[P] break open a galaxy

[Sirius]

until every last star in the galaxy dies

T

hey came to him as clearly now in the light of day as they had last night, a million eyes that smile without mouths, as if hiding some great secret that they can hardly wait to tell. He can see them now, although others might not; the blue of the sky is not so bright to him, not when he can see the ghost of stars hiding within it. He had never seem them so clearly in the day before; it is as if they’ve seared their image upon his mind, so that he may find them more readily when he turns his gaze heavenward. 

And his gaze is always turned toward heaven. 

It has always been easy for the stars to distract him.

He stands there in the meadow now, wings half-flared like he’s ready to fly, and all he’s waiting for is the sky to invite him up. If the heavens asked him to he would fly forever without stopping to land, or sleep, or eat, or do anything other than lose himself in the galaxies swirling around him. They swim around him, a mass of stardust and miniature suns too untamed to yet pull themselves into shapes. Nor does he ask them to, not yet; he can see the bright dog-star, the one they named him for, drifting near one of his wings. And past that one the three centauris chase each other across his back, around and around again. A hundred stars he doesn’t know the name of (yet) crowd his face, pressing against his skin until they look like so many glittering white spots dusted across his coat.

His tail twitches, but aside from that he doesn’t dare move, standing there with his wings half raised to heaven while the cosmos drift down to join him on the earth. 

Sirius isn’t sure how long he’s standing there - he loses track of time when he’s like this, when he can almost pretend that he, too, is made of stardust - when he becomes aware of another horse wandering nearby. He waits until they come closer, and closer, close enough to hear the whisper of his voice above the wind, and then -

"Does hear them, you?" He asks the stranger, without turning to see them. And he lifts one wing, watching as a line of stars dance across the feathers.  Sometimes, when he was quiet and still and focused on nothing else, he could hear them telling him each of their stories, the way they had when he was younger. 

"The stars? Speak to you they do?"

He doesn’t want to imagine what it would be like if they did not. 

I'LL BE WITH YOU
@Darkrise
for any of your kids! I’m still down for cast and sirius if you’d like, but whoever works best <3

[Castalla]

There was a great and heavy silence to a sky that does not sing

A lone figure, coated in the shadows that stalked the night-painted world, stood atop the grassy hill ahead, framed against the star flecked sky. Curiosity licked like little flames at her heart as Castalla approached, wondering what he might be doing out in the cold. Though maybe she already knew, for there had been a great many nights she herself cast her gaze to the heavens to stare at the diamonds that rested there. Her destiny had been mapped out in those stars once, traced across the fabric of the world. A great hero sent by the Fallen Gods, an incarnation of Nysa herself. But she had betrayed fate, or perhaps it had betrayed her that night in the shadowy corridors of Cruor Castle when her kindness had cost her people their victory and freedom. Her soul was too stained to be inhabited by the Goddess now, her deeds too bloody to be the marked path of a chosen one. And now her life lay in tatters, cast from the sky above and laid waste to upon the war-marked soil of Alanaris.

The question did not strike her as odd, not when her own people looked to the night for answers. The children of Nysa were they, creatures fashioned from her love of the wolves that sung to her heart.

“They did once, the stars and the moon too. But I fear they do not anymore.” Nysa had abandoned her, the face of the moon but a cold silver expanse. Or perhaps Castalla had abandoned her, left the land the great Night Goddess watched over, a silent sentinel among the ruins of her brethren.

There was a great and heavy silence to a sky that does not sing. The harmonies of the galaxy lost to the darkness of an endless night. Oh the stars did shine indeed, but they were as mute as they had been the nights she’d spent trapped in a dungeon, the play-thing of a tyrant King. Castalla turned her face away from them, fighting against the sorrow that welled up from the gashes in her heart. It seemed without battle and danger to bite back against the hurt, her strength was waning as much as the moon. Were she alone the Wolf might have snarled at that, might have shed her skin and howled that hurt from the depth of her wearied soul. Instead she looks to the winged steed, the sky mirrored in the constellations across his skin. His words do not follow the pattern of the common tongues she’d learnt, though that did not stop her from recognising his sentences, nor was it something that struck her as odd. “Do you hear them?” Her question is soft, as though speaking too loud might disturb the world in its slumber.

"Speaking."

⚔

@Sirius