until every last star in the galaxy dies
T
he cool-air-above-deep-water caressed the two horses standing on the beach, catching and filling Sirius’ wings as he held them to either side of himself. He shivered inadvertently, feeling the wind drawing the heat from his fevered limbs. After a moment he folded his wings neatly against his sides, cloaking himself in ink-black feathers. Before him the pale-antlers-blue-scarf man smiles, and his violet eyes dance in the pale light emanating off of his scarf. The color reminds Sirius of the sky when the sun sinks below the horizon, how the colors fade from orange to purple to midnight blue.
He smiled back, and the stars laughed overhead. His eyes shined back silver and full of starlight.
The soft whisper of the sea filled the air all around them, a constant symphony that flowed in the spaces between their voices, giving body and depth to a song they unknowingly sang in tune with. Sirius cocked his head to one side, ears swiveling slowly to catch the soft strains. The wind danced along his back as he did, catching in the stranger’s pale scarf.
Aeranas, the stranger names himself, and the name rolls like a wave through Sirius’ mind. He counts the syllable, repeats it over and over silently to himself, compares it to his own name. Sir-i-us. Aer-an-as. There was a certain similarity between them, ringing like a bell in his mind. ”A phantom,” he says softly, and files the word away for later inspection.
He wonders then if the stranger knows about the stars, if they whisper to him, too. But then he decides that he wouldn’t, that he couldn’t; a child-of-the-stars would already know what they felt like, what they sounded like. They would already know that it tastes like freedom, and like joy, and like adventure. They sounded like chains breaking and wings carrying him away from danger.
”Like peace,” he whispers, and a smile, brighter this time, nearly as bright as the sun, stretches across his lips. He fans his wings again, lifting them momentarily back towards the sky. ”It tastes like peace, and wonder.”
He shakes his head then, and looks out towards the trees that wave at them across the beach. He thinks he can see a light flickering between the boughs, fleeting, always at the corner of his vision - but every time he looks it disappears, leaving him unsure if it was his imagination playing tricks on him.
”Novus land,” he answers, and gestures with a flick of his tail towards the bridge they had had to pass. ”Although… this place different than the rest.” And a part of him was not sure if it was a part of Novus at all, even if the bridge connected the two lands.
A part of him imagined that one day the bridge would snap, and the unmoored island would sail off into the horizon like a ship.
”What bring you here?”
I'LL BE WITH YOU
@aeranas <3
@aeranas <3
