[P] we're not meant for history;

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* A breeze sweeps in from the sea, bright with the promise of spring, but Asterion is less like the wind and more like the water. Calm in moments and crashing in others, a mixture of emotions all churning together, riffles on an ordinarily serene surface.   It is bright midmorning and he has only just heard of the events of the festival. His own Midwinter night has been a fairytale thing, paint and fireflies, something out of a storybook; he had fallen into exhausted and contented sleep some time after dawn. Still he smells of birch-smoke and wine as he hurries through the corridors of the keep, the echo of his hooves the only sound. It, too, is slow to wake today.   Worry sings in his heart, a current pushing him along, but it goes far deeper than sorrow for Florentine, for Reichenbach, for his new people. In his head is the memory of another fire, of another promise, of another golden sister. A twin he had sworn to help, would have given anything for.   Do not follow me. I will kill you if you do.   He knows, knows in his coral bones and his salty blood, that Florentine is nothing like Talia. That they share gold and a father and nothing else. And still he trembles as he goes to her chambers. Beneath that, a colder current, a worse worry: that she would be right to push him away. For what could he do? What has he ever done?   Outside the castle a shadow passes, a dragon straight from a childhood story. Inside, he gently swings wide the door to her rooms. She is clean of blood, her hair still damp; it smells terribly sweet, a spring bower after a rainstorm.   Asterion bows his head to his sister, his queen, but his gaze never leaves her, and the thought that he’d been so happy, so blissfully unaware, just hours before is a little deep wound that stings and stings.   He had thought, meeting Reichenbach in these halls just nights before, that he was glad to know nothing of politics. Now he realizes he knows just as little of love.   “Flora,” he says, and in those scant syllables conveys all his sorrow and all his worry and all his fear and anger, too – fear that she’ll rebuke him the way Talia had, anger that anyone would hurt her, would hurt any member of their home. “I am so sorry.” His eyes are dark as the space between galaxies and he wants to press his muzzle to her shoulder, hang his neck over hers, but he hovers a few feet away instead. Afraid to push, afraid to comfort.   “What can I do?” @Florentine

[Florentine]

florentine



She is wet, wet with blood, wet with sorrow. At least, with her cheeks so damp, Flora cannot feel when her tears flow anew. Each teardrop is a waterfall, endless and deep. Gravity pulls grief from her soul and it turns her limbs to lead.
 
This girl longs to be steel as she looks from the window of her room. Only petals of jasmine remain upon the window ledge below her. They are remains of flowers that had lived there for so long their absence makes not just her window empty, but her soul too. The petals are shadows; a ghostly reminder of what was.
 
The door sweeps open and an ear twists to catch its sigh, but she does not turn. It could be Reichenbach and she still would not turn - not in sorrow, not in desire, not even in anger.
 
With her eyes out in meadows and trees, in the winds that blow, high, high in the sky – Florentine is safe. Up there her heart is still wound tight and whole. Her body does not remember what it was to be so covered in blood.
 
Crimson upon her skin, that had been the terrible memory. It was so startling and bold, so beautiful there, red against gold. Such regal colours, so grand… But there was nothing grand about her death or Lysander’s savage attack. They were both terrible memories rending her low, low, low.
 
This Court feels so empty now – or was it her? Is her body now so empty she is just an echo? He had the truth pulled from her so readily. Her heart had not been prepared and now, oh now it feels like nothing of her remains. Where is her armour, she needs it now, she needs it to hold the pieces of her together.
 
Asterion steps in quiet and gentle. Her name in his mouth, upon his tongue is so full of empathy it is a knife in her soul. A breath shudders from her, her skin shivering, her hair dripping water like blood upon the floor.
 
Still she does not turn, not even as he ebbs closer. Asterion is the moon to shine soft silver upon her sorrow but his sister does not move with his apology. It is not his to make. When she does move, it is only her eyes closing tight, her lashes pinching against her cheeks.
 
What can I do?
 
Then they open and she turns to him. The flower girl drinks in her brother with his skin as dark as Lysander’s, his brow flecked with white like Reichenbach’s. All the boys she keeps close and has become too afraid to lose. But one is already gone and she will not chase him.
 
Florentine says nothing as she turns, at last, from the window. Only the room speaks for her as it echoes with her feet. She does not stop until she presses against him, until her face is hidden in the curve of his shoulder. Flora hides in the darkness of their embrace. 
 
Eyes close tight, tight, tight and there in the warmth of her brother she can almost imagine their father. But the image is gone, fleeting; just a picture grown rough and worn with too much time. What did his voice sound like? How red was his skin? So many things about him continue to slip from her. Like water she lets them go with a sigh and an ache of her heart. Her mind drifts then to the boy so broken because of her stupid love.
 
She turns until just her cheek remains against him, and her heart pressed against his. She clings to their sibling blood as she echoes small and meek. “I don’t know… I don’t know what to do.”

@Asterion - siblings <3
 

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* Asterion can answer for her nothing of their father. Never had he laid his eyes on the copper of his skin, never had he heard the bedrock of his voice. The only things he has are fragments from his mother and stories from Florentine, and it is not enough to piece together a man. It would not even be enough to piece together a ghost. All the bay can do is believe that he was good. He must have been, to be so loved. But that is an ache far from the one he feels now, with her forehead pressed against his neck, his lips ghosting over the flowers tangled in her hair. He cannot say how grateful he is that she came to him, how much he needed the contact too; he can only drape his neck over hers, only settle himself by matching his slow breathing to her own. (Somewhere deep in his mind, in his memory, he wonders if he finds this comforting because he was similarly tangled up with Talia in the deep darkness of their mother, heart to heart, a matching rhythm.) I don’t know what to do, she says, and his eyes go to the window, to the scene she had been so recently watching. The morning sunlight slants in on them, soft and white, and the trees look a little greener than they had the day before. Like spring was a promise they were ready to keep. He feels at once moored and adrift, a kite on a long tether. There are things he knows – how to read tides, which clouds mean rain, what variety of coarse sea-grass tastes the least like salt and fish – but those things seem inadequate here. Laughably so. But he thinks of the paint that marks him still in Vespera’s colors, thinks of the way Aislinn had looked at him last night, as though he were worth looking at at all. Of Florentine’s heartbeat against his, and the sound of her laugh, as golden as the rest of her. And then he thinks of what he’d heard, what had brought him to her chambers, of the dried and fading flower on the sill, somehow familiar. He knows only pieces: A friend of hers beaten, found bloody and near-death, and Isorath gone, and Reichenbach – Reichebach the cause. His mind can’t fit it all together, and so he doesn’t try. “Well,” he begins, and huffs a breath into her forelock, stirring the golden hairs. There is too long of a pause before he continues; he does not know what to do, either. He never has. “What, exactly, needs doing?”   He cannot bring himself to ask what happened. It goes against all he is to push, to pry, to make anyone do anything. But he does move enough so that his gaze finds the amethyst of hers, their heads level, and he thinks of saltwater: the way it could mean tears or tides or hurricanes, but healing, too. “Are you ok?” It is the closest he will come to asking what went wrong.  @Florentine

[Florentine]

florentine
Oh she wants to have answers for him. But too many emotions swirl within her like a vortex. They press against her mind, her lips, her eyes, each for just a moment, before being replaced by another. So many ideas she has entertained: so many thoughts of retribution, of hiding in shame, of running away throwing her crown down and never looking back.
 
But Florentine stays.
 
She moves closer to her brother, hiding in the salt of him, in the wave of his soul that is familiar and so utterly warm. Asterion is a sea, but he is calm and steady. Azure waters with clear blue above. She could float here forever.
 
Water, it is not far from her father’s ice… maybe it is what runs within their family? Except for her. Florentine had no affinity for water – maybe the girls were simply made of something different? But water brings life to the earth and the flower girl feels such sustenance as she clings to her brother.
 
Had Florentine known Asterion’s mind then, she might have been warmed to learn of sisters she had not met. She might have laughed, for all he thinks he is not helpful or inadequately prepared. He is not so far from his father in such respect. There were no words that would bring comfort here, only Time could heal her wounds and, for now, his presence was enough.
 
As her eyes close, as she imagines his breath incoming and outgoing with the tide of the sea, Flora dwells upon his words. What did need doing? Stillness becomes her. That wounded heart is just a whisper and a sigh as she moves. Her soul groans with its pain and neither heart nor soul have an answer for what Florentine should do next.
 
“I don’t know.” The flower girl confesses, small and meek, finally stepping back from the comfort of their embrace. Had she ever noticed the way the air is clean about him and the very salt of him plays across her tongue as she breathes? Asterion is as much the waters of the sea as Flora is the flowers of the earth.  But flowers and water will not save their Court, for it drowns in something worse than water. Save it, a voice vows within her and without a moment’s thought she tells her brother, “One thing I do know, however, is that I want you to be my Regent.”
 
Carefully the flower girl watches him and the way her words impact. Amethyst eyes drink in the shift of his face, the lines and shadows that paint concern across it. Finally her lips tip up into a smile, wide and humorous. “You look like Daddy when you pull that face.” Her expression slips into a mock frown, an anguish to mirror her father and brother (though his was less, always less). Wide eyes grow dramatically conflicted even as they flash with a mirth that soothes her turmoil, “So conflicted.” Florentine jests, her laughter light and bubbling and oh what a balm it is for just a moment. Her room rings for the laughter, its far corners even laughing back.
 
Was she okay? No.
 
But: “I am alright, for now.” Flora says, even though her smile falters for just a moment. It is easier here, lost in memories and family.

@Asterion 
 

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* I don’t know she says, an echo of his own thoughts, and his heart seems to sigh, to tremble like a boat on the water. Oh, just a little wave, just a little swell; there are far more dangers, above and below. But at least neither of them are alone. Yet that is not where Florentine ends. She goes on, her eyes ground-steady on him, and at first a dark-rimmed ear twitches her direction before the words themselves catch hold, sink in. Surely his surprise, then, is a comical thing: his jaw goes slack, his dark eyes go wide. “Me? But I –” I don’t know anything, he wants to say, but he closes his teeth on it. He is a boy no longer; isn’t that what he’d decided, there by the sea with Eik? It was time to become a man; he’d been painted in Vespera’s colors, and some traces of them cling to him still. They are whirls and lines on his side, circles of gold and dashes of turquoise, and he thinks, too, of the tattoo on Aislinn’s neck. Yes – he is a man, now, and a man does not make excuses. So Asterion pulls himself straight, just for a moment, and stands as tall as the lion-hearted unicorn that still stalks his dreams, sometimes. “I’ll do the best I can,” he vows, his voice so level, his face so grave. A graveness she mocks, so that he wrinkles his nose and huffs a breath her direction, before reaching over to lip at a flower. But for all her jesting, a pang rings within him, echoes dimly in his heart. He wishes the compliment would warm him, but instead that sadness, older than him, returns. “I hope I do a better job of staying.” As soon as he says the words, voice soft and low and almost bitter, he wishes he could take them back: Florentine has always made clear her love for Gabriel. Her love for everyone, really; he envies her for it, even standing as they are now, discussing the fallout from such love. Had his father felt that way, leaving Aridela? Conflicted? Then he shakes his head, brusque, pushing down all those tangled thoughts of jealousy and want and useless wishing. It is old history, buried beneath years of other things; a shipwreck. It is here that matters, and now. He wishes she would laugh again. He wishes it was still last night, and none of this had happened, and none would. But those were a boy’s thoughts; he knows that now. “Of course you are,” he says, and offers her a smile. “You’re very brave, you know. I admire you, and I am honored to do…whatever it is a Regent does.” Then he does laugh, because it suddenly seems so absurd, that he should be here, that he should be anything but a boy on a quest for dreams. This is a far cry from the adventures he’d envisioned in his youth. @Florentine

[Florentine]

florentine

She watches him with wide, wide eyes and breath that holds itself tight within her throat. Florentine is surprised then, by just how much she waits for her brother’s answer. She dare not consider that he might say no but… what if he did? What would that mean for her moving forward?
 
There was a part of her, (and it is the one that put the question upon her lips in the first place) that longs to wrap herself up in family. Had Florentine been foolish to think that she might make another life – an extension of her family - out of her relationship with Reichenbach? There had been times, with her eyes closed on the fringes of unconsciousness, where her sleep painted them a future together.
 
Looking back, the Dusk girl cannot help but think of what a foolish girl she had been. That love was not big enough for her, or him. But family love has to be. So, in the spaces of her that her parents should fill, Flora fills herself with Asterion. And he would do for now, for always.
 
Into his neck she grins and laughs, whispering, “I know you will.” And she knows his unspoken concerns, for they were the same ones she also had. They were doubts and worries – things that would forever plague her family (more so than others, it seems). Flora begins to see it and know it now.
 
The girl is smiling, smiling, smiling, jesting and mocking because it was, in this moment, so easy in this moment. Their conversation carried her so far away from her sadness. But it is not to be and with finality Flora crashes down with a bump. The wind blows out from her sails by the sadness trapped in Asterion’s voice. It is an old and raw anguish, like rust that was never fully brushed away and has since begun to eat and eat all it touches.
 
Flora’s smile vanishes, her lashes heavy as she gazes at her brother. The flower girl does not rush this moment. As if stood before an inspiring painting, she drinks in everything about her brother. Oh she swallows his sorrow down to mix with her own and lends him, in the quiet piece of her room, a small piece of her own wounded heart.
 
Why did her father stay with her but not with Asterion? It was an unfair fact and she aches for her brother now.
 
“You will do a better job.” She promises, though her thoughts niggle, deep, deep down. Then she smiles, slow and playful. “Maybe Daddy has tried to leave me too - I just never let him escape.” She lifts her dagger between them. “This will always find him, no matter where he hides and, one day, I will reunite you both with it.”
 
Flora falls quiet, letting the dagger drop down to where it hung next to her breast. “I don’t know why he left you then, Asterion, but he has always been good to me. Nothing less than loving and so, I think, he would not let you go again. And if he does, he will have me to answer to.” There is a fire in her gaze and it heralds a pledge that will not so easily be extinguished.
 
Florentine pauses again, still considering, still weighing up her father and her brother. “He is the best worrier I know and gets himself into all sorts of ridiculous situations as a result. We are too laid back for that Asterion, so maybe we will never full understand his actions, past or present…”
 
Then, like a cloud moving away from the sun, the mood slowly lightens. Her voice lowers to a whisper as the flower girl tugs them both back, “I have no idea what a Regent does either… But I am sure we can find something to keep you busy and looks… Regenty.”
 
She hums dismissively at his praise, though a traitorous blush colours her cheeks. “Thank you.” Florentine whispers at last and her mind strays to the hospital and a boy delirious with pain. “There are times I don’t feel very brave at all.”

@Asterion 
 

[Asterion]

Asterion in sunshine and in shadow* Asterion had always thought the same – that family love must be enough, must be as wide and deep as oceans even when it recedes like the tide. But Talia had proved him wrong. She had torn herself from him, and warned him not to follow, and left nothing but a rime of salt on his skin, on his heart. He had thought then that surely that was the mark of their father, but Florentine made him wonder. Made him think that whatever broken thing sharpened the insides of his twin didn’t need to apply to him. So as the bay listens to her speak of Gabriel, nothing to him but a stranger who wore red, he only watches her with those deep-dark eyes. His gaze lingers on the dagger and, as she continues, he lets himself consider (just for a moment, only a moment) such a reunion. But there are too many questions, a deep pool of unknowns where the surface only reflects a rippling, distorted version of himself. Finally he nods, helpless but to respond to the fire in her eyes, in her heart. “I would like that,” he says, and surprises himself by meaning it. He even smiles, as she goes on about his worrying – whether Flora knew it or no, Asterion had a feeling that is something he’d inherited. Aridela had always been carefree as the stars; his twisting doubting inner thoughts could never have come from her. “Maybe we’re not meant to,” he says, and bumps her cheek with his still-painted nose. I have no idea what a Regent does either… At this he actually laughs, though it isn’t long before the cloud of all the coming responsibilities (whatever they may be) settles on him again. “It sounds like we have a lot of work to begin with. Who else is in your…counsel?” When her voice drops again, when he sees her gaze go elsewhere, he sighs softly and moves to press his warm shoulder against her own. “Luckily there can be a difference between what we feel and what we are,” he says softly, and thinks of his conversation with Eik beside the sea. And then, softer still: “How is he? You can go to him, if you want. I should get cleaned up, too.” For another moment he lingers, reluctant to leave her, but with a last nudge to her cheek he turns to go, his thoughts echoing louder than his feet. @Florentine bleh not my best effort

[Florentine]

florentine
Her smile is free of sorrow and pain. In this moment it is something warmer, something akin to the smiles that used to paint her gilded lips before the Winter’s End Festival. The flower girl basks in this moment with her brother. As she leans upon him, Flora considers her family (only those she knows, for she is not aware that she stands as the youngest in a line of numerous siblings) and takes what comfort she can from having her brother close.
 
The smile she wears does not go. It does not succumb to time or sorrow. It lingers defiant against the shadows that have plagued her of late. Asterion's laughter accompanies it and all at once it feels okay to be a queen with little idea of how to run a kingdom. It feels okay for the crown to weigh so terribly heavy. They could fumble through together.
 
Her own laugh, a soft chuckle that chimes like bells, rings out when his muzzle bumps her cheek. It is warming to have family so close, even here, so far from the Rift.
 
“Just a few others form the counsel.” Florentine says slowly. “Cyrene is my Emmissary and Israfel our new Warden.”
 
Florentine's body shifts as his shoulder nudges hers and from beneath her fringe she watches him with a smile that turns sly. He provides such wise words; another gift from their father, she thinks. Such wisdom was not passed onto her. She was not born to sit still and consider the ways of the world, this girl was too busy living it. “I am glad you have agreed to be my Regent. You are quite wise, you know.”
 
Then he is talking of Lysander and her heart stoops low. Her mind becomes so full of thoughts of him. She feels she might burst from all that she thinks and feels. “Lysander is… not good.” Florentine confesses softly. “He is not healing like he should…”
 
The flower girl trails off falling silent beneath such terrible thoughts of Lysander’s mortality. “You are right, I had better go to him. Thank you again Asterion.” She steps forward, pressing a kiss to his cheek and then she is gone, only petals stirring in her wake.

@Asterion