High above flew a Swift herd – just passing through. They won’t land here, in this place of heretics, where they have never claimed a roost of their own. They will talk to no one, make no contact. Here and gone again on their migration path.
Below them shudders a girl.
Like Swifts above so below: Ianthe had never meant to land here. She was meant to be like a passing cloud, a whisper of wind, the herd above. And yet she stands in an open field of lush grass just now browning with the oncoming winter, her heart in her ears and an ache all through her.
Her right wing drapes to the ground, the bone closest to her body pushing against her skin where it’s been broken a little more than halfway down. She knows what happens to limbs healed wrong – has seen Swifts with once broken legs struggle to land and walk – but she doesn’t know how to fix it (doesn’t think she can fix it). A grounded Swift is a dead one.
And she can’t fly.
A breath that would have been a scream, if only she could muster up the energy for it, punches from her chest, and she stumbles on solid ground. The earth hasn’t been able to lay solid claim on her since she was two months old and leaping off a ledge. To now be here, knowing that she can’t reach the sky plunges a knife under her heart, driving pain through her with every beat.
It’s a wonder she hadn’t broken herself against the earth, coming in as uncontrolled as she did, with a wing only half responsive. She wonders if, had the bone broken through skin, it would have torn muscle and tendon until it ripped- until it snapped clean off- and promptly stops wondering.
The gods are cruel, but not like this: that she’s alive must mean something. What god could have been moved by pity enough to let her survive but not fly? What had the Fates weaved for her? Already she is nothing to her herd, as so many others have been nothing to her, and she doesn’t know what to do with the pressure in her chest or the unanswered questions or the wing useless at her side.
If Aion could fly forever and never tire, never need to land - he would. He supposed it would make up for a lifetime of being grounded, the years during which he couldn’t fly. For so long he had had only the scars on his back as a testament to his race, proof of his heritage and his lost flight.
It was a horrible thing, being a bird with sawed-off wings. ’But no longer.’ All those thoughts were left on the ground, hundreds of feet below and behind. All that mattered now was the wind in his feathers, pushing him, guiding him, carrying him. His flight was shakier now than it had been when he was younger - he was missing years of experience, after all - but he was still airborne.
He knew he couldn’t stay up in the clouds forever; his wings would grow tired and fade and so too would his heart ache for his other half (it really was only a matter of which would drive him home first.) But until then, it was only him, his wings, and the wind.
And for now, that was all that mattered.
But he wasn’t alone, not quite - ahead passed a shadow, flying faster than he could hope to match. Aion tried anyway, his wings beating heavily, clumsily, but still the distance between them grew greater. He had never seen a herd of Swifts before - was not even aware they existed - and unable to catch up, they would still remain a mystery.
When his lungs began to burn and his breath came in painful rasps, he gave up the chase. He was just beginning to turn wing and head home when another shadow, a smaller one, caught his attention.
Only this one was falling from the sky.
There was a moment of hesitation, in which he silently debated continuing home and pretending to not have seen. After all, it was just a passing glance - was he really sure that was a person falling from the sky? It was easy to ignore, to write it off as a diving bird.
But his better nature reared its head and chastised him, turning him back around in a neat 360 turn. And just like that, he too was falling from the sky, following the shadow. Wind tore tears from his eyes, clawing at his wings in an attempt to hold him back, but he persisted. On and on he went, until it seemed he would crash into the ground if he continued - only then did he flare his wings out, straining against gravity, keeping himself aloft. And there below him is a girl, striped and winged, crumbled into the ground.
And breathing.
“You’re alive!” he cries out, stumbling across the ground less-than-gracefully in his hurried attempt to land. “How are you alive?” It’s a million dollar question, and almost as tactful as his landing… but at least he hadn’t abandoned her?
Helios does not pull the sun alone. Is the first thing Ianthe thinks, staring breathlessly at the stallion coming in on wings made of light.
Heretic! Screeches soon after, for he is white and black and feathered in all the ways no Swift has ever been, and Daphne had been very clear on what that means.
And yet still he bares wings fashioned from sunlight. Perhaps they are a boon from Helios in return for aid in wheeling the sun across the sky, or maybe it’s some sign of Apollo’s divine favor. In the end, it isn’t truly her business what god had granted him his feathers, just that they had. Just that he isn’t like all the others the Swifts have crossed paths with before.
And how fortunate that this god-favored stallion should find her in this land of heretics! Oh, he may play at being shocked all he likes – Ianthe isn’t about to tell someone with the god’s ear what to do – but Ianthe is now certain that the gods have been moved to pity for a reason. Why else would they have sent one of their favored to deliver her?
His landing leaves something to be admired, but Ianthe can forgive that. His eagerness to obey his gods’ direction and assist her more than make up for his lack of grace. And my! what a talented actor he is! If she hadn’t already sorted what he was about she surely would have thought him to be a surprised passerby.
Not, of course, that she can treat him like any other passerby. No Swift worth their wings would bother with a grounded flier, only heretics are so attracted to weakness, but to treat a god-favored like a heretic! No, that simply wouldn’t do.
With only one recourse she tosses her head a bit haughtily. “The gods must have seen fit to preserve me,”obviously, goes unsaid, but not entirely unheard in her dry response. She’ll admit that she really is not the best of actresses, but she does smile at him to make up for the lack, encouraging him to share in the secret.
After a seconds too long pause, she reminds herself that heretics – and he’s not a heretic, she needs something better to call him, perhaps outsider? – outsiders (yes, that’s much better) are so fussy about their names and personal connections. For all that he’s not a heretic he is very obviously not a Swift either, and as a god-favored she really ought to cater to his sensibilities. “My name is Ianthe.” It feels a little unnatural to introduce herself so brazenly.
@Aion - walk. "talk" ||| Hi! I look forward to threading with you :) Ianthe has gotten the entirely wrong idea, but with confidence! Also, a day after I posted this I realized I could have titled the thread 'pride comes before the fall', and now I'm disappointed in myself, lol.
His heart felt ready to burst in the time it took between landing and her answering. It was racing inside of his chest, skipping painfully fast, twisting and lurching as if it was in the middle of a fight, or perhaps running away from one. He wasn’t sure why he was moved to such concern for her - nor did he have a chance to stop and question it. Perhaps he simply knew how it felt, to be knocked out of the sky and fall so far to the ground.
Of course, his fall had been more metaphorical in nature; but that had not made it hurt any less. So he rushes to her without thinking, only hoping without words.
But the way she looks at him, and tosses her head with a pride he once knew, cuts right through him. Aion skids to a stop, allowing his wings to drift like broken things at his sides, quivering with light that illuminated his face and her’s with a soft yellow. ”The gods must have seen fit to preserve me,” she says, as if he should have already known. But he’s not one for being pious - how could he, when the gods had let so much of his life fall to pieces?
“Well it’s a good thing they eased your fall for you,” he retorts back, folding up his wings with a huff. Sarcasm drips from his voice - he can see the way her right wing droops, twisted and gruesome. ’That bone ought not to be there,’ he finds himself thinking, his lips twisting into a frown. He can’t help but stare, with a sort of morbid curiosity, as silence stretches between them.
He tears his gaze from her wing, about to fly away, when her voice breaks through his thoughts again.
”I’m Ianthe.”
He turns back, his blue eyes searching her face, trying to gauge her thoughts from her expression. “I am Aion.”
He gestures to her wing. “I can take a look at that, if you’d like. I know a thing or two of broken wings.” Of course, the last time his wing had been broken, he’d cut it off, and it had taken years for the new ones - the ones of light - to take the place of the old ones. But he’d studied since then, and learned that some broken things are worth fixing.
Aion… Aion… it is not a name unfamiliar to her, but still it takes Ianthe a moment to place it. It’s the name of a god, a primordial one, but she has heard no tales of Primordial’s walking since before the Titanomachy. Is that only because they wandered the land when Swifts flew? No. It mustn’t be. Aion must simply have been gifted the name as he was gifted his wings, a further sign of godly favour.
Simply – hah! – as if such a boon could be simple! To share a name with a god without being struck down for the sheer impudence… It’s a marvel, and it warms her to this god-favoured stallion despite how he huffed over her lack of acting ability (surely it is this lack of hers that so disturbs him, for what else can it be?) and turned his head away from the grotesque twist of her wing she has been determinedly not thinking about for as long as he has stood before her.
Only, she's thinking about it now, and she can’t stop. A grounded Swift is a dead one, and preserved by the gods or not, what use is she now? Her herd has swept away without her, and already they must think of her as dead if they think on her at all. And her wing aches: like overused muscles and rattled bones ache, like a bruise pressed on aches. And she could have ignored that, really, she could have, only she keeps catching sight of how it drapes on the ground, no longer entirely a part of her, and nausea turns her stomach.
And he, Aion, wants to look at it. Says he knows a thing or two of broken wings. And she wants to think on how he could know of something like that, but suddenly she’s too consumed by the same fear that rose as she plummeted to the earth. “I-,” she stops, utterly unsure of what to say. All at once, she feels so very young.
Ianthe knew, distantly, that she was not full grown, that her wings had not yet stretched to their full length, and her hind was still higher than her front, and that she still was not quite so filled out as some of the others, but she’d not felt like a child in… she can’t remember. But now she suddenly feels very small, and very scared, and very, very alone.
Aion is looking at her like he’s reaching into her soul, and she stares back, wide eyed and startled at the depths of her fear, shifting on unsteady feet. “Please?” He was… Aion had to be safe, right? He was god-favoured, and eager to help, and he… he said he knew about broken wings. He could… he would help her, wouldn’t he? “I don’t know what to do.” She admits in a whisper, shamed.
They had been broken, useless; he’d had no choice, he had to survive and he couldn’t in that state. So he had taken a blade and cut them off.
That day, and every day since, he had regretted that action.
It may have saved his life, but it had also killed a part of him. He’d learned to live with it, to carry on with a new life, but there had always been something missing. With time, he had managed to convince himself that he was fine, even happy, with how things were. But had he been?
He’d never considered himself a lucky man, let alone blessed. If gods existed, surely they must hate him. They’d cursed him from birth, scorned every breath he took, tore his life apart (or had he done that himself?)
And yet… they had not taken his life. He had found Eros, found love and at least some semblance of joy. He had been given a new pair of wings, and although their ghostly appearance at times seemed mocking, at other times they seemed to glow like hope. If that wasn’t a sign, perhaps he was simply blind.
Please.
He tears his gaze away from her wing and finds her staring, wide-eyed and trembling. His heart stutters.
When was the last time someone looked at him like that, the last time someone asked him for help?
He finds himself talking without knowing what he was planning on saying; but the words come out before he can stop them, before he can think about taking them back. Aion steps closer, almost close enough to touch.
“I’ll help you.” I’ll do my best. You won’t turn out like me. He’s making a promise to her, but it feels like he’s making another to himself.
The magic is flowing out of him seemingly on its own, reaching out for her broken wing. He hasn’t used it before, hadn’t understood it. Aion doesn’t know how to control or stop the magic that leeches from his body like water seeping through cloth; it does so of its own accord, finding her broken bones like it knew already where to look. His body feels suddenly cold, his breath turning frosty. Can she feel it, too? The way his magic places itself like an ice pack over her wing, targeting the break, stronger than any normal ice would be? If his magic were to strike true, it would numb the targeted area enough to ease her pain, and perhaps her panic along with it. He doesn't know yet if it will work, but something inside assures him that it would.
It wasn’t a mend by any means; but at least a numbed joint would hurt less.
“It shouldn’t hurt quite so bad now. Do you mind if I take a look?”
He still can’t decide if she’s lucky to have fallen so near to the Night Court, or unlucky to be so far from the Dusk Court. A part of him is still doubtful that luck even exists, that all his life was nothing more than happenstance. But as he reaches for her wing, wanting to stretch it out and assess it, he finds himself thinking out loud.
“Do you believe in luck, Ianthe?”
@ianthe !
walk. "talk."
I wanted to leave it vague; but aion has an active magic that allows him to cool/numb injuries, you're welcome to write it out as working or failing, whichever you choose c:
"I'll help you." Aion promises her, he swears to her, and Ianthe could almost cry with relief. She doesn’t know what he can do for her, doesn’t know what his help will gain her, but the knowledge that she no longer has to do this alone is enough for now. Later there will be the time to think on what ifs, to worry about never flying again, of being so terribly, shamefully crippled, but for now she let’s the sharpest edges of her fear drift away.
When he steps closer to her, close enough to almost touch, she almost returns the gesture. Only the uncertainty she has in her own, trembling legs, and the wing draped against the ground is enough to stop her. She is not alone, but part of her doesn’t know it for certain, part of her wants to reach for him.
And she hates it. She is a fierce thing, a wild, independent thing. When she was two months old she knew nothing of fear, threw herself to what could have been her death if the fates were less kind. She has prided herself on her survival, on the heights she has reached and the dives she has pulled herself out of. She needs no one: not the mother who nursed her or the father who named her; not the age mates she ran and flew with; not the herd that left her behind. She needs none of them.
Why then, does she so desperately want them?
Why then, does she want to reach out to this stranger, to this outsider, to this god-favoured heretic? Aion has reduced her to the smallest parts of herself: the child, the doomed, the forsaken. Only it is not Aion who has done this at all. And she wants to hate him for it, but mostly she just wants.
Cold shakes her from her spiraling thoughts, from the fear and the yearning, and she flinches slightly at the onset. It’s… strange. A sensation not unlike snow, wrapped tight around the broken pieces of her wing, and at first it stings just as sudden cold ought, but then it seeps into her, until the sensations deaden. And that… that is nice. Already she can feel muscles once braced against the pain loosening, and without pain to remind her the nausea turning her stomach eases just the slightest bit.
When he speaks her head jerks back around to him, only just realizing that she had shifted to stare at her wing as if expecting a physical change. Of course there wouldn’t be change. He may have used some strange magic, but wings do not simply spring back into place. “Thank you.” At his question, she would offer up her wing in answer, but instead she can only try to reclaim some of her pride by lifting her head high and nodding. “As you will.”
At his next question she finds herself blinking, head dropping back into something less showy as she considers. “I don’t know. I’ve always believed in fate and the plans of gods.” But what a cruel plan it would be, to take her wing and let her plummet. What a cruel fate, to leave her alive and earthbound. What cruel luck, for that stallion to strike her wing at all.
“But is it better that someone be born for tragedies or for them to stumble into them? Is it kinder for someone to be gifted fortune, or to find it?” Were the countless foals who threw themselves off ledges but failed to catch their own wings fated to die? The elders seemed to believe as such, seemed to think it was an indication of the gods favour for the herd. But that... suddenly it seemed cruel to her, to be born only to die. And the gods were cruel, but she hoped they were not cruel like that. “I think I’d rather believe in bad luck than ill-fate,” she decides, “But I’m not sure about the good.” Maybe that’s sacrilegious, to not immediately tie the good to the gods, but Daphne is not around for her to ask.
@Aion I'm so sorry for the wait! The active magic works c=
It still feels strange, having magic - particularly one so different from the one he was born with.
He supposes Novus must be the cause of it. His magic had withered and died within him the day he lost his wings; there had been whispers of it at times, in other far off lands. But none of them had stuck, and neither had he. His life was one of wandering so far, of finding new worlds and deciding one by one that none of them were enough.
He had thought Novus would be the same - he’d been off to a terrible start, arriving in a storm and losing Eros. And yet it had been three years now, and here he was still. And as if as a reward, he had been gifted wings and magic, different than the ones he’d had as a boy yet inherently the same. It was as if Novus, as if the magic that stitched the land together and wove their fates into one, had claimed him as its own.
He wasn’t sure yet if he was particularly fond of that thought; but neither did he desire to change it.
So now the magic flows out of him, slowly yet surely, her subtle sigh of relief the only indication it was even working. Thank you.
Such a simple phrase, yet it unsettles him. Aion is not used to being thanked - he is not used to helping others, for that case. With a soft huff he cranes his head, bending over her wing. He prods softly with his telekinesis, eyes roving over the uneven structure where the wing bends unnaturally. Again the hairs along his spine raise, and he resists a shudder of revulsion. He makes himself keep going, forces himself to lift her wing - watching her face closely for signs of discomfort - and bend it as best he can along the joint without jostling the broken bone. And as he inspects her wing, he tilts an ear in her direction to listen as she speaks.
The plans of gods, he almost scoffs yet catches himself just in time. If the gods had plans, for every one of us… well he certainly had gotten the short end of the stick if they did, and she as well.
And yet if the gods didn’t give out gifts, if the gods didn’t care to involve themselves in the lives of mortals - how had he been given wings? Or magic? Or Eros?
“I’m not sure there can be one without the other,” he says, stepping away from her wing. “Either the gods cause all of it, or none of it.” It was a black and white way of looking at things, a cut and dry perspective. He had always been that way.
“…But I’m not sure which is better myself. I’d like to think I’ve made my life into what it is, but the evidence seems to disagree.”
He shakes his head, as if to clear it. “Whatever the case, it seems someone was looking out for you. The break isn’t as bad as it could be.” It wasn’t as bad as mine, he doesn’t say. You get to keep your wings today.
“We’re not too far from the Night Court, a city south of here. I can hold your wing on the way, but they’ll be able to do more for you than I can here.” He’d never carried much with him, after all. She needed bandages and braces, something to set the bones so that they could heal straight and true.
“- Can you walk?”
@ianthe !
walk. "talk."
figured we could wrap this up in the next few replies, with them heading to the court together if she agrees? I'm so sorry for how long this has been taking me!!
Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.
Is ill-fate caused by the Gods? Is blessed circumstance? Can there be one without the other? Ianthe has never had cause to question these things before, and always her more direct questions had someone to answer definitively for her. But Aion – heretic, god-favoured Aion – has no definitive answer to give. He poses questions she has to think on and answers her suppositions with ones of his own. She is not told she is wrong, but then… neither is he.
So she gives it the thought it deserves, the thought he gave to her, and keeps them to herself for the time being so as to properly examine them. (All or nothing, he thinks. And yet: someone was looking out for her. All or nothing, and yet he is blessed with a God’s name and sunlit wings. All or nothing, with this? It would be all then, wouldn’t it be. And yet he would also like to think he made his own life as it is. That doesn’t seem very much like all or nothing.)
But this world isn’t just made of questions and answers and wonderings, and Aion steps away from her wing, finally stopping the poking and prodding she has done her steadfast best to ignore. When he makes his pronouncement she feels her shoulders relax, for while his diagnosis of “not as bad as it could be” is probably not the best of statements, it is miles better than her own assessment of death sentence.
Still, he doesn’t let her wing droop back to the earth, holding it despite the distance he has put back between them. Thankfully he explains before she has to ask, and then checks on her before she has chance to ask the questions that had immediately sprung to mind.
Frowning slightly, she takes a step forward and tests her weight. Her legs have stopped their shaking, and the bones feel less rattled from the hard landing. She feels awkward, but then, she always does after a long time in the air, and this time she came to a rather sudden stop instead of running off the momentum and the rust. Still, her legs will hold, she can manage. “Yes.” She glances back to him from where she’d been glaring at the ground beneath her feet, “I’ll make it to… the Night Court?” What a strange name for a place.
With a glance to the sky for the sun’s path she turns to the south. “You called it a city. What is that?” Some quaint place the heretics frequented, obviously, but she doubted it was anything like what the Swifts called cities. For her, cities had always been mountaintop roosts made permanent by whole collections of monolith temples and their priests and attendants. They were holy places, stopping places, somewhere you did not stay for long unless you were Called. It was a sacred, awful duty, being Called. She rather doubted the heretics had anything like it.
@Aion - i'm so sorry for the wait! i'm good to finish this up :)
He holds his wings out, to steady the both of them. He supposes it’s a good thing, that he’s gone so long without having his wings - otherwise it may have felt like an eternity for him to cross the sideralis prairie on foot. So it’s easy to resolve himself now to the long walk, even if he was not expecting company today.
His thoughts drift, as they take those first few steps, to Eros; he had not intended to be gone long, had hoped to even be back before his mate realized he was gone (easier said than done). Now, Aion would be gone far longer than he had planned. And he had not left even so much as a note.
But when the questions bubble out of her like rain from the clouds, it snaps the stallion out of his thoughts. “What’s a-“
He turns his bright blue eyes to her, analyzing her carefully.
“It’s a,” he fumbles with his word choice. “A place that horses gather. Their are buildings there - homes - and it’s also where the Queen lives.” He frowns, despite himself, scouring through his brain for a worthy description. “They have markets, too, supposedly the best in all of Novus - markets are where you can sell or buy things, like jewelry or food or-“ he has no idea what she would want to buy, and his voice trails off. Aion smiles apologetically.
“I suppose you’ll see it all for yourself when we get there,” he says, although it’s hardly a good enough excuse.
But it would have to do, for now. The Court was still a ways off, and he was sure she would have more questions for him before they reached it.
