he only turns from the bar when the liquor turns her body warm and numb. Her eyes close, ice-speckled lashes relishing the way she moves as it her joints are unhinged. Water she thinks, no longer ice. And it is true. Her heart feels melted, no longer scraping at her ribs with its every struggling beat. The alcohol has chased away the frost upon her until, at last, she feels free.
Estelle smiles as she walks. Her lips sharpening into a wicked, beautiful smirk as she drinks in the wealth of this Solterran family. She has seen the way they watch each other. With resentment and with love. She does not miss it. Still, in her day dreaming she can feel the way the Matron Tonnerre watched her, expecting more, always, always. But they were always laying their expectations upon the wrong Tonnerre. Estelle was never made to be the perfect Tonnerre they hoped for but Moira… Moira always held much more hope. She wanted, she worked, she perfected everything it meant to be a Tonnerre, even with her wings and her skin hot like fire. As Moira rose a phoenix, Estelle fell from favour.
But she would not have it any other way.
She reaches the next stall. ‘Truth or dare.’ It says, like a challenge. Estelle smiles. Would they ever believe her truths? Others had not. It was why she ended up here. Kicked out from her family, her name rendered to little more than dirt. So dirt she became when she left and wandered with Moira, pilgrims upon the road. Until the ice caught her, the ice that reached down beneath her breastbone and clutched her hot heart and froze it solid. She should have died, she knows. But instead she is here, watching another family crumble beneath the weight of their own expectations and turmoil.
“I will play.” She purrs, the alcohol roaring in her veins like an ice-dragon. I will play and my truths will at last be heard.
ilver stars sparkle on glasses like the strange liquids a member of the House of Ieshan pours from decanters into glasses of all shapes and sizes. Moira is certain she sees a night-dark liquid in a crystal cup resembling Caligo and smirks. But that smirk falls as her eyes drift and drift among the crowds and smoke and grandeur of this all. It is so very Tonnerre and un-Tonnerre. So much of it is gold where her home is silver and black and white. No, perhaps it is different after all with one of the few similarities being the marble floors underfoot that clatter and quake as she walks.
Or at least, the phoenix thinks that they do.
Moira cannot say for certain. She knows that there are so many in shades of silver and grey, so many she searches, her mind yearns for along the edges, but they are not her silver. None will ever compare to the frosted kiss of Estelle's skin, to the glinting quicksilver of her hips, to the darkening of her face and lightness of her eyes. How many times has she stared into a lilac gaze and found herself falling into the other half of who she should have been?
Estelle looks Tonnerre where Moira acts it. They were a matched set right from birth, from the moment Estelle found herself standing up for Moira when they were just girls. Of course, things would only escalate from there. They would only become closer and closer as the years passed until, ancestor's guide them, they would leave the House of Tonnerre, the beautiful and terrifying Estate, for good it would seem. They travelled for a blissful amount of time together, and Moira was certain they would never be parted. Then, she'd left Estelle, left her star, left her heart in a storm, dying from some ailment that was only whispered of on the Estate, and never loud enough to save her cousin.
Sweet ancestors it had hurt, to leave her there dying in an attempt to find a cure, to find something so that she would not shatter. (Moira knows how to shatter now, and yet disappointment is still bitter on her tongue when every silver is not her silver.) In the end, Moira never did. Her sweet cousin was lost to the mists, the very same, that had kept her from leaving Novus. After all, light cannot make a portal, and by the time she came into her own power it would have been far, far too late.
So now, she sips some strange purple juice that is not wine, but it is just as sweet, and moves like a flickering candle, like a nebula bursting, through the crowds with a slatted smile and half-lidded eyes. As dangerous as she is beautiful, as delectable as she is softened, Moira is not easy to miss.
Her voice, so utterly forgettable when she does not sing to you, coo and croon dark melodies into waiting ears, whisper that you will live or you will die, is so unlike the skin she wears. The red of her should have been on Estelle, but then Estelle would have left her sooner, perhaps would not have been her friend. It is a track she does not want to go down, a path she cannot follow. Before her, the path that the Tonnerre girl does follow leads her into the open air, into the courtyard where the Solterran air is still hot and dry, but the night cools it only slightly. Here, fewer bodies pack together in their revelry.
Moira is free.
Until she is not. There is a voice that purrs, a voice she would know even in her dreams, even in her death, and it has her heart stopping, it has her eyes dropping, it has her lungs quivering with hope and fear and everything, anything, in between. Estelle, her soul screams it, Neerja feels the reverberations in Denocte, a mad panic overtaking the beast who plunges for the mountains, for the wilds that would bring her marginally closer to her bonded.
Feet move slowly, she is wading through a water she thought she'd left behind. Then, red skin brushes the familiar side of silver. Shoulder shivers over scarred shoulder. Moira drinks her down, swallows her, lets the feeling of Estelle devour her as any ice-dragon would. Oh, but she is a phoenix, and she would not die, she would not cry. So silver-lined eyes might quake and quiver, but the gold of them trace the frost-pattern over her cousin's heart.
In stride, she asks, "Would you tell a truth or do you still prefer a dare?" with an arched brow, with a small smile, with a flame in her eyes that was not there moments before.
yes of fire set her spine ablaze. Estelle can feel the way it is gold gilding the curve of her back. Never once does she think that gaze belongs to another Tonnerre. Moira had left, slipping away as death slipped closer to Estelle. Still the silver woman can feel the way its fingers press deep into her throat. It set it’s icy grasp about her heart and stilled its fervent beating. And in those final throes all she felt is so utterly, terribly alone.
How used to the cold had she grown? Enough that now, as Moira slips closer, the light of her, the blazing crimson of her blisters her cousin’s skin. Would you tell a truth or do you still prefer a dare? That voice is a balm to the burn and yet gasoline to the fire of it. Estelle does not turn, no matter how her stomach twists with delight and wild, unkempt anger. She lets the drink the bartender gave her slip down her thought like the ichor of the gods. Estelle would bring the gods to their knees if only to slip from this moment, ease from her body the cacophony of emotions her cousin stirs within her.
That burn feels endless in her throat, the alcohol warm and numbing. She waits until it settles in her belly, slaying the butterfly nerves that beat their wings at her abdomen. When the last of them has fallen still, then she finally turns her gaze toward her oldest love, her dearest companion. Moira’s eyes are gold, gold, gold, her skin brilliant red. The feathers of her wings press upon her slim sides. She is a phoenix in appearance, never a girl that should have been born into the Tonnerre house. But oh how Estelle had loved her, more a sister than a cousin. Their souls were bound, rendered together through turmoil and pain. From the time of Estelle’s death until now, they have been apart the longest.
Ah, and that is the source of her anger. Fires burn her when she thinks of how Moira had left her, dying and alone. I am still alive her ire whispers into Moira’s ears. Is that a truth you expected to hear, Moira Tonnerre? Estelle does not let Moira melt the ice that has formed, the branches of ice that fan out from where her heart beats frantic and alive, alive, alive. Her cousin left for help and never returned. It feels too much like abandonment. Estelle shudders with the ache of perfect sorrow and self-pity. Her teeth clench, no, she was stronger than self-pity.
Beneath the thick fan of snow-white lashes she gazes at her cousin and upon the delicate bones of Moira’s face she sees memory after memory. Some are agony, some are sweet joy, some set her soul trembling. Estelle tips back her silken hair and smiles a thing of beauty and cutting ice. “A truth, Moira Tonnerre.” She breathes smooth as satin, delicate as a rose. The surname hangs upon her tongue, decadent, poisonous. “A truth to honour all the things that have changed.”
She hopes the night is long, for every moment will hold a truth and Estelle plans to uncover each and every one.
hey are a symphony of delight and danger, an eve of intrigue; Moira and Estelle, a star and a sun, two gaseous galaxies ready to fall or explode, on the precipice of greatness, on the cusp of breaking. She's always been half heartbreak and half heaven, Moira Tonnerre, the flame of the Estate that could bring the Matriarch crumbling to her knees. (Oh, in private she had, she surely had, with news of her departure, with the confession that she would follow Estelle anywhere.)
Moira never knew there were limits to that, never knew she could not, on that day so long ago, follow her into the hands of death and come back gasping for air. Instead, she'd fled to find a cure, left her sweet cousin in the hands of strangers (but they seemed so holy, they cared for orphans and infants, taking in an errant teenage girl seemed like second nature) and walked away. She never meant to stay for so long, to...forget.
Sweet ancestors hear her plea, she'd never meant to forget her cousin. Some part of her never truly has.
They were, in some worlds, meant to be eternal. Perhaps, in another universe, they were more than kin, perhaps their souls were melded into one, she thinks, until there is no Moira and Estelle, just a beautiful, perfect union of two halves of the same whole, two beings never actually meant to part. So many times has the Tonnerre girl seen her cousin become so cold and frigid to another, pushing them all away with her walls of ice so that Moira would be sheltered from their families' hoarfrost hearts that beat, beat, beat into oblivion and darkness much like their tempers and their tolerance. Never in her lifetime has she expected to be on the receiving end of it, but she should have known better, should have realized her happiness, no matter how hard she fought, clawed, and cried for, is not meant to be so easy to hold on to.
Nothing in life that's worth it ever came so easily as that.
So she hums softly her amusement and displeasure, hums softly her acknowledgment of the shutters concealing Estelle's eyes behind those pale lashes that she knows like her own scars, like her own skin. Those lilac eyes are her favorite in the entire world, more than her mother's or fathers, more than her brother's and the twins', more than her own ever would be. More than that, she loves Estelle with every fiber and cell in her body, she loves her and would, if only she could, cling to her for eternity if only the world would promise never to part them.
But it does not, and it cannot, so she does not whimper like some weanling pup, still hungry for its mothers teet, still too scared and naïve in the world to know that it has claws and teeth and can take care of itself. The ice of her cousin's smile does not make the phoenix falter, instead she stands taller, squares her shoulders, and throws a warmer grin back. How she shines then, how the stars upon her skin wink at her cousin. It is a light that Estelle never knew - how could she? Their family always expected Moira to somehow inherit or learn the powers of healing.
Some part of her thinks that she was always meant to be a star exploding.
No tempest can take her down.
"I have yearned for the silver of your skin, Estelle, none have quite struck me the same. Just as my love for you will never change no matter the distance or pain - you, my beloved, will always be the most dear in my heart." Never has she lied to Estelle, not truly. Even when the truths were painful and would lash at the skin of girls still shaking and learning who they were, she would not lie to her dear one, her sweet heart. Estelle, her guardian, her protector, her first love and perhaps her last. "A truth I will take with your poison, one request, just one: let it taste like sugar." At that, she pours the rest of her drink down her throat and she knows (oh she knows) it is not alcohol within and no amount of sweetness will cushion the blow.
