i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
check out my pretty flower curls
Her smile is impish, even as her brother presses his face into the curve of her throat to hide his gratitude and his tears. Florentine continues to press the dagger into the air and call the Riftlands to her. She feels them both, Novus and the Riftlands coming together like planets. She feels their resistance, the press of two magics repelling, like oil and water, like two like magnets. Yet resistance is nothing new. Worlds resist her magic, but never have they been able to deny her.
And so, Florentine continues to press and pull and soon existence is peeling open before them like a curtain. Light spills in from her birthland and it smells as wicked wild as she remembers. Oh she swallows salvation down, she laughs as she feels this ancient magic spill over her angry and wicked as ever.
What delights and horrors does it hide beyond this window of hers?
The edges of her rift window are fresh and sharp as a cut. They glow white with matter, blazing hot like nothing she has ever known before. Her magic peels away in sparks and the worlds repel each other. Time blends through the open window, like heat meeting cold air. Everything mists. One world moves slowly, the other fast and friction growls in their ears. They rub, rub, rub.
Asterion stands with awe in his eyes and Flora smiles. He steps up and her stomach leaps, it is a bird taking flight as he steps eagerly through her window and is gone. Hurry, hurry, her excitement sings through her soul. She is too keen to be in the Rift again, to gather her whole family together at last, one place, one time.
But the magics are begging her to knit them back together, as if such strange worlds should never have met and long to be apart once again. Their corners begin to fray, resisting, and then their edges meet and press and twine and suddenly the window is sewing itself shut. Florentine presses her dagger to it, cuts them open in each place they mend and the window trembles, wildly, angrily. She frowns and her dagger is singing, with rage, with worry, with effort.
The Time girl turns to Lysander and whispers softly, “Go, quickly, the magics are… wrong.” And she is frowning, cutting again and again but as fast as she reopens the wounds the window is healing itself. This is not how her magic has ever been – worlds have yielded to her as sweetly as butter beneath her dagger. Their resistance is as futile as the skin of a fruit; each cut as easy as a sigh. Asterion is gone, he stepped through and he is alone in the strangeness of Rift. Her stomach twists and she looks to Lysander, the other half of her, the only one who knows Rift as well as she. Florentine leans and presses her lips to his, “I will send the twins after you and then follow them.”
Lysander goes, into the feral world of the Rift. Florentine wonders what monsters lurk where they have gone – or if they might step into paradise. Yet her brother is powerful and Lysander knowledgeable of the mysterious ways of the Rift worlds. They will be safe until she joins them. They will protect the twins in the moment it takes her to join them.
Yet Florentine’s concern for what lingers beyond, is short lived for the window fights ever harder with each horse she allows to slip through her window. The portal convulses like a heart, throbbing, sparking like live wires. The Riftlands blink before her, there for a moment and then gone, ghostly. They shimmer-shudder and grow steady at last.
“Aster, Leo, come. Go now, quickly.” Florentine breathes and if she knew what was to come she might never have let them step up to the window and then through. The window swallows them, they disappear from their mother’s sight, but oh the edges of the window are knitting ever faster and though she presses her dagger to them, they have become hard as iron. They close and close and close and there is nothing The Dusk girl can do to stop them. The magic in her veins is keening and writhing. Her nerves blaze as if lit. Her every fibre aches with the wrongness of this moment. She is raw and red within for her every effort to keep her magic dominant and her head is sharp with the ache of her body. Her magic convulses and pulling her dagger from the edge of the window she leaps through as the cuts bind themselves together fast as a blink. Her window, once large grows smaller, smaller, smaller.
The tip of a dagger thrusts desperately back through that final mere dot of light, opening it wider and the world of the Riftlands gleams brighter than white light. Sparks blaze as if the blade is upon a whetstone as if it is grinding down, down, down. And maybe it is, for suddenly there is a blade’s screaming crack and the tip of the dagger snaps, splitting into two. The final fissure of the window snaps shut like teeth. There is no light to be seen where there once was. There is nothing to disturb the air before them.
The window is gone….
Their family is… gone.
Leo steps to where his mother was – back through the window she had ushered him through but nothing moves. It does not press against him as it had. It no longer whispers in his ear that he is not wanted in that Rift world his mother tried to take him and Aster to. It does not say that they were made of this world and that Novus alone is where they belonged… It says nothing. There is no window anymore but oh he feels the writhing of the Island’s magic as it reels in the wake of the Time Travelling Girl: A girl who stands with her lover and brother and weeps over her lost children and her broken dagger.
At Leonidas’ feet, where he dropped his little cheetah toy, lies a true cheetah cub. It moves like no other creature he has seen. Beside it another cub stands and yawns and stretches. Each of their features is so much like the toys he and Aster had and yet, their toys are nowhere to be found. “Circe?” The boy croaks, his voice meek with shock. The tiny cub peers up at him, pausing from where it reaches curiously for a thin shard of silver - one of the remnants of his mother’s dagger. The other piece lies a little way from it. Leo lifts them, his breath slipping past his lips in a whoosh as he passes one to his sister.
He turns with wide, wide gold eyes to survey the clearing around them, where the waterfall still hangs still and silent. Everything was so silent. Never had the boy felt so small, so alone. “Mama?” He calls and waits. “Papa?” He shouts a little louder and does not wait so long. “Uncle Ashmerion!” He shouts so loud his voice shatters at the last. Yet still nothing stirs, though the whole island echoes with the sound of a boy’s cries. All the island watches, immortal, frozen, wrong.
Leo steps into Aster. He presses his face tight to her throat, nosing his way beneath the fall of her mane. The boy breathes in his twin’s smell, all the parts of her that smell of their parents and Uncle. He trembles and feels the press of her heartbeat against his, both as wild as birds. Both wild in their twin frenzy of loss.
** <3 Just to clarify, Asterion, Lysander and Florentine have now left Novus <3 **
florentine
rocking your pretty flower world
rocking your pretty flower world
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
