Indra could not say how long she had been wandering the frozen wastes, her breath steaming in the air before her, her flanks matted with ice. Time slipped and swam around her, swallowing days and weeks and months, stretching minutes into years. Still the pale ghost of the sun never seemed to do more than brush the underside of the horizon, a distant gray brightening that scarcely flared before it faded again to night.
Dimly, the unicorn understood that she could not have been here that long, or she’d be dead.
Or maybe the magic, the malice, of this place would not let her die.
She did not know what she had done to anger the rift—if it was anger at all, and not simply the way of things, savage and unrelenting. When the night rose with a hundred impossible colors, shimmering like silk across the tundra sky, she might have thought it was a dream, or death, if she had not been too weary to think at all.
So she walked on, head bowed against the wind, the dark glint of her horn like a setting star as it pierced the veil.
*
On the other side, it is evening, the air damp and warm against her skin, the breeze heavy with brine. Instead of snow underhoof there is weathered rock, solid and reassuring, and the ghostly greens and violets of the aurora have given way to a spectacular red and gold sunset.
Indra sneezes and blinks into the light, pivoting slowly as she stares out over field and cliff and sea. She has grown too accustomed to the whims of the rift to be surprised by much of anything, anymore, and so she does little more than flick an ear toward the cawing of a gull overhead, and start off along the ragged edge of the bluff.
But the coastline seems almost to waver in her vision, blurred by the contours of a landscape she can not quite fully remember and yet cannot shake from her thoughts. There is something familiar about this place, unnervingly so, and that more than the change of scenery causes the hair to prickle along her spine.
She cuts her way north and east, if for no other reason than that the cliffs do so as well. The sun inches lower, and her shadow unspools at her side, and her mane glistens deep and red.
It is less will than instinct, really, that has her leveling her horn at the sound of hoofbeats up the path, for she has seen destruction enough to know that to hesitate is to be lost. But it is only the silhouette of another horse, and the unicorn checks herself, lifting the iron tip to a more genteel height (if only just).
She should say something, she thinks, in an effort to be friendly, but she can no longer recall the last time she had to bother with social pleasantries, and the words lodge in her throat, thick with disuse. For a long moment she merely eyes the stranger, the face half-glowing in the harsh light of the west, its mirror lost to shadow.
"Hello," she says finally, coolly. "This is... a nice place. Do you live here?"
It had always been a fleeting place for him, intriguing but temporary; he had never allowed himself to get caught up in it, never for a moment considered it might claim him with sickness or with death. Only here, in a land so without monsters, had he been acquainted with his own mortality, and it is here that he spends much of his time considering now.
Novus had become a far more interesting place than he’d first credited it with, and such faulty first impressions were not something he would forget.
The copper stallion walks now along the cliffside, the sunset bathing half of his body in fire and warmth. What attention he wasn’t giving to each step he gave to the sea, watching each roll of waves as though searching for something. Talk of the Ilati and selkies both had piqued his boundless curiosity, and it was signs of either he sought for now.
What he finds, when he chances a look down the path and finds a figure there, is something else.
For a moment he is surprised to find himself face-to-face with another unicorn, just as striking, just as deadly-looking, as the last. It was a lucky thing, worlds away where he had been born, to see even one in a lifetime; he thinks with a private grin that he must be a blessed man indeed. But as he nears and draws to a halt his expression smooths into something amiably impassive, and he tilts his pale antlers in greeting to her, his green-eyed gaze lingering wryly on the tip of her horn before moving to meet hers.
“For the time being,” he answers, and smiles as though at a joke. “I assume the question means you don’t. I had thought, for a moment, you might be one of the dangerous things I’m told crawl up from the sea with the tide.” He says no more, does not offer his name or ask for her own.
Oh, but he thinks she might be a dangerous thing, nonetheless. She is a striking and memorable figure, though he had never been near enough before to see those golden eyes – but there is no mistaking the riftlands on her, or the dead space where a current of magic should be.
But nothing about Lysander betrays his recognition, or that he wonders how many of them there are, and if they are all refugees –
It’s an easy smile that rides the stranger’s lips, a friendly carelessness that colors his voice, and for a moment Indra almost envies the way in which he seems to be of this place, filling it with his presence even as he suggests the stay is temporary. Belonging is a thing she has never seen much use for and seldom thought to miss, but watching this stallion, his effortless way of holding himself, she wishes that she, too, could be relaxed and luminous and unconcerned.
But that would be a fool’s assessment, to blink before Lysander’s light and miss the darkness at his heels. Indra is many things, but not foolish, most of the time, and she has long since learned how to look, how to listen. She knows nothing of Lysander’s past, here or elsewhere, but she feels the edge to the silence that follows his words, like static in the air before a storm. She glances at him sharply, reassessing.
“No,” she says, and the word might be a response to either of his not-quite-questions. Her gaze drifts to the sea churning far below, the white foam glazed red in the sunset, and after a moment she adds, “There are things about this place that seem—familiar to me.” She watches the breakers in their rise and fall against against the rocky shore, the troughs of shine and shadow, and she wonders if it is simply the nature of all oceans, to call to memory and soul.
Then a smile touches the corners of her own mouth, small and wry, and she shakes her mane, revealing the pale leather strip woven close along her nape, studded with tiny pearls—and three thin, curved teeth. “I do not carry the sea in my veins,” she says quietly, “but once, long ago, I knew creatures who did. They are beautiful, and they sing the most beautiful songs, and they bring ruin to those who do not know them for what they are.”
Her gaze returns to the stallion, and she allows herself a moment to admire the fine picture they must make, standing opposite one another, burnished by the sun. There is a curious symmetry to them, gleaming like a pair of coins: one silver, the other copper-gold, and made all the more striking by the green of his eyes, the red of her hair, his antlers spreading before the needle point of her horn.
“But you seem to know what it is you’re looking for,” she says, more mildly. “Have you encountered many dangers in this place?”
“I know the feeling,” he answers her, “though I wonder if that isn’t the nature of things. After passing through enough worlds, they all start resembling one another, do they not?” But even as he says it, he thinks he could refute it: wasn’t the wonder of all the worlds that they each carried something so specific? Surely the riftlands were unique in the universe, an accident with shining teeth. It was why he’d found them so interesting, but oh –
Lysander wonders for the first time if he is growing weary of all these wonders. If that is why even his own near-death had stirred only fleeting passion.
The thought makes him more uneasy than he cares to admit, even to himself, and he angles his face away, toward the sea. He listens to the hush of her voice over the steady rush of the waves, and despite his disquiet a smile snares the corner of his mouth.
He may have tired of worlds, but he will always carry a fascination for beautiful, ruinous things.
“That is a wise lesson that you learned from them. Was it always the singing that gave them away?” Lysander feels the warm gold of her eyes back on him, the keen gaze of a hunting eagle, and he meets it again slowly. The breeze sweeps around them, setting everything to movement save for their reaching shadows.
At her mention that he knows what he’s looking for he only dips his dark muzzle. Five minutes ago he might have agreed, but now – ah, he hadn’t anticipated searching himself on this cliffside stroll.
Dangers, though – for that, he smiles again, and flicks an ear lazily. “More than I had expected,” he says, “though I got no pretty songs out of it. I’d forgotten there were places where the most dangerous things were men, but Novus reminded me.”
Perhaps he should be thankful; perhaps it should shake him awake. The other unicorn would certainly expect as much.
But the other unicorn would never have spoken so poetically of monsters.
The wind worries at the red ends of her braid, tugging flyaways loose to lick like flames along her neck. “In some ways,” she concedes; for indeed, how many times can a beach or cliff, a field or sky truly reinvent itself? “But it is often a false likeness.” And oh, she is thinking of the riftlands, too, though she cannot know this golden stranger’s thoughts are such a crooked mirror to her own. Too often, it would seem, the rift could take a reassuring shape to hide the deadly wrongness of it, and for all she knows this place is no exception.
She does not pause to wonder at his word, worlds, or consider whether it is a common thing, for creatures such as themselves to drift across and between them. The riftlands may as well have been a thousand worlds in one; perhaps this place is no different, though she has not seen or felt the shadow of it yet. Could she have guessed, though, at the myriad realms Lysander had walked, playing god and mortal, beast and man, she might have shivered to realize how very little she herself had seen.
And still the familiarity of this landscape hums to her, trembling along her bones. She has been here before, she knows it, certain as she knows her name.
The only question, then, is what wrongness lies in wait for her this time.
His next words startle a laugh from her, low and wry. “Is it a lesson learned,” she asks him, “if you do not heed it?” She sweeps her muzzle toward her right flank, the bare muscle of her neck arching toward him, and the evening light spills across her withers, revealing a trio of delicate white scars reaching up into the root of her mane. “Sometimes the singing,” she continues, turning back to him, “sometimes the teeth, sometimes no more than the glint of an eye. More than once I allowed myself to be drawn... too close, perhaps.”
Strange, to think she had almost forgotten the sound of hoofbeats in the surf, the wild mane tangled with seaweed, those milky eyes shimmering like pearls. There had been a mare, she remembers—a filly, more like, scarcely older than herself, with a voice like the wind through a river canyon and a smile that cut like glass. It feels like a dream, like a different lifetime.
She does not ask what dangers he has met, though she thinks she can guess by the gleam of his green eye that there is a story there, and one she might like to hear some day. But she blinks, and it is nothing more than a final reflection of the sun, slipping swiftly now below the horizon. “We are all dangerous, in our way,” she allows. “Perhaps most of all to ourselves. Would you walk the same path again, knowing how it might end?”
And then it is night, the ocean sighing beneath a last, dwindling smear of violet to the west. “A shame about the song,” she adds after a moment, speaking softly into the dark. “Who knows—maybe they’ll sing one about you one day. What would you do, do you think, to make your name immortal?”
A false likeness, she says, and he thinks that this unicorn is as sharp as the tip of the iron weapon she wears. As the birds cry from their nests along the cliffside below, Lysnader wishes he had been more involved in the shaping of the riftlands, instead of walking them as a ghost. Then he might have known what to make of her, instead of only knowing that she had been there, too.
How new is she, he wonders. Does she still feel the hollow lack of magic?
He leans closer at the sound of her laugh, his gaze following her muzzle as she reveals her scars. “Ah,” he says, and sounds almost appreciative, studying those faint pale marks. It is easy to imagine the teeth that made them; he wonders if their bearer wears a scar as well. A puncture-mark, perhaps, from an iron horn.
“Not too close, yet.” For here she stood, no saltwater in her blood that he could tell – though he is not so good as he once was at sorting myth and monsters. Lysander makes no effort to draw away again, instead standing companionably beside her in the dark, near enough to feel the warmth of her, near enough her voice reached him effortlessly.
“There are too many paths to waste time walking the same one twice,” he replies. But he thinks, then, of Florentine, and how she might disagree with him. Surely she saw great value in winding back time, in retracing her steps until she could make just the right change.
The stranger is still visible in the dark, the after-image following a flash, or perhaps just a pale ghost on a sea-cliff. Down below, he can hear the waves crash and withdraw, heave and conspire. It’s an ancient chorus, and when she says a shame about the song at first he thinks she is talking of the one they listen to now.
In a way, perhaps she is – though for now the singers are sunken below the waves.
Lysander smiles at her question, though the shape of it is lost to the night; he knows the songs about him were all written long ago. They are not so likely now, when he seems little but a passenger to his own foray through mortality.
“I’m not sure they will, and I am not sure I mind,” he says. “I know others better-suited to rhymes.” The breeze picks up again, sweeping in with the scent of brine, tugging them inland by their hair. He inclines his head toward her, his antlers a dim halo of bone in the night. “Where are you headed, stranger? And would you mind company in the going?”
Even he is not such a fool to hunt for sirens in the dark.
Indra dips her head in agreement as the antlered stallion speaks. She, too, can feel the paths of a thousand possible lives unfolding at her hooves, innumerable and wonderful and terrifying. It is hard to imagine not seeking to explore them all, even as she knows that a step in any one direction will erase so many other courses that might have been.
Briefly, silently, she turns her question on herself: Would she change anything, if she could? Would she even have the knowledge or volition to, or would she blindly follow once more the same old path that fate had carved for her? Was that not, in some ways, what she was already doing now—walking a cliffside she had surely walked before, in the dream that tugged her endlessly between Novus and the rift and back again?
The night breeze whispers over her skin, smelling of salt and secrets, and she gives a small shake, turning her thoughts away from time and free will toward more sociable topics. “No real destination,” she replies. “Perhaps toward where the people are. I would be glad for your company,” she adds, and means it, for she has been wandering too many weeks alone, and his is the sort of conversation that she could readily grow used to. She flashes him a smile, ghostly in the dark. “You can show me where it is you make your home.”
She starts again up the cliff-trail, the golden stranger a dim bronze phantom at her side. His pale antlers seem almost to shimmer against the night, and every now and again the round ball of the moon is caught between them, crowning him with an otherworldly glow. “You must tell me a story,” she instructs him, “and a good one, to pass the time. If it is disappointing, I shall feed you to the deep.” Her expression is carefully solemn, only the barest arch of a brow daring him to make her prove it.
And so they walk, on into the lengthening night, the sea a rushing murmur at their heels. Indra, never one for chasing gods, cannot help but feel the touch of one, here—Vespera, perhaps, watching over the sleeping lands of Terrastella.
Or this unlikely stranger, chance encountered on the road.
i n d r a
@Lysander figured I'd start wrapping up, but let's thread again sooooon <3
Once, he’d thought of mortals lives as little more than footsteps on the shore – an imprint to some, to leave or to follow, but each washed away in the end by the hungry tide. Some gods might have thought that left them the ocean (certainly there were those that ate and took) but Lysander was always more of a stone, deep-set in the shore, immovable and mostly unchanged.
Sometimes, now that his heart is a softer, stranger thing, all muscle and blood, he wonders if he had ever been lonely.
The thought unsettles him, like rubbing a finger absently against an old wound and finding it stings; he is glad for the excuse to turn away from it when she speaks again.
The stallion matches her smile in the dark, and turns away from the sea. “To the Dusk Court, then,” he says, “where the monsters are less pretty, with duller teeth.” They walk, for a moment, in companionable silence, and if she is watching the moon caught between his antlers he is allowing himself the fanciful thought of her piercing it with her iron horn.
He remembers then the storyteller from the festival, her sad tale of love and woe, where the moon was a woman who loved the sea. Indeed, the water trailed silver beneath her, a path that could never be walked, a make-believe bridge that connected nothing.
As if she were party to his thoughts, the stranger asks him for a story. His head dips, an ear twisting toward her, his gaze still straying out to sea. Her threat makes his smile twist, dark and wry. “And then you shall ask me for another, and another, with a new if each night?” His laugh is like the moon-shine on the water, silver and rippling and insubstantial. “Very well. Long ago, in a world much like this one, of kingdoms and courtesans, there was a prince…”
Like the sea his voice rolled on, until the two strangers were gone from the high jut of the cliffs, leaving not even a trace of footsteps among the stone and sighing grass.
@Indra <3 thank you for the thread! I cheated on the story xD
