Raglan
may the bridges i burn light the way
For most of his life, Raglan had earned his titles through the acts he committed — Silvertongue, Page, Street Rat, Apprentice, Crow — wearing his accomplishments alongside his own name with a full-chested and bare-faced pride. Indeed, these monikers had shaped and defined the stallion, settling over his thin shoulders in a mantle of self-fulfilling prophecy. It had never much mattered to the male that he had never learned to read, for he had his oral history, his many names to light his path and dog his steps.
What good were scripted words for an orphan destined to scratch out his life between alleyways and cobbles anyhow?
What would he do with letters and their assigned sounds? Would he submit a note to his enemies, a novel to his foes? They couldn’t read either, and the parchment would only serve as kindling while his attempts at communication would be perceived as a mockery. It was not until Reichenbach sat the throne, until the Crows found themselves in royal livery and serving as pages and spies and emissaries for the grand mother Denocte, that he had been taught his letters. They had felt foreign in his mouth, those symbols upon the page, inorganic and tangling together on a silver tongue — choking him. Even Raglan’s eyes had ached and burned throughout his attempts to decipher texts, as if they would blind him for trying to understand the secrets they held.
Yet eventually, he had tentatively mastered the alphabet and their sounds, could shakily (and slowly, dear Gods, so slowly) decipher the tomes set before him by his mentor. It had been an exhausted sort of pride, the knowledge that he could glean information from texts, that the secrets slumbering within the pages of a book were no longer unreachable to him. Despite his newfound literacy, however, Raglan found no joy in reading; it was still a mental labor, like pushing a boulder uphill — ungainly and clumsy and wearisome.
There had only ever been one exception to that odious task of literacy; a foal’s bedtime story, the slim volume illustrated with a loving attention to detail with the leather spine cracked and flaking from being opened so many times. It had been a sweet tale, an adaptation of some ancient and brutal epic, or so he had been told. In the story, the world was a tapestry, constantly woven by three sisters known as the Weavers.
They were ancient, beyond ancient, the triplets twisting the lives of each and every creature with their looms. In the warp, the structure of the universe, all that stood solid and timeless; mountains and oceans and the earth itself — even the sky found it’s story between the threads. In the weft, those creatures large and small, whose lives were short and long, were shaped.
In the tale, the night was bleak, the moon hanging solitary in the heavens, its silvery light mournful and lonely. It wasn’t until the world’s first grand love occurred — the link forged between two souls so strong and so timeless that the Weavers could not harness it within the mortal lifespan given by the weft threads — that the stars came into being.
“You see, dear Reader,” The little tome had whispered to Raglan, the then-youth curled up on a cushion before a crackling hearth, “Their love was something powerful enough to deny the grasp of time, to burst through the shell of mortality and forge something unending and unbreakable. The Weavers, ancient and wise as they were, did not know how to contain this bond and capture within the weft of the world such a grand magic. After a time, having finally exhausted all other options, the triplets realized that if the bond between the two souls could not be contained within the thread of the weft, maybe it would have a place amid the eternity of the warp.
And thus, precious Readers, the Weavers transformed the twin souls whose love defied all boundaries into a pair of brilliant and shining stars; and it was the heavens they would adorn with the brilliance of their bond — hand in hand, heart to heart, a guiding light shimmering through to the end of the universe and beyond.”
He had so loved that little book, so adored the worn pages and the scuffed binding that he had hidden it in a tiny niche found between the massive stone blocks. Even after he had lined that crack in the stone with scraps of velvet and muslin, the book had fit so snugly, so perfectly, that a part of Raglan believed that the fissure was meant for the tome. Every evening that he had been given the time, the pegasus had made his way through the stacks to read and re-read that tale.
Raglan wondered if that, too, had been fate; for that was the only force powerful enough to cleave both time and space, to forge the past, present, and future into a single moment — into this meeting. Into her voice floating between them, her words a melody unlike any he had heard before. Into her scent — sand and smoke and blossoms and warmth and home — filling his lungs and stealing his breath.
Yes, it must have been fate that the battered little tome had been sent to him on the threads of the Weaver’s weft.
So that one day, when he found himself amid a sea of sand and staring up at the star-spattered sky, a woman painted in all the shades of heaven held against his chest, he would understand.
The pegasus shifted, draping a wing over Nefertari’s — her name a blessing and a gift and a light to pierce any darkness left inside of him — lithe body and pressing her closer to his side, the heat rolling off of her skin a lovely and smoldering thing. He knew not what it all meant or where such a path would lead, but Raglan had never been one to shy from the unknown, had never been such a creature that would not laugh in the face of some grand adventure.
If it was destined for the pair to dance across this great tapestry, two stars caught in one another’s orbit, Raglan would do so with joy. Friend or foe or lover or anything more or anything less, the Silvertongue would welcome her presence in whatever time he had in this life and the next. He wondered briefly if stars could swim, or if the hand she had stretched out to him had simply pulled him out of those tumultuous waters and into the clouds.
Angling his head and craning his neck, Raglan buried his muzzle in the pale strands of Nefertari’s mane and crooned a single word, his entire world cupped in three syllables.
“Starfated”
@Nefertari thank you so much for the wait. I hope this is worth it. This was such a lovely post to write. I am filled with so much warmth. Ily.
"Talk"
