take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
She cant sleep.
It isn't really anything new, not for Elena. She tosses and turns, even the soothing rhythmic pattern of the ocean swelling and falling is not enough to comfort her into a slumber. Elena finally scoffs, the only audible confirmation that says she is giving up. There is a sea breeze outside as she steps onto the sand, and it jostles her awake. She has been a storm of emotions lately, the reeling and spinning hits her at strange intervals that leaves her feeling so passionate and light-headed. So much has happened, so much is continuing to happen. She wants to settle herself, but she feels as torrent as her ever faithful sea.
It is easy to keep walking, keep moving, one foot, another, and another. Distance covered, footprints left. It is only when she notices that distinct absence of ocean waves that she suddenly looks to see where she is headed. She feels lost, and yet she cannot place exactly why. It’s a reoccurring feeling of loneliness that swarms like mosquitos to her blood. She cannot outrun it, but she doesn’t try very hard. Its only when the itchiness beings that she ponders actually doing something about it. She wondered if she was destined to forever remain a butterfly, never fully settling to one patch of flowers.
There are mountains set out before her, inviting her into its tender embrace and Elena can hardly refuse them. The night air folds into her like a loving caress, promising to hold her tight until she slips away once more.
The golden girl looks dull against the night shadows as she makes her way closer and closer into Denocte. She shouldn't go there, again and again. Elena is reminded every time she finds herself on the uneven footing of a mountain side of just how weak she is for not being able to stay away. If she were stronger she would have never risen from her sleep, never hunted through her mind for some excuse, even if she didn't know it at the time, to move her feet once more towards Denocte. Night is no Dawn, where Elena feels free to frolic through its forest, and it is no Terrastella which has built a cathedral in her heart and a home in her soul. Denocte is another thing all together, a mysterious thing, and Elena finds her drawn to it like Snow White to the apple, no matter if the evil queen stands by just waiting for her to take a bite.
She is looking for him and for him—for them, she realizes. (She only realizes it because she does not cower from the shadows in fear, but marches boldly into them.) She stares out into the darkness, for her shadow and her star. Elena is looking for them.
But she finds—nothing. No, no, Elena doesn't find nothing.
She just finds Moira instead.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
this is the story of a girl, who cried a river and drowned the whole world
The moon wears a blueprint to the pegasus' heart, pulling her along just as it strings tides onto shorelines as pearls on a thread. Waxing, waning, eclipsing, every version of it draws Moira into the night, into the dark, into the smoke over and over. Only when sun-bright eyes wear silver streams around their edges and pale greys sprinkle over the red of her, the sin of her, does Moira find some semblance of peace in the whirlwind of her emotions.
The moon does not care what the world thinks or if her pull will force chaos on the ground.
The moon does not care.
Briefly, largely, the phoenix wished for that to be her - to not care about those she does care about. Caring hurts too much, feeling hurts too much, being hurts too damn much. And it is a monster with claws dug deep into her heart.
Moira Tonnerre is much more emotional that she likes, much more a monster than she cares for, and much more a sad thing on her trek into the mountains that she'll ever admit to anyone. Not that they can't see the truth of it in the chain of mountains upon her back that serves as a spine, or the shadows and the hollows of her eyes that are craters on her pretty face. Even as much as she's neglected herself, Moira is still beautiful, if only allowed to be the terrible sort to look upon.
Her walk is quiet and unhurried, as soft as the breeze blowing through charcoal and ivory hair. Dark fringe is only just contained, longer now, almost enough to cover golden eyes. The wind whispers to it, just as the moon whispers to the girl, and pulls it away so that her path is clear. There is only one way out, and that is through. So she takes a step, and another, and another. Black hooves land, red sides heave, dark crown surges forward over and over. Like the red sea parting, Moira makes her way out of the city with a nod to the men and women on patrol, a dip of her head, and then she is a ghost once more.
There is a graveyard of ghosts that hide in the trees when she passes by them, or perhaps they are mere shadows that her mind makes into demons and monsters. Leering eyes. Screeching mouths. Upturned noses.
They're all the same.
Full of fury and disappointment and disgust.
Full of nothing but the misery that pours from her like whiskey at a tavern.
The path is dark and quiet until it is not. It is hers and hers alone until it is not. When it is not, it is Elena who comes into view - golden and glistening and beautiful and so utterly like the boys and girls who leave that it makes her brows furl and her frown deepen. Who is this stranger? Have they moved into her home when she wasn't looking, when she was too busy letting the beasts devour her whole, when she was neglecting everyone and everything - especially herself?
No. No. They are too far for her to know them or make out any details other than the complete gold and pain of them. They are too far for her to know anything outside of the ache in her heart and the knot in her belly. The phoenix stops. Every muscle a spark, a livewire waiting to burn. Her head tilts like Neerja's might when she's eyeing food. Her eyes are half lidded and she's ready for a fight. Who is she who is she who is she? The voice whispers, demanding, daring, a crooning like a siren that she can't get out of her head.
Moira must know. She can't turn away from gold, even when it burns her with its brilliance time and time again.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Nothing, sometimes, is safer.
Numbness, sometimes, prevents hurt.
She has seen nothing, when her vision was covered with the death she tried to bring back. Yes, it was safe there, without seeing the world, blind to the pain, unable to notice the suffering, she could not see the hatred. There was something all too beautiful about that, but even as she sat there in her nothingness, Elena knew that there was loneliness, and for someone who wants, someone who craves touch, who desires only the fleeting glances of strangers, Elena felt herself spiraling in turmoil. And then her eyes turned blue, and she came to Novus.
You would never guess from the lightness with which the golden girl walks at the edge of the mountains of Denocte that she bears the weight of an atlas on her shoulders. It presses and crushes, but she holds it up time and time again, to keep it upright, to keep herself strong, even if inside her knees are buckling and her chest is heaving.
She sees her and Elena’s attention is immediately drawn to the mare, to the hardness she wears like armor, to the sharpness of her eyes. She is beautiful, Elena thinks, only because her first thought can never be of danger. Elena takes in warning lights like fireworks, alarm bells like a symphony. Again and again she has made the mistake of befriending the wolf in the woods, offering him her cloak of red and her basket of goodies. She peers under the bed not to avoid the boogey man, but to see if he is still there, smiling his wicked grin that she can only ever look back at sweetly. The golden girl is enthralled by her monsters and enchanted by their danger.
Elena walks into the den of the lion and places a a dandelion in his hair and a kiss upon his cheek.
She is everything that Elena has seen in strong women, even despite her thinner appearance. She can see her, fierce, steely, and she finds it so beautiful, although, perhaps, her enemies do not. She was something to behold as Elena moves closer to her. “Hello,” she offers her, like a plea sent into the night. While Moira asks, Elena begs. The feeling of wanting is familiar, and with it comes the creeping of shadows and the way his forehead had pressed against her own, his breath along her back as he held her. His voice, his laugh, his smile, his…
And then she is kissed by starlight in the way his side leaned into hers, and his voice that soothed, his breath that could only bring lightness and life into her. His light, oh his light. Elena will never forget her star.
“Are you a woman of the mountains?” She asks only because the look in her eyes is Aletta before she went to battle. Because it is the steady resolve of her mother as she fought off the illness. Because it is the elegance of a red haired that has grace Elena could never dream of. “Or are you someone else entirely?”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
this is the story of a girl, who cried a river and drowned the whole world
It takes a long while of staring, of thinking, of mulling over what this little thing is and what they should do next before Moira realizes she's been spoken to. The voice that greets her is soft as roses falling against her skin, silken and smooth and sweet. Sweet like summer wine that lulls her into a sense of love and calm and longing. Too sweet, too soft. Moira's nose wrinkles for a moment, her eyes narrowing further before her head comes back up, her dark fringe moved faintly by the wind to show those flashing golden eyes again.
In the moonlight, she is beautiful in her muted coloration. A fire lined in silver. A collapsing star left to explode for eternity.
But she is not so lovely as the woman in silver and gold, dressed so plainly and beautifully, dancing forward with kindness. Moira is left to wonder if she ever looked so innocent as a girl, so sweet as Elena does now. Of course, she would help those who needed helped as only a doctor could, but her heart does not bleed so freely for everyone she meets. The kisses she presses into secret alcoves of skin, into the hollows of collarbones and creases of arms and curves of auricles are so hard-earned and so few between.
Perhaps to a few she was so sweet and soft, like a lamb new in the Spring just learning of the world. But the Estate made her hard, the Tonnerres grew her into a frigid sort of formal, a remote island never truly immersing herself into the continent of people.
"I do not know what I am," the phoenix replies at last. Quiet as a dying man, the words are barely more than a whisper. They are not harsh nor uncertain, but full of conviction and a simple truth. So many metamorphoses have made her something entirely different than what she was, and the phoenix is still learning how to be a predator without devouring everything she sees.
After a moment, she huffs out a breath. Ears come forward, released from charcoal hair that hide them and their displeasure. Forward she walks, forward into the arms of an angel that she does not wish to know. "I know you are not of my home," it is another truth, another statement given dryly. There is no question, no room for questions. "You smell like somewhere else entirely, somewhere I once longed to be." Perhaps Elena is a ghost conjured up for the phoenix to meet once, to cry upon, and then never see again.
She feels so heavy, stone upon stone lain over her heart, nails as a bed whenever she rests. There is no release from this pressure, and strangers never make good secret keepers. But she does not want to ask questions and she does not know what she wishes, not now that the eyes in the trees have quieted and all that is left is red and gold and silver. The mountains are lonely, but it is far lonelier in the silence of her soul. For now, she will not bark and bite and burn all that she sees. For now, the phoenix waits to see what will come.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
It is when the woman wrinkles her nose that the sun drenched mare thinks maybe this had been a mistake and she should have never stopped for a chat. Crystalline gaze is steadily focused upon her and she watches for intentions. But her golden eyes immediately set her at ease. Golden, beautiful, like her father’s, like Elena’s had been once. She thinks, even with eyes of fire like that, she had never looked with such resolve and beauty as Moira does now.
“That’s okay,” Elena so quickly reassures her in a soprano voice. A soft smile ghosts her face. She says it, but Elena has wondered the same thought so many times before, has agonized over it. She is too far for the golden girl to reach, but she longs to reach out to her, to touch against her shoulder, to let her know that she is here, here and she would not be so quick to leave. ‘I do not know what I am.’ It is a statement that can send someone out into the open ocean. Elena has no life vest to save her, but she would hold her in her arms in the frigid ocean saying ‘you will not float out here alone. I will not leave you to drown.’ Even, while she can already feel herself sinking beneath the waves.
Maybe the woman could sense the aura Elena gives, or something of the like. Because she comes forward, forward. Blue eyes watch her with sparked interest. Elena thinks, and she will remember this moment in years to come, she thinks as Moira steps forward, that this is when she believes they will be friends. Maybe she will tell Moira this one day, when they are older, that she knew from the very beginning.
“No, no I came here for…” she trails off. For a boy, for two boys, her mother would be so disheartened. “Perhaps I should not have come here at all,” she admits to herself, even as she steels one more glance at the world around her, waiting for the shadows to move or the stars to shine brighter. “I chase shadows and starlight, two of the most impossible things to catch,” she admits with a laugh and sigh, and had she been human maybe she would have tossed her arms in defeat.
“And where did you once long to be?” Elena questions her, boldly. “I am from Terrastella and before that, well, a great number of places,” she says. “And you?” She asks. “What is your name?” Elena has always asked too many questions because she always thinks she wants to know, but she is too often quick to hand those answers back to their source. The flaxen haired girl tilts her head and furrows her brow, considering the other girl before her. Strong, beautiful. She looks anything but unsure and Elena worries deep in her chest, if this woman could not find stability, what made Elena think she could? Her heart pulls in two different directions, and here on the mountains, Elena hands Moira the needle and thread, wondering if she can sew it back together.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
this is the story of a girl, who cried a river and drowned the whole world
Elena's voice is a bell chiming, her blue eyes a river slowly flowing forever into a sea. Or perhaps, that sea she dreams of is the sky, the stars, the expanse where everything and nothing is. They both dream of the stars and the ocean, of something intangible and untouchable. They ache and never admit to it. The world will never know how two girls crumble together into dust on a mountain at night; it will never know how they rebuild each other molecule by molecule.
The phoenix does not care for a lifeline or a vest to keep afloat, she'd rather drown a million times and let the sea swallow her if only it meant she could find what her heart is searching for. Every night it is thrown into the cosmos, and every morning it returns as hopelessly alone as before.
She is a pyre fizzling out. She is a wildfire just starting to burn.
Old. New. Wise. Naïve. Moira is so many mixtures of contrasting things that she fears she may be forever doomed to suffer this world alone. So alone and empty and silent. Once, she thought that it was fine to sit in solitude and tend only to her books and another's skin with a needle when called to work. That had been her only goal, her only hope, outside of seeing Estelle smile. At least then there had been Estelle, her Estelle, who had never left her side or let her down or abandoned her. A star, a northern light. They'd been together even when apart. They were two faces of the same coin, and now they were miles an miles and miles apart.
Elena could never be her. Caine could never be her. Bexley could never be her. Nor Asterion, nor Isra, nor Michael or Eik. No one would be like those who came First. And somewhere deep, deep, deep down, that scares Moira Tonnerre more than everything else.
They're gone.
Gone like everything else. Disappearing into the darkness between the stars. "All who are lost find their way into the arms of my court," she says at last, nodding to the lights in the distance, the bonfires that blaze and the faint smell of smoke with only the lightest traces of laughter. "Denocte holds the hearts of gypsies and dreamers, it satisfies the soul as no other court ever could. We here make a home for the homeless and find love in the arms of strangers in strange clothes." Moira unthaws, the summer storm of her ending like a flash flood. There and gone, and what's left is something almost holy, almost whole.
With a secret little smile, the phoenix spool starlight down from the sky and makes a miniature galaxy between them. Over the top of it, she whispers "Starlight is only as far as you let it be." The stars freckling her skin wink in response, passively shining as only they know how to do. They do not ask if they are alone or if they are part of something bigger, they simply are.
"I longed for the ocean's depthless embrace, for its thrilling mystery to always be beside me. I held it too tightly and it slipped through my hands." She answers truthfully, the gravity of her loss an albatross about her neck. "What would you have my name be?"
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Her life in Paraiso seemed so long ago, that on some days, Elena wondered if she had dreamt it. She remembered the mist of waterfall clinging to her body, the flowers dancing in their fields when a wind swept through. She thought of an old willow tree, the calls of forest birds, and the twitching noses of rabbits. She thought of the loving gaze of Valerio and the loyalty and love of her kingdom. She thought of it often, until it took on abstract shapes with little meaning, until it faded in the corners.
She thought of it until her heart ached, until her bones sung with loss.
They stand their together, never knowing how high their arms reach and stretch, thinking they could reach the impossible if only they could go a little further, hands flitter at the frayed corners of it, and they know the feel of it, and it feels like dreams and hope.
And they go even further, as if they might grow wings, before falling together in a pile, never truly knowing what the ocean at sunset tastes like, or how it feels to cradle a star. They know only the solidness of the dirty they sit upon, broken. The next closest thing for Elena, when she has fallen, in this moment is Moira.
And so she reaches.
If Moira is a wildfire only starting to burn, then Elena will be her sparks. She will burn brighter with her still. They will be so much more than glowing embers, more brilliant than quiet flames, and more wild than any inferno.
“How many others have you found on these mountains?” She asks in a voice like yellow flowers, shy and fragile and beautiful in a wild way. Drops her chin and glances away from her for a second so she can hold close a hidden the emotion that swirls to life in those silver blue eyes. This is not the first time she had been found. (A bridge, a forest, a cliff). Elena is always found, and maybe this is why she has never bothered to leave a trail to follow behind her. Maybe it is why she has always felt so free to wander. They always find her. Moira found her, after all.
She thinks sometimes about life, and what it might have been like to be someone else.
She would have liked to have been artist, she thinks. Who traveled the world and painted. Who sought only quiet landscapes, imposing mountains, eager rivers, vast oceans, and shy flowers.
Not boys who broke her heart.
Moonlight glitters and dances across both of them. In the right light, a strange sort of wildness is caught in them. Eyes like early morning frost watch in awe as the stars find them, when the phoenix brings them. Cracks open a window to her past where, for just an instant, she can glimpse things she does not want to be reminded of tonight.
It feels like a fist buried in her chest, fingers spread to capture the heart within, to crush it or maim it or, perhaps, just to watch and wonder how such a wretched, mangled thing still finds the will to beat. Her mouth opened, a question ready, then closed. “Starlight is only as far as you let it be.” Elena takes her words quietly, they are scribbled on a piece of paper. One day she will find it at the bottom of her pocket and remember something she should have known all along.
Her confession is enough for Elena to walk through the stars to the girl. She reaches out with a golden face that nearly touches her own, but she holds back a moment. “We should never get so attached to such pretty things.” She admits. “Maybe, together, we can hold it,” she says quietly, there is shards of fragmented hope in her breath. “The starlight, the ocean, we can hold onto it all.” And she thinks of something she had once told Lilli another night, another place surrounded by mountains and night sky. “Make believe is so much easier in the night,” she says. “We can make believe until the sun rises.” Make believe until their hearts burst with promise, until the sun sends it scattering.
“It will be something good tonight. We can be happy, Gioia.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
this is the story of a girl, who cried a river and drowned the whole world
They are a monsoon, crashing together, crashing over the land, reshaping the world into something devastating and beautiful and broken. Something never seen before. Not as Elena reaches for Moira, letting herself be pulled into the black-hole heart that rests within the chest of a girl who only knows how to bleed and bleed and bleed. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters as the wind brushes through their hair, combing it as a wild thing.
Moira feels the chill of it on her spine, revels that she feels anything at all.
And then, the golden girl speaks. Sunlight lines her questions, curiosity, hope, naivety. The phoenix knows it is dumb to give in to it, to allow herself to be sucked into a destruction that is not of her own making, but she cannot, will not, deny a simple question. And that question is honest enough, easy enough. It does not seek to delve into an unknown sky, nor wade into the deepest parts of her murky ocean just to save her from drowning.
Moira would rather drown than let another golden heart in.
Dark lips part, sanguine red, bloody and beautiful, on soft words that feel like the first wool sheared from a sheep. "I find the hearts that want to be found.” And it is not a lie. It is not untrue. Every heart that walks alone through the woods is aching. Her own aches even still. Even as it tries to forget. So she pulls her fogs closer and the mystery nearer, lets them cover all the goodness and light Estelle tried so fiercely to release.
Moira will not be unleashed upon the world again, not now.
"You wanted to be found,” she continues at last. It is just as gentle a claim as the last, but there is that smile again. The same smile she wears when she reshapes the cosmos between them.
It is simple enough to bring the burning hearts from above down low, to bury them in her reality just as her own heart is buried at the bottom of the ocean, taken to another land, flown into Solterra and shattered with a second set of wings. So many times it’s been bruised and crushed. So many times it’s come back, stitched and aching for another dose of pain. Maybe the pain is her anesthesia, dulling the rest of reality into something bearable… But when the pain rips into her, she feels even more lost than when it is quiet.
Deeply she breathes, unable to look at the hope so clearly written on Elena’s face. It is something of the future that Moira Tonnerre will not dream of, will not even dare think of. She is sad when she admits "My oceans have all gone, but that does not mean that your fading light must disappear.”
Like that, she is ash. Elena may be the spark, but how could a spark ever stop a wildfire from blazing out of control?
Gritting her teeth, with a bite to her cheek, Moira at last meets those warm blue eyes. With a nod, she tells her "I will dream with you, little lamb.” And she is left to wait for whatever should come next, only hoping that it is quick and easy.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
“Maybe you were out wandering again.” He smiles with brown eyes that crinkle just so, looking at her like that. He is too old for her, she knows it even as she speaks her next words, but they have just met and she has never seen a man with such dark eyes as his. “Maybe that’s for me to know and for you to never find out.” She teases him because she is young, foolish, and in love with her own blissful ignorance and naivety. And she was raised on stories of her parents and love at first sight. “I’ve never found enough interest in anyone to want to stay anywhere, except maybe you, little Elena.” He says and he walks her home as their once upon a time begins in graceful writing against storybook pages. Pages Elena once cherished, but ripped it apart all the same.
She stands here, about to repeat the same mistakes, and to make some new ones. She has no way of knowing his. Maybe if she had, she would have just stayed with Moira in these mountains. Forever and ever and ever.
It might have brought her peace, happiness, joy.
She will never know.
They will never know.
Right now all she thinks is that all she needs is Moira. This will not be the last time she thinks it, even if it is the first. And beside her everything is simple. Elena will crave this simplicity with Moira, built on glitter and delight. Who knew simple things could be so beautiful? It was no secret to Elena, in truth. Did she not see that peaceful life so out of reach under a Hyaline sky once?
You wanted to be found.
“I did,” she says and it takes all she has to not fall apart inside her arms, but this is not Lilli, and Elena holds herself together, for this stranger, because it feels kinder to do so than to crumble like a toppling cliff side that Elena so loves to dance upon. Elena loves her smile, and ultimately, this is what will keep her from shedding a tear when they part ways. “I can burn for the both us,” she tells her, a promise, because if anyone should have Elena’s promises, it is her, it is her. “Until you can spark a light for yourself.”
Elena buries herself into Moira’s side for a moment before she knows the mare will slip away from her. “I will look for you tonight—dont let me look too hard,” she says and laughs (oh that feels so wonderful, it feels like magic.) “Goodnight,” she says, and she waits until she is out of sight before Elena turns to Dusk, where Moira and her dreams await her.
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
![[Image: ddvotwe-59302ba6-6a81-47bf-9846-30c5a5db...0iFb4PvyXE]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/8026a53b-dc57-41ab-b574-9f8a8fe57ce4/ddvotwe-59302ba6-6a81-47bf-9846-30c5a5db0780.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzgwMjZhNTNiLWRjNTctNDFhYi1iNTc0LTlmOGE4ZmU1N2NlNFwvZGR2b3R3ZS01OTMwMmJhNi02YTgxLTQ3YmYtOTg0Ni0zMGM1YTVkYjA3ODAucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.ujCJH7FAbsQhfZlQniMmEd_vw-VmvaTDn0iFb4PvyXE)
