and we would
meet by the moon
meet by the moon
Her appetite for flight shivered to life with all the ravenous searching of a waking beast. It flexed white talons into the shoals of soft beaches, it razed the cobalt spindles of her feathers with a wanting, burning touch. But Aelin, who had learned so painfully what it meant to fall, did not dare heed its whispers—
Now, her wings twitched, ached. Like a limb severed from its body, her phantom desires roared with the ghosts of ancient winds, sweeping her heavenward to dance with the clouds. She couldn’t, she couldn’t.
Soon, the lily woman repeated, soothing the wildness of her with promises. But as with so many things, it was not in the primal nature of a beast to understand the words of a girl.
In so many ways, she was still the weed-covered creature that had scoured Nordlys for home and hearth, seeking purpose between each stone she deliberately upturned. And she still remembered, as surely as if the memory had been burnt beyond her eyes, what it had felt like to approach the stone walls of Morthalion and seek her future beyond the King’s gates.
This time, it was memory that forced her to shiver; and she realized she’d been gazing through the window of dappled sunlight for so very long that her eyes had begun to burn. Like dreams, like wishes, scorching purls of tears unfurled from her piebald gaze. She blinked rapidly, letting her silver lashes catch upon the filigrees of starlight that pooled down her cheek, thick with emotion she hadn’t known she felt.
The cracking of a branch, the deliberate slash of a tail through summer air, forced her hoary countenance to tip toward the forest floor. The vines of a long-burned jungle receded, releasing the island mare from the crushing vice of memory as she returned to the waking world—to behold the ribbon clad stranger who wore his scars beneath dressings of silk.
Aelin would always be a healer. She would always see the pain before the beauty; and so, too, would she see the hope among the blood.
The stranger was mute in a manner that spoke volumes, the drawn-out motions of his head, the pointed flicker of his eyes across her incandescent wings. Aelin shuddered in silence, the glimmer of her tears replaced with a flash of unspoken queries.
Gods, how long had it been since she had spoken a word to a stranger?
And yet he was quiet. A sentinel emerged from the woodland, a head higher than she, to look upon some weeping wraith of a winged, flightless bird. Phantom as she might have been, even the traces of death her divinity still shouldered could not elude the beginnings of a smile.
Aelin was soft before she was anything else; she was kind. Her eyes did not linger upon his scars, and her woes were forgotten with the ease of a breath as she angled her body toward him. The Dawn woman’s head bowed first, his wordless enquiry answered with a greeting, before she sought out her voice.
“Hello,” like the brush of her feathers, Aelin’s voice was whisper soft. The intimacy of her singular vocabulary still spoke of legions, and yet she knew, even as a Queen, she had never possessed the range of command.
A healer—she was a healer with a hunger to learn. To help.
Her smile remained, sometimes too-perfect; sometimes too-sweet. She was still learning to trust again.
But so, too, was she perceptive. Once, her magic had taught her the nature of empathy. Gone, it might have been, but the Fair had never forgotten to know the intricacies, the delicacies, of small changes.
A wing twitched by way of answer, and she glanced to the translucent light they cast over her skin.
“Forgive me. I was speaking to myself; to my wings,” her eyes were bright as she smiled, her feathers ruffling. “They have a language all their own—and would rather I let them take us somewhere far from here.”
Aelin paused, her soft heart registering one blue eye—and the absence of another. “I am Aelin."
Speech, @Drune
the table changing game
the table changing game
