[P] suns fled and ten million moons fled after them;

[Florentine]

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Florentine thinks, as she holds her daughter close, that she has never loved anything like she loves her children. Already she knows every hair upon their slim bodies, already she knows the curl of their brows in joy and in anguish. Close to her breast she holds her daughter and, as Aster gazes upon the ornate instrument, as her fascination blooms bringing the silver alight in ways she has never seen before, Florentine knows she would, without thought, pay the price of the blade and her magic for the lives of her twins.

Aster is as fragile as porcelain beneath Florentine’s touch. She is white as china, white as bone. Idly the Dusk girl wonders when, exactly, Midas touched the Moon and created a creature such as Aster. What comets breathed their gold breath across stars to make this little star girl shine? What wonderful magic was it that forged two twins in the dark of her womb? Still they curl together in slumber with their long limbs entwined as they had within her. 

Slowly, Florentine’s lips glide to and fro from the base of Aster’s neck, across her withers and along her spine. Over and over her touch glides, mindless, soothing. It was what she did when the twins twitched in sleep, their feather lashes fluttering, their thimble hooves twitching. Always she wondered what worlds they saw in the pool of their dreams and what they galloped across - clouds? seas? Universes?

Home. 

And Flora’ lips stop their caressing. That word slipped from the child’s tongue innocent and bright. A mother looks down as her daughter looks up and there gazes meet, golden and lavender. Once, oh once, the word Rift would have been upon her tongue, for that is home and how she found it was in the dagger about her throat. But that stopped being so the day she first told Lysander, ‘No’. She would not return to Rift with him.

But he never left her and always they called his home, Greece. Would he call it home now?

Already she realises, as she lets her gaze roam over her daughter’s delicate features (ears that bear the same shape as her father’s, lips that curve in his same once-god smile, eyes as wide as hers, and cheeks high and angular). An elegant thing this girl of hers is. A creature carved of smiles with eyes as warm as her uncle’s. It was quite simple. Florentine was wrong.

“Home,” she begins, “Is wherever you feel most belonging, where your soul and your heart fit best. Where everything knows the shape of you and you it.” And already Florentine knows her world would be empty without her family as its walls, its doors, its windows, its water, its food and light and life. “Wherever family is, is home. Grandpa and Grandma in the Rift are home, Uncle Asterion in Dusk is home. Wherever your brother is, is home.”

She smiles and lays small butterfly kisses along her daughter’s brow, and eyes and cheeks, ticklish as wings. “If you take love with you, wherever you go, then any world can be home.”

@Aster <3 

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world