not even balk at the wood-and-gold, and he does not blame them for the way they stare at suspended waves.

Only when they lift the glass against the wall of water does he look back at the queen of stars, holding the water suspended with his magic curled like a fist. Oh, he wishes he could lend her his strength - he cannot bind water to glass alone.

@Isra

if you'll be my star*
 

[Isra]

Isra of the molten silver

“If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.”


It feels like a wish to watch them take over her dream and make it their own. Isra watches them silently and breathes to the sound of their hooves on wood and gold. In those moment her eyes flutter like butterfly wings and in the darkness the seconds pull out to minutes. Her magic revives a little in that blackness and her sweat starts to cool and chill on her neck.

When she opens them again it's to the Asterion leading her citizens between the walls of water (and not the walls of glass). Something in her sparks like electricity at the sight of him blended into the builders. Here is almost looks like a dreamer or an artist instead of a king. And this time when she blinks it's to etch this new memory deep into the core of her heart.

There is no hiding the way her smiles waivers or the way her steps seem less that graceful when she joins them. “I can try to bind the panels.” She says and when her gaze meets Asterion's it glows a little with a secret sort of emotion, gratitude and something deeper (something hotter).  

Isra moves easily between the Night horses and brushes her lips against their shoulders in thanks and in praise for being so clever where her magic failed her. It's easier, she thinks, to touch them without that hot thing smoldering in embers inside her chest. Once she's greeted them all she moves to the place where the first wall of glass meets the second. There she pauses for a moment and thinks while tapping her horn gently on the glass.

The tap, tap, tap rings out like a song and Isra lets herself be carried away on it while she thinks and thinks. She's better at dreaming than building, better as a lonely unicorn than as a queen.

An idea comes to her then and she lets her magic flow from the now still ocean of her power, through her skin and into her horn. The tip of her horn works like a forge fire (without heat and flame) and when she touches it the edges turn to a strange molten sort of glass. The edges do not smoke like they should but they still mold together as she changes the form of it.

She goes on like this from panel to panel, stopping briefly to rest her magic and to smile as the fish that watch her with wide, bright eyes. “I wonder what I must seem to them? A monster or a god?” This she says to no one in particular but she thinks Asterion must hear the thought and she blushes a little for that.

It's not until the last panel is molded to the one before it that she turns to all her citizens and the King of the Dusk that she smiles and lets her magic, slip back into her skin. There wasn't much left of it. Another panel, she thinks, would have been the death of her. “Let us retreat back to the castle so that you might all celebrate the first of many changes to our court.” Her hooves continue the same song as her tapping horn as she walks across the wood and golden pathway back to the shoreline.

And oh! Her gaze still feels like a secret thing when she looks back over her shoulder at Asterion and wishes, wishes, wishes that he will decide to join them in celebration.


@Asterion

Art

[Asterion]

It feels good to work with the sun on his back and glinting off the lake, even when he must squint against the bright of it; he had grown so terribly weary of rain. And as those who have come to help grow more comfortable they begin to talk amongst themselves, to laugh, to wonder at the strange thing they are building. This, too, is different enough to be a relief, and for a while Asterion forgets that he is a king.

Even when Isra steps forward again to finish the work he is nothing but a dreamer, nothing but a man who might at last build something lovely. He does not mind the sweat that slicks his skin then - and he dismisses the way his heart stumbles when the sea-blue of her eyes catches him by surprise as owed only to the work he is doing.

Asterion will never be used to the way a unicorn looks at him.

But he falls still when she begins to tap her horn against the sea-glass, with the dark waters moving just beyond, and thinks of nothing but the magic she performs.

When she speaks, soft as the clouds that are gathering overhead and sweet as the warm wind with its breath of summer, the bay stallion smiles a little to himself but does not answer her. A dream, he thinks, and steps back as she finishes this thing they have built. For a moment he only takes it all in (and there is so much! oh, he wishes Fiona were here now, with her pencil and her paper, that she might make the moment immortal). But when Isra speaks the king’s gaze goes back to her.

“Only if we might perhaps rest first,” he says, and the smile he wears then is almost sheepish, certainly boyish, as though it is he that is weary, he that has drawn too deeply. Only his eyes betray his worry - but then, they are always as dark as the sea where the light cannot reach.

Still, he thinks, as he follows her across the wood-and-gold planks and the sounds of their footsteps and the slow lapping of waves against strange glass echo back at him, he has never seen anything quite so beautiful as what they have made.


@Isra <3

if you'll be my star*