asterion,
Her hair, adorned with fireflies, looks like clouds with light glowing softly beyond. She does not look at all out of place here, and makes him feel less so, when she speaks.
“Nor have I,” he says, but to the rest of her words - the last of them - he only smiles, a slip of a thing tucked in the corner of his mouth. He likes this stranger, the easy way she has, the grace and the matter-of-factness.
He doesn’t know the song she sings, but he can pick up the key; he hums along, a complimentary note, soft and low with both self-consciousness and then, after that wears off, a kind of reverence. This, he thinks, feels more like worship than any solitary words he might say, or any religion droned from within stone walls - better than worship, even, because it is not the gods they sing for, only the mystery of magic and life.
He is less dancing than merely swaying, now, and watching the way the fireflies alight on her - like snowflakes, like moon-dapples on the water. More and more settle on her, from her slender ankles to winding streams of lights around her horn, and he feels them landing on him too.
At first he is just trying not to sneeze, and then - partially with the effort of this but mostly with the wonder of it all - he laughs, breathless and unselfconscious, like a boy. And the fireflies don’t seem to mind, or find it any less acceptable than the other music.
what's past lies still ahead,
and the future is finished.
and the future is finished.
@Mesnyi
