A lone figure, coated in the shadows that stalked the night-painted world, stood atop the grassy hill ahead, framed against the star flecked sky. Curiosity licked like little flames at her heart as Castalla approached, wondering what he might be doing out in the cold. Though maybe she already knew, for there had been a great many nights she herself cast her gaze to the heavens to stare at the diamonds that rested there. Her destiny had been mapped out in those stars once, traced across the fabric of the world. A great hero sent by the Fallen Gods, an incarnation of Nysa herself. But she had betrayed fate, or perhaps it had betrayed her that night in the shadowy corridors of Cruor Castle when her kindness had cost her people their victory and freedom. Her soul was too stained to be inhabited by the Goddess now, her deeds too bloody to be the marked path of a chosen one. And now her life lay in tatters, cast from the sky above and laid waste to upon the war-marked soil of Alanaris.
The question did not strike her as odd, not when her own people looked to the night for answers. The children of Nysa were they, creatures fashioned from her love of the wolves that sung to her heart.
“They did once, the stars and the moon too. But I fear they do not anymore.” Nysa had abandoned her, the face of the moon but a cold silver expanse. Or perhaps Castalla had abandoned her, left the land the great Night Goddess watched over, a silent sentinel among the ruins of her brethren.
There was a great and heavy silence to a sky that does not sing. The harmonies of the galaxy lost to the darkness of an endless night. Oh the stars did shine indeed, but they were as mute as they had been the nights she’d spent trapped in a dungeon, the play-thing of a tyrant King. Castalla turned her face away from them, fighting against the sorrow that welled up from the gashes in her heart. It seemed without battle and danger to bite back against the hurt, her strength was waning as much as the moon. Were she alone the Wolf might have snarled at that, might have shed her skin and howled that hurt from the depth of her wearied soul. Instead she looks to the winged steed, the sky mirrored in the constellations across his skin. His words do not follow the pattern of the common tongues she’d learnt, though that did not stop her from recognising his sentences, nor was it something that struck her as odd. “Do you hear them?” Her question is soft, as though speaking too loud might disturb the world in its slumber.
@Sirius
