The earth falls away as they rise into the crisp twilight. A shiver dances down his spine and his eyes tear up mercilessly; the air is cold and crisp enough to cut. Time passed strangely in that place of glowing water and warm heat; he cannot remember what time of day he entered the bright clearing, or how long he spent there. Even the memory of the conversation between the two pegasi seems, in hindsight, blurred by the glare of the water, drawn together by pinpoints of words like alaja and thank you and even no.
"Elif," she calls herself, although he can hardly hear over the rush of wind. The name lodges in his mind. There is something strangely familiar about it that puzzles him. He juggles the sounds, and the letters that make up the sounds, and grins even wider in pride as he realizes- Elif. The same letters as life, just a little mixed up. It feels like he's solved a puzzle, although he thinks that proper puzzles ought to have prizes.
She's pulling ahead of him toward the great mountain, and although neither of them had said the word race, that is most certainly what this feels like. He flaps his great wings hungrily, but they were built for gliding, and with every beat he pays careful attention for an updraft to catch. Even being in second and last place (for now) he can't help but to grin widely. Partly because he's got a nice view of her from here, but mostly he's just happy to be airborne. On the ground his height chafed his pride constantly- he was almost always the shortest person in the room, or the bar, or the great hall. But up here in the air, his small stature is a boon. With his large wings he can do acrobatics as good as any raven, and if he has the mind to he can make himself very small and plummet to earth not unlike a falcon. He does not often have the mind to, of course, because he is not, by nature, a risk taker-- unless there is an audience.
The mountain lies quite evenly between him and the horizon. He spreads his wings as wide as possible and catches the wind, lets it vault him up and forward in a delicious rush of speed. He wants to say something to his new companion-- his new friend-- but anything he would say ("Nice night, eh?" "Are we racing?") seems unnecessary. Anyway, the wind is too loud and fierce to hear much of anything else. So he simply hollers at the sky, and in response the wind squeezes tears from his eyes and whips his short mane against his neck.
- - -
@Elif finally! sorry for the wait <3 (continued from here)
Her prize for him would be a grin, as gleeful as a girl’s, if she knew what he had decoded - a reassembling of her name that had never occurred to her. Elif would feel pride like a sunrise to have him tell her so.
But of course he does not, and she feels like a sunrise, anyway, with the wind full beneath her wings and the cold stinging her eyes and the entirety of the world spread out ahead of them both.
Whatever made up the water of the gods-pool, it must not have been real gold, for it does not sit heavy and sinking inside of Elif’s stomach. She knows well the weight of that bright metal; Solterrans have always been over-fond of it. Instead, if there is any change at all wrought in her, it lives instead in her blood, which feels sparking-hot and quick, warm even as the cold wind drags tears from her eyes and whistles through the gaps between her feathers.
If they were racing - truly racing - she could ask the wind to buoy her as soon as she sees him alongside her. But the urgency in her is not asking her to win but to live, and instead she only grins like a fool at the way he yells at the darkening sky, and stretches out a wing-tip to see if she might brush one of his.
It passes like this, in silence but for the wind rushing in their ears, in darkness but for the way they are still lit by the sun so low on the horizon, until they reach the peak.
Elif has not come to the gods’ mountain as often as, perhaps, she ought; piousness and femininity were lessons she never learned. She prefers her god as wild as she is (and so it is still difficult, to reckon the knowledge of Solis with the idea of him). So it is with unfamiliarity and a little awe that she touches deftly down to the ground, hardly kicking up a cloud of dust with her landing, and shakes out her neck and shoulders as she looks about.
The view from here is almost like flying, the way the fields and hills roll flat below. If it were not so dark, she thinks she could see the golden flare of the desert, and the distant blue wink of the sea. Oh, but her heart has grown heavier since her hooves touched earth, and it is not long before she turns to Mateo, stepping closer to the man, her heart still racing and full.
Among the clouds, silence is expected; here, it feels like a different sort. They are above the treeline, but still she wonders where the nightbirds are, where the crickets. It is cold, as her blood cools, and she fluffs her wings up against the side like a chilly hen.
“They say the gods trapped the regimes here, two summers ago,” she says to break the silence, and at once wishes she hadn’t.
The flight is too short. It is a sacred thing, sharing the air with another. When the tips of their wings touch he grins, wondering what it is they say to each other. Wings could have minds of their own, and he often thought his were unfortunately lonely. Hers are lovely, colors of brown he's only seen on birds before, but the wind is too loud for compliments and once they land it seems... inappropriate, given the setting.
He is surprised when she breaks the silence-- it was so often him that was the first to break things.
"I should have been there," he mutters finally. "Why do you think they did it?" The court talked about it for weeks, yet he had almost forgotten about that event. The fires that came afterward were so devastating they overshadowed most of his memories from that time period. Also, he had been a low ranking scholar at the time and had been assigned work at the library while most everyone else was free to join the pilgrimage up the mountain. (Not everyone called it a pilgrimage. Actually most didn't. But he did.)
He should have been there, that day the regimes met and the mountain swallowed them. He should have been there to help dig his regime from the rubble. When it was all over, and the convoy returned full of stories, he could not believe that the gods would do such a thing. But he considered it more and realized that no one had been hurt, let alone killed. Members from different kingdoms worked together, some (most?) for the first time. It seemed, to him, a lesson in teamwork, a breaking of walls... although judging by the current state of affairs, the lesson had been rapidly unlearned.
"It's cold up here," he says abruptly, and quickly regrets it. It does not feel the place for small talk. They aren't in a bar or on a stroll in the forest or plains. They're in a sacred place, and he's ashamed that he had been so focused on the stranger, so lost in intrigue, that he had forgotten that.
He quickly turns away and steps forward, to the middle of a clearing where four altars sit, each precisely aligned with the cardinal directions. He does not see any gods here, but that does not mean they are not watching. His heart fills with reverent love, with beauty. He stretches his wings wide, ignoring the cold that sinks into newly exposed skin, and closes his eyes. It is the only way he could sing in the presence of others.
And then he sings a song his mother taught him. The first song he knew. It was a lullaby, not technically a song for worship, but it was familiar and right here, right now, it feels right. He came here to find his god. This is how he does it.
This is how he prays:
"Radiate kindness like Oriens, love,
Every day see the world in a new light.
Be humble like Vespera, love,
Gracefully go into the night."
The melody is simple and his voice is quiet but firm. Through the darkness of his closed eyes, colors rise and take shape. Shades of sunrise dance to the melody. He smiles and his voice grows deeper, warmer. His body sways of its own accord and the colors wrap around him, delighted to have a dance partner.
"Move passionately like Calligo, love,
Dance recklessly, life's a ball.
And while you live shine bright like Sol, love,
For in the end Tempus takes us all."
The clearing is full of music and warmth and color and god. When he opens his eyes the colors fall away and the silence returns with its indifference. He feels flushed when he turns to his companion, and he's not sure if it is with sudden self-consciousness or with joy. "Will you show me how you pray?"
How else could a boy and a girl summon their gods?
- - -
@Elif you're forgiven a hundred times over <3 his magic is taking effect here, feel free to have Elif see colors when he sings, or not! whatever floats your boat <3 Also Imma change the thread prefix now because Mateo decided this is gonna be a worship thread
For a moment, when he doesn’t answer, she worries that she’s offended him - that he might see her as a blasphemer, and their friendship (which feels to her fragile as a new flower) will already be ended. It was never like Elif to worry about such things before. But then, the whole world is changing around them; should it be so surprising that she is changing, too?
She is relieved, then, when he does answer, though at his low tone the slant of her eyes is curious. At the time she had only been two, and not permitted to go; still, she remembered well the almost festival feel of the court that day, when the queen and those with her marched out to meet their god. “To teach us something.” Her answer is automatic, though so is the way her brow furrows afterward; like Mateo, she is thinking of all that came afterward, the blizzard, the war, their court once more isolated. All those deaths. But if mentioning it at all made her feel guilty, to suggest it was anything other than a lesson…Elif gives a little shake of her head, a shuffle of her wings, and turns her chin away so that she’s looking not at alters and stone but at the whole of Novus, spread below them like a twilit map.
The girl is wishing for more of that golden, sleepy-warm water even as he speaks, and the timing of it makes her shoot a look at him, a little of guilt and a little of a grin. “Freezing, she agrees - but he is already turning away, and the small glimpse of his expression as she does steals her smile.
Silently, then, she watches him step out between the pillars (from which it was said the gods had woken). As he spreads his wings she tucks her own tighter about her, and shivers; she can’t remember the last time she was this cold, other than that unnatural snow that had been like a curse from a djinn-story.
But once he begins to sing it isn’t the air whispering over her skin that raises the satin-short hair there.
It isn’t just his song, either, though at first she thinks it is, like something her nursemaid had sung to her once. His voice, though, is boyish, and gentle, and insistent; the words are soft and lovely and though she tries to keep watching him her eyes slip closed, dark lashes fanning dark cheeks. The wind quiets in answer to a question she is unaware she’d asked, and the only sound is his singing.
That is when the colors begin.
First there is gold, just a blush of it against the dark of her eyelids, and she thinks it is some reaction of the pool still with her. But then it blooms to rose, and the colors move the way she had only seen once, on the coldest night of the snow, when it was clear enough to see the sky. Then, as she draws in her breath, they are joined by hues of purple, and of blue, like a sunset over the sea or over the world entire.
She can’t help but open her eyes, even when something in her wants to resist - and she makes a soft sound of wonder to see that the colors are here, too, in the true night. They wind around Mateo, they shimmer across his skin, they fill the places his body leaves as he moves in a way that makes her think of how the wind loves her, leaning into all her hollow spaces like a cat curling up, content.
Like all such things, it is over too soon. As soon as she sees the glint of his eyes all the colors begin to run out like dye wrung from cloth, and she can’t tell if she is paler or richer for what she has seen and as quickly lost.
When he faces her again, Elif’s mouth is open, her eyes are wide and soft with awe like spring’s first leaves unfurling. His question draws her back to herself and one ear twists sideways, uncertain. “It isn’t so pretty as that,” she says, suddenly self-conscious. Rather than meet his eye she steps over to Solis’ altar, pale marble fast-cooling with the night. With the unnatural colors fled, the dusk seems more bleached than it had been before, everything muted and dim-growing-dark. “We begin by lighting a candle,” she says and touches her nose to the cold stone. For a moment she is silent, and still, and then she backs away and turns back to her companion. Mateo is gilded by the last of the fading light; his green eyes gleam like fireflies. It makes her want to smile, and to shiver. Instead she continues, matter-of-fact, trying not to feel defensive that she had not come prepared to pray, that even if she had hers were in no way remarkable as his had been. “Light to represent Solis, and smoke to carry our words up to him. Most of the proper prayers are very long, and very—” Elif stops before she can say boring. Certainly there was something to be said for those long, long prayers that she had grown up hearing priestesses speak - all power and violence and strength - but they had never caught her the way Mateo’s simple song had. Which, then, was holier?
“very serious,” she finishes instead, a little lamely.
Mateo sung without thinking. It was not always easy, this not-thinking, and as soon as he falls silent all the thoughts come rushing back in. They reenter his mind with a great whoosh– although that was just his grand imagination, picking up on the sound of the wind whirling up the mountain.
I just sang in front of someone– he sweats, then shivers in the thin alpine air. When he looks at Elif, though, she is not laughing at him. She looks… awed. He whirls around (is there someone else here?) and once he sees nothing of interest, his attention returns to her with uncomprehending eyes.
No gods on the mountain, no magic in the water. Why does he feel so odd then, like he’s looking out through someone else’s eyes? And what's this fluttering sensation in his throat?
It must just be the cold wind in his eyes and the warm, bright water in his belly. He pulls his wings close and fluffs his feathers. What a bother it must be, to have to walk up the mountain. And, once there, to have nothing but your own skin and flesh to keep the warmth close. Thank you, his heart whispers to the gods. For wings and eyes and song. For peace and joy. And unexpected companions. He sneaks a look at Elif, a sly glance like he shouldn’t be looking at her, and returns his eyes to the altars as she speaks.
For someone so uninterested in seeing other places, cultures, religions, he was incredibly open minded to them. (although, uninterested is not exactly the right word for it-- he was interested, just... not very motivated to act upon this interest) He was also terribly uninformed. Or rather, over-informed.
See, Mateo half expected the Solterran prayer to involve blood in some fashion- a hunt, or a sacrifice, or maybe just a few drops of one’s own blood, taken with the gentle prick of a knife. The world is so much smaller than it seemingly used to be; there was much more travel between courts than in generations past, and with it the exchange of knowledge and culture. But in Delumine there was so much information going around that it could sometimes be difficult to tell the falsehoods apart from the truths. Many citizens were still very much misguided about the other courts– particularly Night, especially with all the recent whispers of dragons, but Day was also often regarded with an apprehension that bordered on bigotry. Barbaric tribes and civil war and burning libraries– the stories made him cringe. He knew they could not all be true, but he also knew that truth was the seed from which every story grew.
He is trying desperately hard to not overthink things, but he’s doing it anyway right now and it makes him feel all jumbled, like someone opened up his body and swapped all his organs around. Things don’t fit together. His idea of Solterra does not fit the boyish girl before him with the alaja and the green summer eyes.
“Oh, we do candles too!” He laughs, sheepish. “And other…” (boring) “… serious things. Singing is just… for me, it’s how I feel closest to Oriens. Or any of them.” For while Oriens was his patron god, there would be no sunrise without the night, no night without dusk, no dusk without day. It was a wheel, pushed along by Tempus, and it seemed to him you could not love one part of the wheel without loving the whole structure. But Dawn was… it was not just the court he lived in. The hope of a new day, the promise of the sun after the long dark of night, it was the fire in his chest that kept him moving, dreaming, singing. Flying. It filled him to the brim with love and gratitude– and then it overflowed.
Something that powerful deserved more than whispered words and a candle.
He wants to ask her more about her god, more about Solterra, more about herself, but it was just so damn cold that if he were to ask all the questions on his mind they would both surely freeze to death. "I wish Solis was here," he says, for the first time in his life, and he laughs a little to himself at the thought. He feels their time together coming to a close and it frustrates him that there isn't anything he can do about it so he just looks at the girl with a forlorn look-- a puppy that knows it is about to be left alone. "But they aren't here, are they."
He always told himself-- always felt that god was with him always. It's why he didn't come up to the mountain much, because he preferred to pray in the air or at the library or when he first opened his eyes in the morning and the light was streaming in the open window like a beautiful message in a language he hadn't yet learned. But it would have been wonderful to see a god in the flesh, as they were known to sometimes appear to mortals. Now that would have been a story!
(It briefly occurs to him that perhaps the girl is a goddess made flesh, and it was all a trick or a test. But he remembers how she looked at her own feathers to see if they had changed. It was not just the act of looking that he remembers but the specific expression in her green eyes. The intent in them, and how it relaxed into a certain kind of disappointment. He smiles.)
The wind sinks its teeth into his flesh as an annoying reminder of the physical world and Mateo shifts back and forth restlessly. "Would you like to visit me sometime?" It shouldn't feel so awkward, this invitation between friends, but for some reason it definitely does. A half-shy, half-laughing smile plays across his lips. He thinks he already knows what she will say, and it makes him feel strangely accomplished.
- - -
@Elif ahhh I love her. I'm not sure why I put off writing this for so long, once I finally sat down to it the words came easy <3
It is hard to look at him the same, after that, although Elif tries.
His first impression on her (so important, those first founding moments, a beginning) had been of someone not so different than herself - young, curious, but decidedly mortal. Now she can’t forget that overlay of color, the way it had shimmered and pooled, a wealth of hues greater than any she could have counted in her four years in the desert.
She wants to ask him about it, to demand that he do it again - but she is no spoiled noble girl any longer, to stomp her foot and be given what she asked. Or maybe she is, and it is the world that has changed, the order no longer set up to cater to what she knew. Either way, something hushes her tongue, and neither of them speak of what had just happened, and the moment passes. (Except it doesn’t, it lives in her still, and every time she sneaks a glance at him she half-expects and wholly hopes to see those colors swirling.)
Of course nothing so wondrous happened as she explained Solterra’s prayers. Maybe, if she had brought a candle, and a match - maybe, with their bellies full of god-water and the wind a hymn weaving through the rocks - maybe if she believed enough -
Well, she’ll never find out.
She’d braced for his dismissal, after such a dull explanation, and so his laughter comes as a surprise. Elif smiles, soft as the hazy colors pressing the horizon to darkness, and wonders if all the courts used candles in their prayers. If they were more the same than different (a strangely sharp thought, after a lifetime of being taught that the Day Court was the best, the strongest and the fiercest, born survivors who had to shape a home from an unkind world).
Or any of them, he finishes, and her head tilts like a bird’s. “”Do you pray to the others, too?” she asks, and then wonders if it is too forward, and as if to make up for it adds “I can’t remember the last time I sang. But I know it didn’t look like…that.” She shrugs her narrow shoulders like shifting beneath an itchy cloak.
Even the scratchiest wool would be welcome tonight, as the darkness increases and Mateo is almost lost to it, all his edges blurring to softness. She steps nearer (so as not to lose him entirely, she tells herself), and grins when he mentions Solis. Hush, she tells the wind, and what chilly breeze there was, laden with the scents of night and wild, high places, falls still. The night is pinpricked with stars, so clear and close it seems almost possible to catch them like fireflies, to touch them with her wings.
“No. I wonder where they go…” It seems right, for her voice to be hushed in this open-air cathedral. When she shivers it is not entirely the cold, though it’s a large part - she wonders if they could extend their wings over one another, a hen gathering chicks. She can’t remember the last time she touched someone she hadn’t already known for years.
Up here the wind is too strong for her small magic; it has a mind of its own, one that clucks at her like a parent. When another breeze rises, pulling at Mateo’s long dark hair, Elif thinks longingly of her city, and how it held the heat of the day close to its heart all through the night, as though storing the sunlight in the streets themselves.
His question shouldn’t surprise her, but it does, and she is filled with a warmth that has nothing to do with the desert. “Yes,” she says simply, grinning, and Elif doesn’t feel the guilt she’d expected, doesn’t feel like she’s degrading her own home by wanting to see a friend’s. Up here on the mountain, after all she’s seen today, the world seemed an awful lot bigger and stranger than it had at dawn. It makes her feel bigger and stranger, too, like her heart is full of doors she’d never known could open and each one opened to another, and another. Like the whole world is a mansion and she’s been lingering in the hall (or perhaps the solarium). “I’ve never seen Viride,” she admits, shy and almost breathless with the confession. “Or any forest, really. Is it true there are trees there a thousand years old, that grow taller than any building in any of the courts?” Elif laughs then, a little breathless, half because the cold has stolen it and half to imagine something so unlikely. The trees she knows are stunted, wizened by their lives in the desert.
By now the cold is impossible to ignore; her feet are feeling numb and she stomps them the way you might rub your hands together for the illusion of warmth. She guesses that Mateo feels the same - from his question and the restless way he shifts, the way their breaths are becoming twining plumes. Elif leans away from him, shuffles her wings against her shoulders, the ticklish way the feathers slide against her ribs. When she glances back at him he is hardly more than the glint of green eyes in the dark, and she pulls in a breath that aches with cold before tossing her head with a grin.
“Race you down?”
@Mateo I literally did the same thing! It was so easy once I began. I'm not sure why I have the biggest mental block with her.
The cold makes him feel like a different man. Like all the excess of him is shaved away and scattered in the wind. He is afraid to stop and look at what is left behind, because maybe there is no part of him that is not excess.
So he looks at Elif instead. In her green eyes he can see something-- awe?-- shivering like the leaves of a cottonwood tree, not knowing how to not be seen. Pride unfurls in him, a shy kind of pride that, for the first time, he holds close to heart instead of displaying like a banner.
“Well, yeah I pray to them all. Don’t you?” The gods needed each other, he was sure of it. It was not something he heard talked about much, but he assumed he was not alone in sending a prayer to Vespera, Caligo, Solis, Tempus, every time he spoke Oriens’ name. He lets himself drift away in thought because he does not know what to say when she mentions the way his song looks, except “It’s… odd, isn’t it?”
His magic was a trivial thing. It could not protect, or heal, or wound, or do much of anything than awe– which was arguably useless. But it was his magic. And although he did not understand the hows or whys of it, surely there was some god-given purpose for him having it. He believed this, as he believed many things, without a doubt. But until he understood it better, he did not wish to share it to excess, or even to talk about it much. He tells her this by averting his gaze, back to the fine subtleties of the alaja, although he already had an incredibly detailed image of it committed to memory. It was inspiring to think there were ancient traditions that encoded prayers in patterns of shape and color. And the sect of monks that practically raised him, they prayed through song, often wordless and improvised. It was all connected: touch and taste, sound and sight and scent. Not just in the obvious way but something deeper, more meaningful.
It made him feel like it was possible to live in such a way that your very existence was a prayer, and the very possibility of that strikes a fire in him warm enough that for a few seconds he does not feel the wind at all--
And then it’s not there at all. His ears ring with the sudden absence of it, or perhaps the grey noise is a relic of his mind unable to understand pure silence. It unnerves him, but the calm look on Elif’s face, like she’s not afraid at all, steadies him.
“I wonder where they go…” her wondering voice gently bends the cathedral silence around them, and the wind soon picks up as though to say “we’re here, silly children, here always here” and she says “yes” to him, the answer he already knew because he had gotten a sense that she was a true pegasus who would fly wherever there was wind to take her. He might be a little jealous of her daring, a little insecure of the ridiculous roots he sinks into the earth. He must remind himself, before the insecurity gets the best of him, that it was not so bad to have roots, when you had friends willing to travel.
“Oh you have to see the forest!! However you imagine it to be-- it’s bigger!” It was surreal, flying from root to crown of the oldest trees. It made you imagine what it would be like to be a little bee, buzzing around a forest of flowers hundreds of times taller than you. “And have you heard of our library, how it’s made of trees?! Not all cut up and square but like the forest grew around the library and the library grew into the forest, and you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins because they’re one and the same.” He’s breathless with cold and pride and most of all longing, a deep, deep longing for the place that most put his soul at peace.
And that is how he knows it’s finally time to go home.
“Of course,” he says with a cocksure grin, physically incapable of saying no to a race. He spreads his wings and holds them open for a moment, just to soak in the top-of-the-world feeling, and then with a running jump he’s off into the young night.
(LET IT BE KNOWN that if he loses, it’s only because he let her win, being the gentleman that he is.)
She has lost count of the number of times today she has been surprised, and the number of times Mateo has done the surprising. Surely she’s never had a day at all with so many worlds shifting and opening before her, making the world larger and larger yet, filling her head with questions that were itchy and uncomfortable, but not unwelcome.
That he prays to all the gods is only the latest (she hopes it will not be the last, even as their time draws to a close, and the darkness and the cold make them no more than any other wild forest-creature who knows it’s time to go home). In answer she only shakes her head, bemused, and her green eyes shift to his; it takes her a moment to realize his next question doesn’t relate to the first.
“I wouldn’t call it odd,” she says, uncharacteristically soft - but Elif does not say what she might call it, instead. She isn’t sure she has the words, or that they wouldn’t be insignificant up here, less meaningful than her silence.
It might have made her feel not herself, sitting too long with these strange thoughts in her head, on a day that altogether fell far outside her usual. Luckily, before she can begin to doubt, they are young again, and his voice is loud with enthusiasm, and she is grinning and ducking her head to itch against the inside of her foreleg and wondering just what it might be like. even the library sounds like a dream, and she is not a girl overfond of libraries.
Elif remembers then that Aion is from the Dawn Court, too - and this solidifies her decision to go.
“I’m not sure that I can take your word for all that,” she says, and there’s a laugh in her voice but it is not at all unkind. “It sounds more outlandish than the pool we saw earlier. And so that settles it, I shall have to visit.” And how eager she is already; this, too, is a surprise, one that feels like warmth.
When he lifts his wings she does the same, and a few heartbeats later they are gone, the wind in their teeth and their feathers, and the sound of her laughter echoes in the cathedral air.
