and pluck til time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
the silver apples of the moon
the golden apples of the sun
O
h, how she might have run if the wolf had given chase! Aster has yet to flee from any hunter other than her brother, but what a thrill that feeling is, of being coursed like a fox through the woods, hunted like a golden hind. To be quick, to be clever - even to be caught -But the wolf does not hunt her, and she does not see him. There is only the girl colored like a storm with her sharp horn made for piercing. When she turns Aster watches the moon-chart of her feet as though she might divine meaning from those patterns; perhaps she does, for when she looks up to meet the unicorn’s gaze there is a half-knowing, half-wondering look in her own eyes. She has to lean forward to catch that whisper in the slim cup of her ears, and she doesn’t mind the closeness, nor the soft-rough of it like foam on sand. She is one half of a whole; nothing feels more natural to her than such intimacy, even with a stranger.
Almost she answers And she would know best. But she is snagged on that word like a bit of veil on a thorn - mother, mother, mother - and she says nothing at all, though her golden eyes flicker bright like a world-door closing. Instead she only closes her eyes, lashes falling soft and pale as snow against her cheek, when the girl touches her. Aster must close her teeth on the command that wants to follow (Stay) when a space opens up between them enough for the wind to come through, and the cold salt spray.
When another tongue of lightning makes shadows of the rocks and themselves, painting everything stark, she opens her eyes with a sphinx’s smile. “I’m not a flower,” she says, though she is pleased to be called it, to be called anything at all. “But they grow in my mother’s hair.”
Who are you, the unicorn asks, and Aster thinks that she could be anyone. A princess escaped from her wicked parents and her high tower, or a hunter after a spirit-stag, or nothing at all but a bit of wind whipped up with seafoam and brought to life by a falling star. But the filly did not ask her, she asked the sea (as surely as if she expects the sea to answer) and so she tells the truth.
“Aster,” she says. And she is a flower, and a star, and (she suspects) a thousand other things beside, waiting to be born.
She wonders if this girl is, too, as she steps alongside her, hip to shoulder, cheek to cheek. “Is this your home?” There might have been a note of jealousy in her voice (as thunder rumbles low like a wolf in its throat, and lightning splinters the darkening horizon, and waves thrash themselves against black rocks), except that she and her brother have the whole of Novus as their home, little feral children, and every other world besides.
It is their birthright.
@Avesta <3
