“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,
and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident,”
Ah, but the stars have always been as bloated with light as they are arrogance.
Even in this mortal form, with her wings large enough to paint silver-dust trails across the black-glass floor and her ears curved like two olive branches of a crown above her head, she drips arrogance as much as she drips light. It's bold now that it's risen like a tide above the sorrow. And it's a flash of dark-ore in her eyes as she looks up the stars dancing, and singing, and flickering a song above their three heads like sparrows above a church coopla.
Her blood wants to sing back as much as it wants to loop a noose of iron around each star hanging in the blackness. And it wants to roar and bellow until the world is as fallen as she is. Later she'll tell herself that it's the softness in the boy, the innocence that has never seen a battle-field drowned in light and shred planets, that silences the furious song banging against the backs of her teeth.
Later she'll look a the island and never let her hooves touch the lava-rock of the bridge as she flees from this cage of memories. Later she'll feel like her wings are spent.
“This place called to me.” She says with the imprint of the sword constellation flashing like a far-off storm at the back of her eyes. And she looks like a wolf-star when she turns her face up, up, up to the moon arching above them and the stalls starting to fall like waterfall currents as whatever magic lives in this place starts to die. Warset does not question it, nor does she stop walking and listening to the echoes of their hooves on the glass like it's her own heartbeat encouraging her to go on, go on, go on.
She does not look at Elena as she guesses the horror of the knowledge waiting just below her skin. The constellation flashes again like lighting when she presses her eyes shut in another rush of her almost-forgotten sorrow. Her secrets are the only thing she knows how to hold onto now.
It's the secrets of the stars that lead them onward through the silence thriving between the hard tap, tap, tap of their hooves. And it's the secrets that she follows on, and on, and on until the blackness starts to become flush with the soft golden-glow of the dawn through the fog barrier.
Her body trembles with the magic of that fog. Each ounce of her star-blood races with fear as it presses in at them like the tentacles of a great sea monster. Instinct has her wings sapping out, her lips pulling back in a snarl, and her tail lashing at her hocks like a whip. Her soul roars to fight, and run, and destroy all at once. This feels like being caught in a rip-tide of falling all over again.
It feels like being cursed.
She turns back to Elena and Pan with her teeth still bared with every wild instinct screaming in her body. “The sun is on the other side.” Perhaps something not bloated with arrogance and light would have draped her wings across their backs in comfort as the fog stars to rise above their ankles like the sea.
But Warset can feel the light in her blood dying against the violently broken magic and so she does not wait for them before plunging into the fog like a roaring bullet. And she does not look to see if they made it before her wings carry her as far from the memory of her sorrowful tears as possible.
@Pan @
