[AW] and the leaf is singing still

[Florentine]

i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls

She comes to find her children.


As she crosses the channel of open water between the mainland and the strange island, Florentine feels the way the winds change beneath her wings. It goes from a normal salted breeze, chopping and changing like the waves, to something entirely other. The air is filled with old magic. Its essence across her tongue is as metallic as the tang of rust upon ancient metal. Upon her feathers it feels warm, silken, wrong. Already Florentine knows how this island’s magic fights her own. It might be the only place she has encountered, across Time and Space, that can better and break her own.


She lands upon the comma of land. This time its face is barren and angular, full of glass and stone. The glass stones each mirror her. She is surrounded by a thousand Florentines. Some she recognises and some are worlds and existences she has yet to explore. She would linger, examine every stone and remember its reflection and its world that she might travel there one day. She looks for one with her children, hoping that it might reveal to her what her twins may look like now. There are none that she can see. 


Oh. 


Does this mean that they are doomed to never be reunited? Is there no existence in which she can ever be a true mother? She birthed her children upon the island when time stood still and it was from the island she tried to take them away, back to the Riftlands. But the island revolted. Maybe her children were never meant to be hers, their magic connecting and holding them to the island. Together their magics could stop time, after all.


Slowly Florentine peels herself away from her reflections. Her amethyst eyes search for a flash of gold, bright as sunlight. She sees nothing but a man stood as dark as Lysander, his antlers reaching tall and proud, up to pierce the sky. The fae-girl moves toward him, her petals guiding her close. They skip across the glassy ground and swirl about his feet. The man is a flame and he turns Florentine into a moth he draws in with the bright familiarity of his looks. Her love for Lysander does not wane with time nor distance. She thinks it might never subside. She would wait for him in any world.


Though she knows the fae stallion is not her love, though she sees the blaze of white trickling down from his brow and over his nose, though she does not feel how the earth bends for him, reaches for the fae stallion (as it does for Lysander - once a god of the earth) she still steps closer in fanciful hope. 


The fae man is gazing at a reflection, vines twine through his antlers, he seems wilder, more godly. Her stomach twists and dips. The sensation pushes a breath past her lips, a sigh, full of magic and Time. Florentine’s magic reaches for the glass, keen to cut and carve and reach into this world that makes gods of men - would Lysander be there with his divinity returned?


“Stay.” Florentine breathes and begs as the fae stallion moves to turn from his reflection. “You remind me of someone I have lost. My love. He had vines in his antlers like you do here.” her lips touch the glass. It is warm, like a film, as if flimsy enough to pierce and tear and fall through - to him, that stranger, ever more fae, world. She lifts a blackened glass, fragment of bone. It once belonged to monster, who was once a horse, twisted by a virus into a monster. She plucked the bone from its desiccated body and fired it within a dragon’s flame until it turned to unyielding, unbreakable glass. Its point is wicked sharp and more terrifying than her silver, beautiful dagger had once been. 


Florentine presses the point of her new bone dagger to the warm glass of the stallion’s reflection. The ring of bone glass upon glass stone, the sound of clashing time magics is a scream of grating metal. Slowly the gilded-girl removes her dagger and the sound muffles, abating. “Huh, the island still doesn’t like me then.”


@Septimus

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world