[AW] hear it in the midst of the night,

[Warset]

Her grief, her endless grief, waivers before her like a lamp of moonlight in the dawn. Trees are turned silver as she turns her gaze towards them. Roots, when she images the moonlight has turned to a basilisk  stare, turn to stone that presses up hard as a spire against her hooves. Her wings feel lighter, light enough to eat of the clouds, when she feels how hard, how cold even in the spring, the world feels. 

It is a wonder, or no wonder at all, that mortals must sleep away the pull of gravity in a sea of silk every  night. 

But for a star there is no rest in the day. For a leopard there is no rest in the night either when hunger is as driving a force as a whip laid to flank. Her feathers flutter against her sides, catching the spring wind promising a storm, as she tries to lift her hooves from the hard touch of earth bloated with rock. Even the wheat-grass and willow branches do not comfort her as she passes through. 

She was not made for this, she thinks, and she casts her mournful and baleful quicksilver gaze to the sun. All the parts of me, deeper than flesh, were not made for this world. And like all trapped things, all cursed things, all torn-out and lost things, the thought is a fleeting as her memories of the taste of star-tears running cool down her glowing throat as she and her sister's had licked tears of sorrow from their cheeks. 

Like everything else that is slipping away from her. 

All she has left is a song, a song made of a hundred discordant notes of a greater history. No note makes a story on its own and she does knot have enough of them thundering behind her eyes to remember the beginning and end of that tale. All she has are slivers of a middle, faded and bitter, to comfort her when her own tears cool to frost behind her gaze instead of down the throat of another star. 

All she has is discord when she hums and a star does not come down to greet her but to die. 

But she does not fall to her knees, not even with the sound of someone else joining her to watch the star fall, and there is in that (and that alone) a small victory that is not as bright in her heart as victory had once been. 

It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.

« r » | @any!

[Sirius]

until every last star in the galaxy dies

☾

The fast-wind-above-open-fields feels as though it is pushing him from one end of the world to the other, when he spreads his wings to catch it. Below him the earth is a shining field of green, as he imagines the grass waving up at him as he passes.

Sirius does not wave back at them.

He flies past them on wings that do not know how to stop for the peaceful buffalo herd or the flocks of blackbirds taking flight below him. When he blinks he sees not the prairie grass but a battlefield waiting for its armies to arrive. The trees dotting the field are sentries riding ahead of their battalions, the sparrows carrying negotiations each flock will reject. All the world is a war that does not know how to stop, does not know anything but the violence of living.

He can almost imagine the cries of bloodlust and freedom in the distance. But when he turns towards the sound it is not the war drums he hears —

It is the sound of a star screaming.

It tears the sky in two as it falls, a kaleidoscope of color and light and agony. Before he can blink the pain away, before he can stop himself he is chasing it, racing it, feeling the wind wailing against his wings as he falls alongside the star.

There is a moment when he thinks he may crash with it. But as the ground rushes up to meet him he spreads his wings wide again. His heart stops when the wind catches him, when his shoulders scream in protest, when he lets himself be carried away from the star.

He lands at the same time that the star crashes (and all he thinks as he watches the pieces of it shatter, as it flashes from blood-bright to dusk-faded to at last its midnight-nothingness, is too late, too late, too late.) Star-dust and smoke rises from the collapsed center of it like its soul still reaching for the sky and he — he cannot bring himself to reach back to it.

Sirius only watches the last wisps of it struggle to return home (they will never make it.) And when he turns his eyes from the fallen star to the pegasus standing beside it, there is not enough of the anger that he wishes would be found in his look, in him, in the way he still holds his wings out like he is going to a war instead of a funeral. There is only a brittle and mournful sort of rage when he whispers, “what have you done?”

Another day, he might have smiled to himself for getting the words in the proper order. But today his heart is filled only with the death of a star, and the wondering if this was one of the very stars that whispers to him each night, if their’s is a voice he will never hear again.

@warset "speaks" notes: I think I forgot how to write him.

rallidae