“Hli sisi,” he mutters under his breath, squinting up at the wide, blue, springtime sky. Not a cloud in sight; its calm, vaulted infiniteness it overwhelming; feeling crushed by the weight of the world’s open mouth, he turns his eyes to the horizon-eating stretch of long, seeding grass. But why? Why would he be here again? It makes no sense, except that he knew it, this land and where it was, and just as his cunicular heart yearns to run from things that get tough and eldritch—(and snow in a hot desert qualifies as such, thank you)—so does it yearn for a hide it knows the tunnels and nooks of. And while things had gotten weird here, weird enough for Max to have taken off under cover of night, as if anyone would be any the wiser to his disappearance in Solterra, it had been much, much worse in Sovereign.
Much worse.
He shivers, reliving the slow creep of the darkness and… well—he hadn’t stayed there long either. Max is a wild, wanderling, cunicular soul. An endless wellspring of fear and curiosity, duelling on battlefields of strange lands and homes away from ho—no, no he hasn’t had a home in a very long time. A fresh bed of straw in yet another inn doesn’t count, no matter the maids he manages to share it with. No matter the days he spends soiling it, running undignified hustles on the street to pay for just one more sleep on something civilized and familiar. Just one more. No, home is a concept long since relegated to fitful, shiftless sleep, phantoms and shrouded memories. Home is gone now. He is here.
He presses on, in an aimless sort of way.
At first, he had, himself oriented towards the south, wondering with every step why he would ever choose to go back there, of all places. Perhaps, because he knew it best, by the cobbled sandstone and flickering, sun-sigil banners. Somehow, he had felt an initial migratory call to it, like he owed it something primal. An animal pact to serve a duty—which is crazy, really, because he’d never be in this mess if he embraced duty to begin with, and not misfit, creature trickery…
Very soon it had dawned on him that those ill-placed feelings—debts; he owes but one to a haggardly old sorcerer, and he’s probably dead, rodents tend not to love too long; duty—were just that, and with a small turn of his body, he was wandering again, across an ocean of belly-tickling grass, still lying prostrate, here and there, from the heavy weight of snow for so long. Small clutches of blooming flowers give bright colour to the drab brown-green of a world just awakening.
He was looking for an eagle, or perhaps one of the other strange creatures who roamed these lands. Sirius had never seen an eagle in person before, or many birds at all for that matter. They had always been out of reach, too far beyond the walls of the aviary, always disappearing over the horizon when they were let out for training. He had always watched them go enviously; there were no tethers to keep them in place, no chains to drag them back home.
One day he had tried to fly after him, when they had first let him into the air. They had been so close at the time - he was convinced that if he tried hard enough, if he beat his wings fast enough, he could catch up to them. He didn’t know what he would do once he did, if he did; but in the end it didn’t matter. His captors were bigger and faster than he was, and he was caught before he got even twenty feet into the air.
Nor did they believe him, when he promised he wasn’t trying to escape. I just wanted to see the birds.
But that was in the past - now Sirius was as free as those birds he’d watched jealously. The entire land and sky stretched out before him, farther than his eyes could see. There were no pegasus guarding him, ready to steer him back to his group. There was no ropes tethering him to the ground.
Free.
He scanned the landscape below, looking for movement across the snowy plains. It seemed he was the only bird in the sky today - the horizon was empty as far as he could see - but neither was there a creature to break up the empty expanse on the ground. It was as if winter had chased all the life from the land, and even with the incoming spring the animals were loathe to return.
So he drifts lower and lower, low enough to see the individual stalks of wheat grass bending in the breeze, and finally he sees something moving.
He flares his wings, changing directions on a whim to soar towards the sleek creature. He thinks it a strange deer at first, tall and pale and unusual. But as his hooves touch the ground, and he stumbles into a canter, he realizes it’s just another horse - a strange horse, but a horse all the same.
“Sorry!” he calls breathlessly, skidding to a stop some distance away. His dark wings spread to either side of him, buffeting the stranger with their wind as he struggles to slow himself. Sirius tosses his head back, nearly sitting to slow his momentum. "Sorry - I thought I could stop faster." He'd blame the snow; he didn't have much practice landing on an icy or sloshy terrain, after all.
moon dust in your lungs,
stars in your eyes,
you are a child of the cosmos,
The slip of winged shadow overhead still ignites him, like a discharge of electricity down his spine. His chest squeezes, constricting him to a tight coil; ears flicking forward and around. Primal habit drives him for a second, becomes him, and he thumps a back hoof, splaying dirty slush in a meager wake around it. It wasn’t so long ago—(no, actually, it was an achingly long time)—that a shade like that was a portent of sure death, driving him and his below ground for fear of being the one who doesn’t slip the grip of some beast’s talons today.
Being the one left in a calm shower of fur and some blood from the puncturing of the soft place around the spine where the grip had been sealed shut.
He exhales, shallow and shuttering down this tightened throat, his ruby eyes turn skyward to catch sight of this elil, to see for himself, in his preything’s mind, that which brings the rabbit to the surface with unwanted and uninvited precision. Still, after all this time— Yes, indeed, after all this time, for he is a severed soul. He still carries around the part of him that was exacted as payment for his petty foolishness as a cavalier young buck. Still, after years of repentance; after minutes spent trying to forgive himself; after seconds, drew long and sombre, lipping the rabbit’s skull that hangs (thump-thuump) against his breastbone.
But what he sees is far too big to be any bird of prey, so the next breath that is realized is long and hard and flushed with the bright flame of shame for such a weakling reaction. It’s nothing, and even it is was something, you’re far too big for any elil from the sky, now, Maxie-boy. He watches with keen curiosity head tilted, overlong ears pricking forward, a small grin twitching one corner of his lip in a second nature of nonchalant roguishness. He’d oft pondered the strange differences and similarities he once shared with the kin of the sky. For he has one had a world underground, beyond the reach of land-dwellers (such as himself, now) that offered cool, earthy freedom; they, the wide, vast skies.
Freedom, indeed.
His eyes drift over the early-spring continents of slush and old, melting snow, surrounded by bodies of meltwater and brown-green grass, laying low and unappetising. This is his realm now. This, and this alone. He is about to drifts into one of his sober contemplations, unbecoming as they are, when the buffeting of wing (woooosh) snaps his eyes up, taking a step back in mindless instinct. The stranger lands with a slosh and a squelch of damp earth below his feet and Max nods—eyes shuttering for a moment aaginst the wing’s great, pumping breeze, ears tilting back bit. “Well,” he says, voice full of cavalier pride and low, swelling slyness, “I daresay my landing would have been worse from such heights. So I wouldn’t worry about it,” his grin deepening to an impish crack. “Maximus.”
Diving through the air, dropping nearly on top of the pale colored stallion, brings back memories he would rather forget. It feels too much like hunting, when the horse below him resembles one of the rabbits the masters would set loose in the forest, to teach their falcons how to navigate through the trees.
But there are no trees here, at least nowhere in eyesight - the plain stretches on as far as the eye can see, snow and ice speckling the landscape like splotches of white across a paint mare’s back. Sirius has never seen snow before - he’s hardly seen ice from where he’d come. And while his first impression had been that it was bright, and hurt his eyes when he was flying about it and the sun reflected off of it -
- His second impression was that it was cold, and slippery to land on.
His wings flare out to either side of him, feeling heavy and cumbersome here on the ground where the wind did not fill them and make them weightless. One tips low to the ground, dragging through snow and flinging the cold powder into the air before he finally regains his balance, tucking the appendages into his sides. Thankfully the stranger doesn’t seem to mind the intrusion, or the slight dusting of ice crystals across his back. He smiles at him instead, and when he speaks there’s a casual, impish hint to his tone that makes him think of magic tricks. He shuffles his wings closed, holding them close against his back.
“Maximus,” he repeats, testing the name on his tongue. It reminded him of something, he thought - but he couldn’t place it. He wants to ask if the stars had named him, too, or where else he had gotten his name from. But he decides it’s a silly question to ask, and offers a smile instead. “I’m Sirius.”
Only then does the boy notice the color of his eyes (he’s only seen grey eyes before, and white eyes and black eyes - never red eyes.)
He tilts his head to one side, peering at the man with his pale, glassy eyes. His ears tilt back and forth, listening for the quiet whisper of the stars that has become so familiar to him in his few years. But all he hears is the wind, whistling through the dry grasses, and the soft sighs of their own breathing.
“What’s that around your neck?” he asks abruptly, reaching with his nose towards the tiny skull hanging about a rope.
moon dust in your lungs,
stars in your eyes,
you are a child of the cosmos,
