Never regret thy fall,
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.
O Icarus of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is never to feel the burning light.
Is ill-fate caused by the Gods? Is blessed circumstance? Can there be one without the other? Ianthe has never had cause to question these things before, and always her more direct questions had someone to answer definitively for her. But Aion – heretic, god-favoured Aion – has no definitive answer to give. He poses questions she has to think on and answers her suppositions with ones of his own. She is not told she is wrong, but then… neither is he.
So she gives it the thought it deserves, the thought he gave to her, and keeps them to herself for the time being so as to properly examine them. (All or nothing, he thinks. And yet: someone was looking out for her. All or nothing, and yet he is blessed with a God’s name and sunlit wings. All or nothing, with this? It would be all then, wouldn’t it be. And yet he would also like to think he made his own life as it is. That doesn’t seem very much like all or nothing.)
But this world isn’t just made of questions and answers and wonderings, and Aion steps away from her wing, finally stopping the poking and prodding she has done her steadfast best to ignore. When he makes his pronouncement she feels her shoulders relax, for while his diagnosis of “not as bad as it could be” is probably not the best of statements, it is miles better than her own assessment of death sentence.
Still, he doesn’t let her wing droop back to the earth, holding it despite the distance he has put back between them. Thankfully he explains before she has to ask, and then checks on her before she has chance to ask the questions that had immediately sprung to mind.
Frowning slightly, she takes a step forward and tests her weight. Her legs have stopped their shaking, and the bones feel less rattled from the hard landing. She feels awkward, but then, she always does after a long time in the air, and this time she came to a rather sudden stop instead of running off the momentum and the rust. Still, her legs will hold, she can manage. “Yes.” She glances back to him from where she’d been glaring at the ground beneath her feet, “I’ll make it to… the Night Court?” What a strange name for a place.
With a glance to the sky for the sun’s path she turns to the south. “You called it a city. What is that?” Some quaint place the heretics frequented, obviously, but she doubted it was anything like what the Swifts called cities. For her, cities had always been mountaintop roosts made permanent by whole collections of monolith temples and their priests and attendants. They were holy places, stopping places, somewhere you did not stay for long unless you were Called. It was a sacred, awful duty, being Called. She rather doubted the heretics had anything like it.
So she gives it the thought it deserves, the thought he gave to her, and keeps them to herself for the time being so as to properly examine them. (All or nothing, he thinks. And yet: someone was looking out for her. All or nothing, and yet he is blessed with a God’s name and sunlit wings. All or nothing, with this? It would be all then, wouldn’t it be. And yet he would also like to think he made his own life as it is. That doesn’t seem very much like all or nothing.)
But this world isn’t just made of questions and answers and wonderings, and Aion steps away from her wing, finally stopping the poking and prodding she has done her steadfast best to ignore. When he makes his pronouncement she feels her shoulders relax, for while his diagnosis of “not as bad as it could be” is probably not the best of statements, it is miles better than her own assessment of death sentence.
Still, he doesn’t let her wing droop back to the earth, holding it despite the distance he has put back between them. Thankfully he explains before she has to ask, and then checks on her before she has chance to ask the questions that had immediately sprung to mind.
Frowning slightly, she takes a step forward and tests her weight. Her legs have stopped their shaking, and the bones feel less rattled from the hard landing. She feels awkward, but then, she always does after a long time in the air, and this time she came to a rather sudden stop instead of running off the momentum and the rust. Still, her legs will hold, she can manage. “Yes.” She glances back to him from where she’d been glaring at the ground beneath her feet, “I’ll make it to… the Night Court?” What a strange name for a place.
With a glance to the sky for the sun’s path she turns to the south. “You called it a city. What is that?” Some quaint place the heretics frequented, obviously, but she doubted it was anything like what the Swifts called cities. For her, cities had always been mountaintop roosts made permanent by whole collections of monolith temples and their priests and attendants. They were holy places, stopping places, somewhere you did not stay for long unless you were Called. It was a sacred, awful duty, being Called. She rather doubted the heretics had anything like it.
@Aion - i'm so sorry for the wait! i'm good to finish this up :)
