This keening soul;
He whispers, and she strains to hear him. She leans in, like a universe pressing upon his. His voice comes to her, softly. It comes laden with weariness and how his wings echo that weary voice. The move at his side, slow and sluggish, as if the very earth has bound them tight in vines and weights them low, low. The move like arms trapped in mud, in swallowing quicksand.
She longs to breathe life into him. She longs to bleed energy into his veins like the sun does the earth. Yet she does neither. Leto merely watches, letting his words dance along the shell of her ears.
They say that here is a better place than there. His wing rises, suddenly free from earth’s great shackles. It reaches for the sky, just as he had fallen, an angel broken free of the ties that bind. Her galaxy eyes watch the way he moves, it trails along the arm of his wing, up and up past feathers rich as bark, up and up to where they lengthen and gather and narrow to a tip that points like a spear into the sky. A finger laced with magic to call the stars to order.
Her gaze runs along the tip of his wing and then sets loose. It rises and rises and though he does not look, Leto does. Never is she able to look away from them for long. They glitter in response. They laugh, joyous and proud with their wiles in freeing their boy. Starlight gleams along the frayed edges of his leather ties, Leto knows it is there, the blood of stars, a price spent for the freedom of another.
“And is it a better place?” She asks at last, her gaze tumbling down to land like lightning across his flesh. Mercury gleams in her gaze, it rolls like planets sucked in to billowing sun. This girl knows nothing of where he had been, of what joys or horrors may have swaddled him there. At last she lets her eyes settle upon the shackles broken at his ankles. Boldly, her muzzle lowers to touch the haggard leather. “It smells of freedom.” She muses and how light her voice is when there is ire seeping like acid into her veins. “Were you kept captive?” Her skull tilts and her sigils blaze, a thousand Ilati are screaming out from the runes across her torso. Her people know oppression and servitude. “If so, then anywhere where you have freedom is a better place than there, Sirius.”
At last she has said his name. At last she lets it roll upon her tongue like a wave. It crashes upon her teeth and tongue like a star-storm making landfall. “The dog-star.” She muses and again she looks up, drawn to where that star rests. “The scorching star,” it an intimate whisper, her voice laden with awe and adoration as a smile begins to curl at her lips. The star, that brightest of stars, begins to burn as her starfire wakens it. What power she draws as it smolders and scorches and burns bright, bright, bright.
“Did they name you after it?” She asks at last, starlight limning across the ink of her skin. Suddenly weary, suddenly fatigued with glass grasses tapping at her knees.
@Sirius | "speaks" | notes: <3
