"I think we deserve
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
It's easy to forget that people are so fond of celebration - sometimes the fog of time blurs things that he wanted to keep clear, like fresh snowfall or the faces of loved ones or the moment one's heart sings winter is here in the almost-day glow of a city blanketed in snow and lit by yellow lanterns. It's easy to forget almost anything, if you live long enough.
But still his heart sings winter is here year in and year out, and if it is always done with an undercurrent of time to go, that's his business--and he does go, but not across the continent until the faces he meet no longer know the word Novus, not on some ship that rocks across the ocean, and, hopefully, not for so long that summer is long past its prime when he returns. When Michael goes, as Michael does, he goes to Terrastella, to bury himself in the heart of their festival and hope that the keen of his heart dies down.
Isra had said, will you stay?
And Michael will. He had not thought it would be so hard, back then, but he will nonetheless.
This brings us to today, and Michael walks to the city with the steady rhythm of a beast in motion, and he is thinking, I have never seen so much snow. He has -- of course he has because Isra's city on the hill is just that, and it is closer than the star-freckled sky than he has ever been -- but it is another one of those things that he thinks because he cannot taste anything but the frigid, wet air and he cannot hear anything but the crunch of his hooves and, somewhere, the bustle of community. The wet sheet of his mane, tied up haphazardly with the scarf that usually hangs around his neck, is dripping cold water all down his back and chest.
Michael remembers, now, why he runs away every winter.
He and winter do not see eye to eye.
The gold horse, chilled but still enchanted, sweeps into the city as if he had been there all along, taking his place among the throng. Perhaps he has grown too used to the hum of a crowd. Perhaps it is just more comfortable, crushed against other bodies, where the bite of the season doesn't quite touch his skin. "This is a beautiful celebration," he says to someone, anyone. As long as it is louder than his voice bouncing around in his chest.
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