FLORENTINE
always one decision away from a totally different life
The girl beside her is smoke rising slowly from a fire. She is heat that scolds and light that shatters darkness. In the mirror, adorned in crimson and gold, Florentine watches Moira as her lips form each syllable of her name. Never has Flora’s name been so richly spoken, so woven by curling smoke.
In just a name, a simple murmur of Moira’s voice, Asterion’s sister can see why her brother eye’s were so irrevocably drawn. A smile dances at the corner of the Dusk girl’s lips. It draws her mouth up, up to the stars that shine bruised and bright. But that smile is fleeting, for Moira’s gilt gaze is so full of a simmering pain. It pours like a river between them, a river that cries with grief and babbles of its stress. A shiver rocks down florentine’s spine and she smoothes her hair down, working tangles free, slowly, slowly.
Each golden thread of hair she unfurls is a spool unwinding in Moira’s heart. Ah, just one look in that mirror of truth before them, and Florentine knows how Moira’s heart might ache. The flower girl’s own heart is bound together by thread and twine, it knits with each day, with each look Lysander gives her, with each touch. Yet she remembers the ache, she remembers how her heart felt to lie in tatters at Reichenbach’s feet. There is no place for her smile here.
Asterion’s name is as soft as the stars that litter his skin. It is woven in something heavy, something broken and something whole. Her breath is stolen in her lungs and oh how they ache, but how can she breathe when the girl’s pain is a palpable thing. It is a throbbing heart singing into their ears, pouring its crimson hurt into the golden river that continues to weave between them.
“I am his sister.” Florentine confirms, though there is no need. Beneath the wash of golden lashes she sets her bruised gaze upon the sunset red of Moira Tonnerre. “He has told me much about you.” A smile creeps back, slowly, mischievously, sweetly. Florentine is a girl of secrets, of unbridled love and fierce protection. She is the wildflower growing toward the sun, spreading roots to nuture those she loves. Her soul is a garden for all she loves and Asterion is there, his garden a meadow of stardust flowers twinkling beneath a twilight sky. Florentine knows what it is to love the boys of her family.
Slowly, slowly that smile turns from playful to plaintive. Her lips as soft as the sea that brushes the shore, tugging forlornly at the land, begging it out to sea. The girl listens in silence as Moira speaks, she lets the smoke of the fire-girl curl around her, lets her flames lick against her skin, her soul, her heart. It might melt those threads she used to bind her heart, she might unravel… But Florentine was a queen once, she ached for her court, she bled for her court and she wove her heart together with a thread that knows fire, ice, wind and darkness. She offers Moira a little piece of her thread.
“When I ruled Dusk,” Florentine confides, still picking carefully, slowly through each wild tangle. “I would have been lost without, Asterion. He was my regent, a friend and a confidant. He was so much more than a brother. He held me together when I did not think I could hold myself or reconcile the pieces I had broken into…” Tears glimmer upon Moira’s gilded lashes and Florentine does not look away. She watches their trail, slipping away from Moira’s gaze as streams of heartache running forth. “I hope you have someone you can confide in, who can hold you together while you bear the weight of Denocte.” Florentine’s eyes are the bright of suns, they glow with knowing, with love, with compassion. “Isra will return.” Florentine says, as assured in this as she is that the sun will rise. “You just have to hold on a little longer, bind yourself a little tighter.”
Then Florentine’s smile returns true and bright and beautiful. Her eyes close as she recalls the winds that toyed their way through her mane. When her eyes open, Moira’s hair is a waterfall at her shoulder. “It can, and the wind is a merciless imp twining it into tangles.”
A pause, as Florentine drinks in the feline eyes of the tiger beside Moira. Oh her mind is full of memories and they twist her stomach like serpents. Thoughts of her parents run like electricity in her veins and steal her breath from her lungs once again. “I was raised by a tiger. My mother never named her, but she guarded me when I could not guard myself.” A secret smile tugs her lips and turns her heart so achingly raw. “What is your tiger called?”
@
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
