avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
Avesta does not feel alone as she should. The sea is roaring in her ears as it brings the tide in to lash out a fury against the cliffs curling around her small bay. It is the only sound echoing against the rock (and against the curved bone of her skull). There are no gulls calling a storm-song over the crags and no crabs snapping in and out of the small outcropping of dune-grass. Nor are her parents, or her sister, here to keep her grounded.
Although she knows that not too far away, in her castle, they have surely noticed she is missing.
Again.
She should feel smaller than she does too. Against the violent sea her bones are nothing more than dry wood waiting to be bleached and washed out to some distance shore. Avesta is young and delicate. The sea is a monster as endless as she is new, as violent as she is wild. With just a turn of the wind the storm-clouds, that are starting to paint the sky with darker and darker shades of black and blue, could sweep her away like a seed of nightshade.
From way up high where the sun and the moon watch, she thinks, the world must look like it is bruised and beaten.
Foras is watching, from a distance not as high as the gods, and each time Avesta encourages him to welcome the storm with her, he only says, I do not like the sea. Over and over again his answer never changes and his white jaw, bloody from a rabbit, does nothing more than frown a wolfish, childish scowl at his unicorn dancing in the storm tide. Something inside him starts to wake up, to crack open like winter, and blow through all the hot blood screaming through him each time a wave lashes violently against the rock. But he still does not try to go to the water.
Avesta wanders deeper into the sea that is only now starting to roar beyond the cliffs and against the sand of her cove. It's cold and she shivers when it splashes against her sun-warmed and fever-hot side. A shell, long empty and hollow and dead, slides across the sand towards her. And it's not until it cracks against her ankle, that she realizes how deep she's wandered into the waters.
Or how dark the sky has become.
She pulls back towards the shore and only then starts to wonder how long, and how furious, this storm will become. The meek tame part of her knows she should turn home, and that Foras has the right idea to watch from a distance with a belly full of food. But the wild part of her, the part that is all salt-water and brine, howls primordial at her. It begs her to stay a little longer, just until the sky turns as black at night and there is no summer sun left to find her.
It is only the howling part that Avesta listens to.
and pluck til time and times are done the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
T
he sea is a mighty thing, the mightiest thing that she knows. It is still strange to Aster (strange and marvelous) the way it never sits still, for she was born when the sun hung motionless in the sky and not even the wind shivered along the water to disturb its surface. She will never forget the way it all came alive again, like a sob after a long-held breath, like a cry of hounds set free from their leashes, like a birth.
There are dark clouds boiling up over the horizon, spilling across the faded blue of the sky, swallowing it all up to darkness. The air smells of brine and salt and coming rain, and Aster runs like the wind runs over the sea, wishing she was quicker yet, that not even her footprints would be left behind her where she dashes over the sand. If she looked back she might see the surf eat up her prints, and she would be glad to know there is no trace of her passing, only herself pale and perfect as a shell against the darkening day.
When she flies over the sand and into the cove with her mane and tail streaming out behind her, Aster does not see the wolf higher up among the rocks and trees; she only sees the crashing waves that send spray over her hocks and knees and sides, and she sees dark rocks slick and glistening with saltwater, and she sees the girl.
At once Aster stops, struck to stillness as foam whispers cold around her hocks and sucks gently at her hooves, trying to tug her out, out to sea. There are times she might have listened (and oh, when her wings are more than just a dream of feathers and her antlers more than just a hope of mighty golden crown like a seed still-buried in soil, then she will see what the ocean has to tell her) but now she only regards the girl who looks like she came from the ocean, like the waves bore her to the sand like Aphrodite.
Then she is walking forward, her golden eyes still drinking in all the silver and blue of the unicorn. She does not stop until their tracks meet in the sand, and she is close enough to see all the ways the dark lace forms webs delicate as spider-silk in patterns around her neck (and how she wants to touch that lace, those pearls).
Everything is possible, to a girl born when time stopped playing by the rules, and so it does not feel foolish to her to say (in a voice like willow-leaves blowing in the wind, or like brushing roots reaching down below the soil), “You are very beautiful. You look just like the storm - did it carry you here?”
And behind her, out over the open sea, lightning splinters the sky in fingers like veins and capillaries, like the branches of a mighty tree. If there is thunder, the waves are crashing too furiously to hear it.
avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
Foras notices the girl running down the restless shore long before Avesta does. He watches her steps, her wings, and something in his dark, feral heart screams deer. If the sea wasn't nipping at the tracks she's leaving in the sand, Foras thinks that maybe he would have given chase (if only to see how fast, how fleet, how quickly she might run). He's too distracted with the thoughts and the blood rushing winter quick through his young belly, to warn his unicorn that something other than the storm is rushing towards her.
Avesta is too distracted wit the way the white-crests of the waves look like shooting stars racing across the bottom of the dark cloud. She's wishing upon each one just before it dissolves back into the sea. And it's not until she reaches her seventh, wild, youthful wish that she notices the bone and gold girl. She inhales and it's sharp and cold, and her eyes sting to see all that white after seeing nothing more than flashes of it across the black.
The shore sighs beneath her hooves as she turns towards her. Their prints on the sand look a little like a moon-chart-- sickle to wishing moons, to bloating moons, and back to sickle before the sea eats them. Avesta's horn paints a black arrow through what the sea leaves behind. It's long and sharp and looks like it wants to fly away from her delicate brow to another world. “Sometimes my mother tells me it did.” She whispers and it's like another distant storm falling from her lips, all wave on sand, and sand on shell. It feels like a secret on her tongue that she's not supposed to understand yet.
Avesta almost wants to say, sometimes I think it's calling me back. But she doesn't know which words to give to this ache in her that blooms each time the water dashes itself to death on the dark, gray planes of her cheeks. Instead she only steps closer, brushes her nose against the girl's cheek and whispers, “You look like a flower that decided it needed no roots and only wind.” And when she pulls away the space between them doesn't feel like it fits between two girls anymore. It feels more like that place between the end of the sea and the beginnings of the sky.
She decides she doesn't enjoy the feeling of it, the weight, the way it makes her forget how much her soul loves the lightning, and the thunder, and the wave-wishes drowning in the water. The silk and pearls flutter against her neck, like butterflies caught in her mane, although they do not flutter in quite the same way the wind is howling. The touch of it makes her pulls away and look back to the sea.
Another bolt of lighting sizzles through the black clouds, hot and bright and Avesta tells herself not to blink against the sting of it. “Who are you?” And this time she does not look back at the bone-white girl stained in golden (like molten fire caught on skin). Avesta looks only at the sea with a hunger in her gaze that was not there a moment before.
Foras, up on the cliff, has the same look in his arctic eyes.
and pluck til time and times are done the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
O
h, how she might have run if the wolf had given chase! Aster has yet to flee from any hunter other than her brother, but what a thrill that feeling is, of being coursed like a fox through the woods, hunted like a golden hind. To be quick, to be clever - even to be caught -
But the wolf does not hunt her, and she does not see him. There is only the girl colored like a storm with her sharp horn made for piercing. When she turns Aster watches the moon-chart of her feet as though she might divine meaning from those patterns; perhaps she does, for when she looks up to meet the unicorn’s gaze there is a half-knowing, half-wondering look in her own eyes. She has to lean forward to catch that whisper in the slim cup of her ears, and she doesn’t mind the closeness, nor the soft-rough of it like foam on sand. She is one half of a whole; nothing feels more natural to her than such intimacy, even with a stranger.
Almost she answers And she would know best. But she is snagged on that word like a bit of veil on a thorn - mother, mother, mother - and she says nothing at all, though her golden eyes flicker bright like a world-door closing. Instead she only closes her eyes, lashes falling soft and pale as snow against her cheek, when the girl touches her. Aster must close her teeth on the command that wants to follow (Stay) when a space opens up between them enough for the wind to come through, and the cold salt spray.
When another tongue of lightning makes shadows of the rocks and themselves, painting everything stark, she opens her eyes with a sphinx’s smile. “I’m not a flower,” she says, though she is pleased to be called it, to be called anything at all. “But they grow in my mother’s hair.”
Who are you, the unicorn asks, and Aster thinks that she could be anyone. A princess escaped from her wicked parents and her high tower, or a hunter after a spirit-stag, or nothing at all but a bit of wind whipped up with seafoam and brought to life by a falling star. But the filly did not ask her, she asked the sea (as surely as if she expects the sea to answer) and so she tells the truth.
“Aster,” she says. And she is a flower, and a star, and (she suspects) a thousand other things beside, waiting to be born.
She wonders if this girl is, too, as she steps alongside her, hip to shoulder, cheek to cheek. “Is this your home?” There might have been a note of jealousy in her voice (as thunder rumbles low like a wolf in its throat, and lightning splinters the darkening horizon, and waves thrash themselves against black rocks), except that she and her brother have the whole of Novus as their home, little feral children, and every other world besides.
avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
There is nothing more than the howl of the wind and the growl of the sea for so long that Avesta starts to count her heartbeats by the violence of the storm. Her body feels hollow each time the sea crashes against her bones, like her skin is just waiting for the brine to replace all the hot-blood of it. Another wave-star races across the horizon and she walks belly deep into the water before her realizes that she was moving towards that comet of white.
Take me with you, her heart is sobbing at the waves and she feels as empty as a cave when that star fades into the black.
She startles when the flower presses against her, cheek to cheek, shoulder to shoulder (wanting to wanting). It seems like another natural thing for them to be, tangled together like two lost stars instead of the roots her and her twin tangle like. Although she has never felt like a half a thing waiting for something else to make her whole. Avesta has always felt like the full moon waiting for her constellations to tell her stories long after the sun has risen to knock them below the belly of the earth.
For a moment she wants to ask who the girl's mother is, or what colors the flowers are, or a hundred other questions that rise up in her throat like lava when she turns away from the sea. Instead she only learns against the girl like the waves are leaning against her (waiting, waiting, waiting). “You could be. We could be anything.” When she blinks she's thinking about that star racing the horizon and her hungry wolf waiting on the cliff. Could girls raised by dragons and magic and wolves ever be just mortals?
Her blood tells her, over and over again, no.
“Aster”, she echoes the name as another roar of thunder and sea scream out. It sounds like AS-TER, like magic and and wild things that have decided to name themselves. Somewhere, in the bit of her not filled with the storm and the brine and Aster, her memories are trying to tell her something. Like that name is a part of something else, something missing, something like the sea.
But she's young, and a unicorn, and by the time Aster asks her question she has already forgotten what it is her memory wants her to remember. “No.” The word sounds like a lie on her tongue and she wonders if the girl can hear her heart screaming ownership beneath its cage of skin and bone. “I live in Denocte.” Avesta wants to tell her that she lives in the castle in a room with ruby walls and paintings that never sleep no matter what hour the day is. She wants to tell her that she lives in the city just up the cliff where the bonfires blaze until the blood turns to jasmine.
She inhales all the electricity of the storm and quivers when a wave not far out rises into a dragon larger than their heads. Soon it will be time to go--
Soon, but not yet.
“Do you live there too?” Aster looks like she should live in the gardens where ivy looks like lace and cooper grass feels sharp and sweet when she naps in it. She looks like the castle, all bone-white and golden and slick with shine-- like wonder, like dreaming.
And yet, Avesta isn't sure what answer it is she's waiting for when she finally looks away from the sea.
and pluck til time and times are done the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
I
t is cold, cold in the lashing waves and the rising tide as the ocean tries to crowd into the little stone-wrapped cove. Against the summer-hot storm-humid air it is a shock and Aster wants to laugh at the way her blood races to keep her warm and little bits of salt-spray are whipped by the wind from off the waves. They write patterns that fade as soon as they are born and the girl stretches her fledgling wings to catch them in her golden feathers. Maybe tonight they will tell her what they were trying to say.
If she wasn’t here, how far would Avesta walk out into the waves? It isn’t hard to think she might be a princess of the undersea; that the beach and cliffsides and rolling hills beyond are not her home, that she is visiting the shore to plant pearls for a garden of iridescent flowers.
It is even easier to think it when the unicorn says We could be anything.
Aster doesn’t respond We already are. Instead she only lips at a seed-pearl caught like a dark star in a black net against the girl’s neck and glories in the way the only warmth is where their narrow bodies press together. When Avesta says her name and the thunder answers Aster grins and it is not the kind of look a girl should wear. Her eyes are gold gold gold when she looks at the sea-gray storm-blue unicorn beside her.
She thinks that she will give her name to no one else. That only Leonidas and Avesta can have it, the one who says it like home and the other who says it like a storm.
Only because they stand so close does she hear her companion’s voice. She watches a wave rise up that almost becomes more, the glitter of lightning on water and all the dark of the sky behind it making it look like wings, but it is from the shore that she feels the burn of eyes on her. Aster does not turn around.
“I don’t live anywhere,” she says, and she hasn’t learned how to keep the pride from her voice (or why she should). And yet, and yet, she thinks of a mother. Of curling up in the curve of her belly and listening to the lull of her heartbeat as Florentine told story after story until she fell asleep. Of a father, green-eyed and laughing, the dark curl of his hair like her twin’s. When she speaks again, her voice is soft, the softest thing on the beach. “My brother and I have no home. Our parents disappeared.”
She cannot see the island through the haze of fog and storm. There is only darkness on the horizon, only the whitecaps of waves, only a tongue of lightning and an answering groan.
Aster hates the way sorrow makes her feel like drowning, like all her bird-bones have turned to heavy pearl. She tosses her head, defiant, like if she were grown she could rip down the clouds with her antlers of gold (only the beginning of pyrite buds on her forehead).
“We follow no rules, we are loyal to only each other.” Wild children, defiant children, laughing and fae.
avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
Bits of coral are starting to wash up around their hooves long before Avesta looks away from the golden pyrite peaking through Aster's hair like bone. The coral is white as sea-foam and each piece cuts at her ankles when the waves dash it against her skin. And if there is blood blooming between the black scales of her legs the sea takes it back before Avesta realizes she's sacrificed anything.
She's looking at a shard of coral that looks brighter than the others, sharper too, when Aster breaks the silence between one roar of thunder and the next crash of the sea against the cliffs. “Oh,” she says. It sounds like a sigh, like the beginning of a dream (oh, there was the sea or oh, there was the wind howling through my ears). Maybe it sounds a little like a kiss too when she turns and presses it into Aster's downy feathers that are still catching salt stories.
There is no pity there because she cannot feel it.
Avesta whispers her own story there when she worries a feather between her lips in an instinct so much older than the marrow filling her bones. She hopes Aster will listen to it later-- later when the sea and all this warmth between them is quieter.
“It sounds like the perfect way to live.” When she pulls away, just enough to see those golden bones peeking through, it feels like cutting her skin open. “I have a sister.” It sounds no less proud and no less fierce than the way Aster spoke of her brother but something in it seems protective in the way the sea protects the sharks, and the whales, and the rotting ships. Like she'd cut open the world for her sister, like something blacker than loyalty, more violent.
Up on the cliff Foras starts to howl and somewhere further than that she can hear the bellow of a dragon calling her home. She doesn't look back towards her city that she knows is waiting, instead she looks at Aster in the way that a wolf might look at a deer when its belly is fat with voles and sparrows. “If you follow me home I could show you another way to live.” And when she turns away, and starts to run towards her wolf and her mother's dragon, the clever tilt of her horn promises that her way is no less wild.
and pluck til time and times are done the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
O
h she says, and the word is like a puff of dandelion scattered to seed; one bit of it is torn away by the wind, and one drifts down to water like a seagull’s downy feather, and one little piece or sound or sigh is tucked down between Aster’s newborn feathers. She wants to close her eyes, she wants to watch, as the little wild unicorn lips at one as idly as Leonidas might. Instead she only stares out at the dark sky and darker sea and waits to see another image marked out in salt-spray. There is something different about the way Avesta’s breath tickles on her skin.
When the girl says she has a sister it is Aster’s turn to part her lips and say “Oh. It is a little sound that means then you understand, and the same thing is said in her eyes when she turns to look at the unicorn. Avesta’s eyes are so near the color of the storm behind her that Aster almost looks back again to wonder whether one did not steal from the other.
But a part of her is too caught by how she wishes the unicorn did not already belong to somebody. Even a sister.
It is the howl of a wolf that makes her look away, not in fear but in curiosity, the way a raven or a fox might. She notices that Avesta does not look, nor so much as flick an ear when another, lower, larger roar rolls like and unlike the thunder and the waves.
Aster says nothing to the unicorn’s offer. But when the girl turns and races up the beach and the dark rocks, dancing over the foam and fallen logs, she follows. And it is answer enough.
