i'll never be
thatme again
thatme again
S
ilver stars sparkle on glasses like the strange liquids a member of the House of Ieshan pours from decanters into glasses of all shapes and sizes. Moira is certain she sees a night-dark liquid in a crystal cup resembling Caligo and smirks. But that smirk falls as her eyes drift and drift among the crowds and smoke and grandeur of this all. It is so very Tonnerre and un-Tonnerre. So much of it is gold where her home is silver and black and white. No, perhaps it is different after all with one of the few similarities being the marble floors underfoot that clatter and quake as she walks. Or at least, the phoenix thinks that they do.
Moira cannot say for certain. She knows that there are so many in shades of silver and grey, so many she searches, her mind yearns for along the edges, but they are not her silver. None will ever compare to the frosted kiss of Estelle's skin, to the glinting quicksilver of her hips, to the darkening of her face and lightness of her eyes. How many times has she stared into a lilac gaze and found herself falling into the other half of who she should have been?
Estelle looks Tonnerre where Moira acts it. They were a matched set right from birth, from the moment Estelle found herself standing up for Moira when they were just girls. Of course, things would only escalate from there. They would only become closer and closer as the years passed until, ancestor's guide them, they would leave the House of Tonnerre, the beautiful and terrifying Estate, for good it would seem. They travelled for a blissful amount of time together, and Moira was certain they would never be parted. Then, she'd left Estelle, left her star, left her heart in a storm, dying from some ailment that was only whispered of on the Estate, and never loud enough to save her cousin.
Sweet ancestors it had hurt, to leave her there dying in an attempt to find a cure, to find something so that she would not shatter. (Moira knows how to shatter now, and yet disappointment is still bitter on her tongue when every silver is not her silver.) In the end, Moira never did. Her sweet cousin was lost to the mists, the very same, that had kept her from leaving Novus. After all, light cannot make a portal, and by the time she came into her own power it would have been far, far too late.
So now, she sips some strange purple juice that is not wine, but it is just as sweet, and moves like a flickering candle, like a nebula bursting, through the crowds with a slatted smile and half-lidded eyes. As dangerous as she is beautiful, as delectable as she is softened, Moira is not easy to miss.
Her voice, so utterly forgettable when she does not sing to you, coo and croon dark melodies into waiting ears, whisper that you will live or you will die, is so unlike the skin she wears. The red of her should have been on Estelle, but then Estelle would have left her sooner, perhaps would not have been her friend. It is a track she does not want to go down, a path she cannot follow. Before her, the path that the Tonnerre girl does follow leads her into the open air, into the courtyard where the Solterran air is still hot and dry, but the night cools it only slightly. Here, fewer bodies pack together in their revelry.
Moira is free.
Until she is not. There is a voice that purrs, a voice she would know even in her dreams, even in her death, and it has her heart stopping, it has her eyes dropping, it has her lungs quivering with hope and fear and everything, anything, in between. Estelle, her soul screams it, Neerja feels the reverberations in Denocte, a mad panic overtaking the beast who plunges for the mountains, for the wilds that would bring her marginally closer to her bonded.
Feet move slowly, she is wading through a water she thought she'd left behind. Then, red skin brushes the familiar side of silver. Shoulder shivers over scarred shoulder. Moira drinks her down, swallows her, lets the feeling of Estelle devour her as any ice-dragon would. Oh, but she is a phoenix, and she would not die, she would not cry. So silver-lined eyes might quake and quiver, but the gold of them trace the frost-pattern over her cousin's heart.
In stride, she asks, "Would you tell a truth or do you still prefer a dare?" with an arched brow, with a small smile, with a flame in her eyes that was not there moments before.
