War.
That darkness – which by many names goes and with many mouths, speaks – is also familiar to her. Severed in two by a spine of fire and smoke, blood and rebel yells, Nordlys had ached and wailed for a generation. The Mother and Father had wept, as their children carved arrowheads from the flesh of their proffered Eden; had watered their blooms with blood and fed their roots with each other’s flesh-sacrifices. She had been but a babe, watching the skies to the south bloat with heavy clouds of black wafting off the Heartwood’s battlefields. It is hazy, a dreamlike thing, figments of a child’s mind made softer and more romantic than it really was.
Than it ever is.
She knows better, now. Knows the keen bite of fire, the pang of split flesh; the smell of blood when it meets oily cobblestones, like petrichor, but metallic and all wrong. As a girl she had seen men and women come home less-than – missing parts of themselves, of skin and bone and being.
And now she, too, is fragmentary.
Stella nods her commiseration. She ebbs and flows, tethers and untethers, at the will of something beyond herself – above her. She had so loved her visits to Morthalion, her walks around Isdel, but these things took from her much more than they gave. So when she had slaked herself on the pools of curiosity and culture, she retreated. Retreated to places that could not be mapped or triangulated. High, lonely places – the eyries of stars and granite. “I will have to stop by, if only to remind myself how wide the earthly world is, again.”
She quiets, watches him glance with those bright, venerable eyes, across the black plain of unwrinkled water. When he speaks of his own past, with an ache perhaps to return, or maybe, just an ache for the days when he could just return to his home. That comfortable, warm, womblike constant, it waits for me beyond this bend; above this crest, this earth. She presses her eyes shut and stifles loose tears against her white lashline. Stillness, silence, a funereal moment passes, wherein they have found each other – homeless, errant stars – adrift.
She bites her lips, taking in the enormity of his question. The vastness, the leagues of time, water, space, foreverness. Oblivion. “No,” she confirms, smiling sadly, “my home, too, is no more. Taken by the void.” It is bitter as ash in her mouth, “Nordlys. That was its name, when it was at all, that is. I was born in the far north, under wide stars and the septentrionalium luminum, northern lights. I grew up there, occasionally visiting the capitol city with my father. I mapped the northern hemisphere—” she turns, lipping open the cap of a cylindrical, leather holder, secured fast to her harness by a loop and fixture. Gently, she coaxes out a sheet of weathered, but well-kept, parchment that hovers in the air between them, unfurling with her mind’s eye.
It is old, textured, mottled pale-caramel calf-skin, upon which a circular chart, in slightly faded black ink, is quartered and marked with numbers and sketches of birds and animals around its perimeter. Within it are hundred of dots, many connected by thin lines and illuminations – here, a lion’s head with mane traced in constellation lines. Patris Decursus, the Father’s Mane. She glances over it all with pride and adoration, half her life’s work, a map of extinct skies. ”These are my stars. Some of them. There is also Edana, to which I fled when Nordlys was overcome by darkness’ creatures...” She motions to the lion’s face, marked with swirls and hatching, “The Father’s Mane – well, that is the name I gave it – I saw the face of my god, of Cosmos, in the way His star’s arranged themselves.” Her lip traces the paper from the Mane to the River, the Mother’s Ear, to the Tine and Betrayer’s Horn…
She pulls back, eyes trailing to him, “why was your home destroyed?” she asks, quiet and wistful, and in between each heavy word is a plea, an appeal to make sense of senselessness.
That darkness – which by many names goes and with many mouths, speaks – is also familiar to her. Severed in two by a spine of fire and smoke, blood and rebel yells, Nordlys had ached and wailed for a generation. The Mother and Father had wept, as their children carved arrowheads from the flesh of their proffered Eden; had watered their blooms with blood and fed their roots with each other’s flesh-sacrifices. She had been but a babe, watching the skies to the south bloat with heavy clouds of black wafting off the Heartwood’s battlefields. It is hazy, a dreamlike thing, figments of a child’s mind made softer and more romantic than it really was.
Than it ever is.
She knows better, now. Knows the keen bite of fire, the pang of split flesh; the smell of blood when it meets oily cobblestones, like petrichor, but metallic and all wrong. As a girl she had seen men and women come home less-than – missing parts of themselves, of skin and bone and being.
And now she, too, is fragmentary.
Stella nods her commiseration. She ebbs and flows, tethers and untethers, at the will of something beyond herself – above her. She had so loved her visits to Morthalion, her walks around Isdel, but these things took from her much more than they gave. So when she had slaked herself on the pools of curiosity and culture, she retreated. Retreated to places that could not be mapped or triangulated. High, lonely places – the eyries of stars and granite. “I will have to stop by, if only to remind myself how wide the earthly world is, again.”
She quiets, watches him glance with those bright, venerable eyes, across the black plain of unwrinkled water. When he speaks of his own past, with an ache perhaps to return, or maybe, just an ache for the days when he could just return to his home. That comfortable, warm, womblike constant, it waits for me beyond this bend; above this crest, this earth. She presses her eyes shut and stifles loose tears against her white lashline. Stillness, silence, a funereal moment passes, wherein they have found each other – homeless, errant stars – adrift.
She bites her lips, taking in the enormity of his question. The vastness, the leagues of time, water, space, foreverness. Oblivion. “No,” she confirms, smiling sadly, “my home, too, is no more. Taken by the void.” It is bitter as ash in her mouth, “Nordlys. That was its name, when it was at all, that is. I was born in the far north, under wide stars and the septentrionalium luminum, northern lights. I grew up there, occasionally visiting the capitol city with my father. I mapped the northern hemisphere—” she turns, lipping open the cap of a cylindrical, leather holder, secured fast to her harness by a loop and fixture. Gently, she coaxes out a sheet of weathered, but well-kept, parchment that hovers in the air between them, unfurling with her mind’s eye.
It is old, textured, mottled pale-caramel calf-skin, upon which a circular chart, in slightly faded black ink, is quartered and marked with numbers and sketches of birds and animals around its perimeter. Within it are hundred of dots, many connected by thin lines and illuminations – here, a lion’s head with mane traced in constellation lines. Patris Decursus, the Father’s Mane. She glances over it all with pride and adoration, half her life’s work, a map of extinct skies. ”These are my stars. Some of them. There is also Edana, to which I fled when Nordlys was overcome by darkness’ creatures...” She motions to the lion’s face, marked with swirls and hatching, “The Father’s Mane – well, that is the name I gave it – I saw the face of my god, of Cosmos, in the way His star’s arranged themselves.” Her lip traces the paper from the Mane to the River, the Mother’s Ear, to the Tine and Betrayer’s Horn…
She pulls back, eyes trailing to him, “why was your home destroyed?” she asks, quiet and wistful, and in between each heavy word is a plea, an appeal to make sense of senselessness.
@Azrael
☽
