Raglan hadn’t expected to find so many stars in the sky of Solterra, had assumed for some reason that the hate of Solis was strong enough to blot out even the infinite lights of Caligo’s skin. Though as he gazed heavenward, the tips of his curved horns brushing coolly against the bloody bay of his rump, the Crow slowly realized that he was wrong about many things — most things, actually.
He had tasted the feast foods of the Lord of Day, and the Warrior God had not rained terror and blood down upon him. He had drank cool water, laughed among strangers, found a sort of acceptance in the arms of what he had thought to be a nation of enemies and warmongers. The notion had gotten the stallion to thinking, though had not brought him close enough to that bottomless pit of despair that stood just on the other side of reminiscing. Yes, Raglan considered Denocte from a safe distance, as a Terrastellan would, as a foreigner would.
For that was what he was, wasn’t it? He had abandoned Denocte when she had abandoned him; had cast aside the land that had been his Mother and fled the very shores where she laid her head. Her bones, the Crow knew, had shaken that day; the day her borders had burned and her gates and snapped shut and her Trueborn children had fled under the cover of her own shadow. How she must have moaned, his beloved Motherland, wept and cried out for her progeny, to defend and love her as she had protected and nurtured them.
Yet, they had abandoned her, every last one of her most beloved: The Bruised King, the Stormdancer, the Drunken Warden, the Scaled Emissary, the Bloodfaced Regent, and each and every one of her Crows. None of them were innocent, most were likely dead, though Raglan in his heart of hearts could not wish them restful sleep or steady steps, least of all himself. The boy had been just that — a boy, when he fled in terror and in confusion, but the decisions of a boy sowed the regrets of a man.
And the regrets of a man would dog Raglan’s steps until the end of his days.
Blinking pupilless silver eyes, the stallion felt each ache and breath and beat of his battered heart as he fell back into himself. Into this body that was called beautiful, this body that had carried him away from those he loved when they had needed him most. What a betrayal of self, to be called beautiful when one had performed such ugly deeds. Yet, it was all the stallion truly had left in the world, the last surviving gift of his Mother and his true God, and so he would cherish it with what strength he had left.
Raglan stood in a cool and crystal clear pool up to his belly in an oasis in the middle of a desert. He stood still in a Kingdom that felt like a million miles and a million lifetimes away from what he had been and what he had known. He felt unsure, he felt lost, he felt oh, so very afraid.
He hadn’t expected to find so many stars in this sky.
These past days had been filled with excitement, with revelry. Food and drink had always flowed freely for Nefertari, but with the shifts in power and the desire to forge a sense of community in full swing the feasts had spilled into the streets and the taverns turned their liquors loose like an unruly tide. She had not expected such comforts to carve a hollow place in her chest. To build a temple of longing and loneliness.
It had been several years now that she had called Solterra her “home”, though it would never truly feel that way. Since the first day she set foot outside of Denocte, the first stride over her carefully guarded borders like a secret whispered among lovers, she had felt like nothing more than a fugitive. The parties, the showmanship, the festivities had all been beautiful distractions. And how could one not feel a sense of belonging, of joy in the presence of gilded halls and sparkling boys and bejeweled girls? It was easy there to forget about loneliness, for a time, at least. Still, that fearsome beast would come; not as a ferocious bear to knock down the walls you’d built, but as the creeping of ants, slipping between the cracks and nestling in the deep places to consume you.
She wasn’t sure when they had gotten in, but the crawling sensation in her skin had become overwhelming. And as any other occasion when she could not sleep and found no comfort in plush furs and soft silks, she made her bed under the stars. She had found the night to be her one last connection with her home, the last comfort she found from the place in which she had run. After all, she had fled from her family, not her goddess.
The mare took each step without looking at it, without taking count of where she would go. She never had, when she was restless in her heart and mind. Somehow, her legs knew how to take her where she needed to go. It was no surprise that they brought her to the edge of the oasis, the one sanctuary among the dry sands of Solterra. The stallion, however, was unexpected.
She watched him, his face lifted to the sky, the curved bones of his horns reaching like slender fingers to caress his backside. The bulk of feathers were tucked neatly at his sides, but they did nothing to hide the lithe muscle that was clearly there. He was beautiful, but he was also achingly lonely. Nefertari did not need her goddess-given family-cursed gifts to tell her so. Whatever the stallion carried with him weighed as heavily on his heart as hers. Like would always recognize like. Forget the “opposites attract” narrative. Those twin flames would always find each other, those whose love whispered and rejoiced. Those whose pain screamed until their throats were raw and their whimpers were swallowed by the night.
The mare felt hot tears threaten to invade her golden pools, though she was unsure why. Perhaps it was her own loneliness consuming her, her own regrets, her own desires. For a woman who was very used to immense feeling, it was nearly consuming, this ache, not a dull roar but a bone-deep ache that reached out and twisted the soul. Perhaps it was this place, this beautiful oasis. Or perhaps it was this stallion, a mirror which she did not expect to come by. She took a deep and unsteady breath, her bodice shuddering with the effort.
Nefertari lifted her gaze to the sky. The stars were so beautiful.
Something about a sea of sand was both terrifyingly unknowable and comfortably quiet, and amid a blanket of stars and the humming of nocturnal insects, Raglan felt both sensations acutely. He was only a half mile or so from the capitol city of Solterra, and yet the stallion couldn’t help but feel as if he were the lone occupant of an entire nation. Breathing deep, silvery eyes still transfixed on the distant lights hanging in the heavens, the Crow tucked his wings tighter against his sides, resisting the urge to speak to Caligo — resisting the desire to have Her eyes upon him once more, to have Her see him as he truly was and to know he was still Her son.
Blackened lips parted, a tiny, raw gasp escaping from Raglan’s chest as his resolve nearly broke and the act of resistance shot a finger of pain ricocheting along his spine. So deep, was this fear of feeling, that the stallion considered it akin to falling — primal, all-consuming, inescapable. And while a true fall had never horrified Raglan, for he trusted his great feathered wings, the thought of stepping over an invisible line and into the depthless ravine within himself was a terror that he could not justify.
At the sound of hooves brushing over sad and a shuddering breath that was not his own, Raglan startled. Blinking rapidly, as if to clear his vision of the concept of grief, the Silvertongue lowered his gaze to find he had been joined by a long-eared mare. Dressed was she in shades of cool evening, with gold clinging to her knees and dripping down her face. The stranger was short, though not stocky, with eyes of gold that were not unkind and a tilt to her mouth that implied that while she may not smile often, the smiles she offered would be as pretty as she.
It made him wonder if she was thankful to her deity, for bringing her to earth after being so lovingly wrought.
So easy it would be for the pegasus to slip back into old habits, to don the cloth of jester and take up his role as charming rogue. Yet, the thought of hiding himself beneath the gaze of this unknown woman felt dangerously similar to sacrilege, and Raglan had committed enough sins thus far. Thus, the Terrastellan convert only moved to stand a more companionable distance from the mare, dripping water tracing his path over the sands. Standing at her side, the Crow does not ask her to halt her stargazing, only tilts his head back to stare once more skyward.
“Thank you for joining me, stranger,” His voice was soft, but warm in its welcome, “The desert can be mournful at night, and your company will help keep the past at bay.” A blink and a tiny curve to blackened lips later, Raglan settled in to the moment and thought no more of falling.
The swirl of the cosmos danced in her eyes as the mare watched the stars above. Even as the stallion took sudden note of her, as she knew he eventually would, she did not turn her gaze to him. The lantern lights of Caligo marched a steady, winding path across the velvet blue expanse, twinkling and tittering to themselves. Sharing the secrets that young fillies and handsome young colts spoke in confidence to the great wide night, she thought. The stars could not speak to anyone but themselves, and while there may have been a great many of them, she thought that perhaps the chatter kept the potential loneliness at bay. She thought that, perhaps, even the stars could feel grief. After all, they were the stars of Caligo, regardless of what land she stood in. It didn’t matter if her hooves landed her in Solterra, or Delumine, or even Terrastella. The night belonged to her goddess, and thus, the night sky that stretched across all lands also belonged to her. Even if she never saw the Arma Mountains or the beautiful Night Markets again in her lifetime, Caligo would always be with her. That was a comfort.
The stallion had moved gracefully through the waters of the oasis, sliding easily from the clear pool to the still warm sands. The summer air still clung to the last heat of Solis, and she thought that the water dripping down his crimson pelt must have felt extraordinary. He came to stand beside her, lifting his gaze once more to join her in watching the stars.
“Thank you for joining me, stranger,” he spoke, his words like warmed honey in spring. “The desert can be mournful at night, and your company will help keep the past at bay.”
A small smile curved at the end of his lips, and she thought that it suited him. The gentle expression seemed natural on him, though she suspected it was not something that came often. She got the impression that most of his smiles were sly, cunning, exuberant not in their genuineness because they were not that, not most times. This smile, though, as he watched the whispers of Caligo’s children, it felt more genuine than any she had come across in her years in Solterra.
She had not realized that she started to cry until the tear had already cut a path down the curve of her cheek. When had been the last time she had cried? Had it been that night, when she had run under the cover of darkness. Had it been all those first nights when she had been truly alone? The mare felt as if she had not cried in an age, and perhaps that was right. The last time she had shed a tear for her homeland and that which she had lost, she was nothing more than a child then. She had cried the tears of a child who had been lonely and afraid.
Here, though, in the clear night with this genuine stranger who felt more like herself than any she had ever known, she cried the tears of a woman who had suddenly realized with crashing anger and sorrow all it was that she had truly lost. There was no comfort for her here in Solterra, though she had spent years trying to hide that fact from herself. But yet, in this oasis and under the cover of her beautiful and powerful Caligo, she found some comfort. It took her a few more moments of silence to realize the comfort did not come merely from the cool waters or the blanket of stars. These were small comforts she had come to again and again and they did not start the drum in her chest as she had now.
She blinked, trying to clear the misty tears from her eyes. She turned their golden warmth to the stallion, taking him in. His pools swirled in a similar way to her own, tones of opal in shifting colours, bright and with a wisdom brought on only by years of experiencing and understanding true pain. He held himself like a soldier, or nearly so. No, he did not have the pompous air of the young men she had come across before, and not the same refinement of those who had seen the battlefield. There was something far less practiced, and far more real than any of those things, though she could not draw out exactly what it was. The thought slipped from her grasp, but it did not matter much. Where he had come by his disposition did not matter in this moment. What mattered is that it was as raw and real as any grain of sand beneath her hoof and any stray wind that brought with it the distant smell of cacti in bloom.
Nefertari parted black lips and found that at first she could not speak. She wet her lips and swallowed, trying again for words to express herself to this stallion. They came as a whisper, thick and low. Unbecoming of a lady in high society, surely, but oh so right in this small oasis, under Caligo’s stars.
“Perhaps it shall, for both of us.”
The mare continued to watch him, drinking in all that she could. He surely was not a native Solterran or she would have seen him before now. If he was only passing through, she may never see him again, and she wanted desperately to burn him into her memory. Perhaps, if she did, she might be able to recall him again when it felt as if the world was collapsing around her and perhaps he would bring her blessed peace.
When you are young, most assume you know nothing. You are but a babe, a child, a mere stripling with no life lived; they would take your precious experiences, those shining and lovely creations built from new eyes and fresh minds, and crush them flat beneath the sharp edges and right angles of their own limitations. It would be better to turn what was once colorful and abstract into slate, they say, if only to continue the status quo. Yet, each youth was brought into the world cradled in arms of starlight and infinity, with the truths of the universe dripping from a graceless tongue.
If babes could speak, if their voices could be made into words and poetry and song, they would sing as angels sing, croon as cherubs croon, speak as Gods speak.
There is no stronger truth than what is found in the eyes of the untested and the unknowing — their greenness nurtured in springtide ignorance, perceptions not yet clipped into orderly rows. If they could, babes would speak gospel, they would speak milk and honey and holiness and painful, painful Truth.
Would that they used their voices to define the undercurrents tracing the outline of existence — all to become, all to dissolve, all to be forgotten amid the tumultuous waves of time, and all that would weigh the destinies of the future. Would that Raglan had known just what the universe had written for him, just how the twisting of a single thread in that grand tapestry of Fate could wrench he and his ilk so violently from one another.
If he had been a crueler sort, maybe the winged stallion would have stood upon Veneror lashing at their damned temple, would have sent his rage skyward and flung the Gods’ betrayal at their celestial feet; a gauntlet, a challenge to give back what had been stolen from him. Maybe they would have answered, maybe if they knew what they had done, what shockwaves their petty rivalries had sent down into the bedrock of his inconsequential mortal life — maybe they wouldn’t have left him so alone.
And yet?
And yet.
He glanced again to the gold flecked stranger that stood by his side, a solid and unwavering comfort, an ally for the war each mortal unwittingly waged against the lurking and endless Dark. That he was of the Night made no difference, born in smoke and shadow, the grandness of death was still something he feared in his animal heart. Indeed, eventide was not the same as True Dark, for no matter how small their shining, stars were still made of light.
Silvery eyes lingered on the maiden’s own twin pools of blazing gold, Raglan’s gaze drifting over tear stained cheeks and the memory of the smile she had offered him — a flitting glimpse at sunshine through clouds filled with rain. It occurred to him then, that she was his match in whatever way it meant to the cosmos. To whatever end, amid the labyrinthine plans of the Gods, this night smeared stranger had been brought here by their wretched, terrible, graceful hands. They had presented the exile with the other, brighter half, to his brilliant and tarnished coin.
~*~
”Perhaps it shall, for both of us.”
Her voice was soft as the downy feathers that underlined Raglan’s massive wings, and the stallion couldn’t help but watch her just as she watched him. She was painted with subtle splendor, flawless sunlight skin fading to dark and back again, as if she wore the passage of days as her raiment. Serene and careful, yet powerful in her presence, he wondered what it would be to pass days as peaceful as she. The Silvertongue’s vision snagged on the little snatch of dusk nestled beneath her neck, a careful brush of plum cradled against her breast, and a flush rushed through him to be staring so openly at her body. Quickly, he flicked opal eyes back to her face, praying she would understand that his gaze had not been lustful.
Raglan was thankful for the earth in that moment; for it’s unyielding solidity, for reminding him that he had hit the ground, and could fall no further.
”Who are you, to have such exquisite timing as to save me from the memories that would devour me?”
The twist to his lips was wry, the words playful as they slipped into the beckoning darkness, but there was a note of genuine curiosity there — Where had she come from, if not from his own desperate need? And how had she felt so much pain, to have looked at him and known?
Two beats of his heart and understanding cracked through his bones and into the sand at his hooves.
Raglan loved her; beneath the eyes of gods old and new, amid a battleborn and battlebred nation, he swore he loved her. The knowledge swept over him with a sudden and blazing ferocity — she owed him nothing, this stranger who had seen whatever weight he bore and shouldered it without a second thought; this unnamed woman who looked at the Crow’s cracking resolve and wept for him and all he had lost. She owed him nothing and still stood at his side, still offered her hand to a drowning man.
Fear rose in him at this realization; the abject and absolute terror driving the urge to flee her presence, rid himself of those too-honest eyes, was overwhelming. However, the idea of leaving her to stand alone beneath the blanket of Night was just as painful. The Crow could not stomach abandoning a friend again, no matter how newly forged their bond, not after he lost his brothers and sisters and home, not after he lost his Orphan King. So he stayed, a sudden and strange sense of loyalty girding his spine. Leaning a bit closer, he didn’t look away from that depthless golden gaze, even has he felt feathers brush against her rib cage and shoulder.
@Nefertari oops he fell in what he thinks is platonic love. THINK AGAIN IDIOT. (Shout out to my Sylvia Plath homies if you caught the referenceeee) also im sorry... that this is so long????? I dont know what happened.
Drowning feels so much like falling that if it weren’t for the crashing waves, one might not be able to tell the difference. The complete lack of control, oxygen being ripped from tired lungs, and desperate pleas that fall on deaf ears. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still weep? If you are drowning and there is no one there to offer the hand of salvation, you might die clinging to a fleeting memory of solid ground. The clawing, desperate searching hands of a once drowning man brushed so tenderly against her mind the mare’s breath caught in her throat.
She had felt that same drowning deep in her own bodice, and a nearly forgotten memory began to ache in her bones. The clairvoyant had been drowning, once. Nearly every night those first two years she had been swallowed by the ocean tide of her own desperate loneliness and found solace only in the consistency of the stars. She had followed them until at long last, her weary legs found Solterra, a blessed place of solid ground, for the god of the sun dried the sea of her sorrow. For a time she had been able to stand strong and breathe fresh the air without a threat of suddenly being pulled under. But no person could run from themselves forever, and always there had been storm clouds chasing on her horizon.
With the stallion this close, it was too easy to lose herself to the swell of his emotion. In the mare he had found an island amidst his drowning, and a calm inside his hurricane. Her own desperate cries for serenity echoed back to her in his silver eyes. For an eternity their gazes locked and she knew that he had seen her. Not in the way that others claim to see- not with his mortal eyes, but with his very soul.
The liquid silver spin of his gaze caressed her body, following the trail of her throat and the pulsing vein directly to her heart. She wondered if he could hear it trying to break free from the prison of her ribs. She wondered what it would feel like to hear his own heart muscle march in a steady rhythm, and what it would be like to match his. It felt as if those pale pools of silver were made of hot iron rods, reaching straight into her and melting the very core of her being.
Nefertari had never been very skilled at tuning out the emotions of those in her close proximity. She had made a habit of turning away or keeping a distance, lest she lose some part of herself to the fury of someone else’s passion. But how does one turn away from a cosmic mirror? How could she run from a reflection of her own thoughts, her own feelings magnified? Could a person run far enough and fast enough to drop their shadow and not once have to face themselves again?
His rich tones cut through the staccato of her heartbeat and filled her mind with a sense of clarity. ”Who are you, to have such exquisite timing as to save me from the memories that would devour me?” Such an elegant way to ask her a simple thing as her name. But surely it was more than just her name he was asking her. Who are you? The mare had not dared to ask herself that same question for so long. She had worn so many facades, her life had become an elaborate masquerade. Who was she? The mare carved from marble and incense. The mare born from stars and shadow. The mare who had been cursed with the gift of knowledge far beyond what any mortal had right to bear. She was a child, who had run from the uncertainty of family obligation and headlong into the uncertainty of the vast world. She was a woman who had crafted a life built upon half truths and frivolities. The mare was all of these things, but she was also so much more.
The stallion’s words echoed again in her mind, and it shattered some piece of her wall. The one she had forged in secret and tended to so carefully. The one that had protected her for so long. Perhaps it had been the day’s festivities, and perhaps there had been some lingering kiss of liquor in her belly. Perhaps she had just been struck so thoroughly by this gift from Caligo, for who else could have sent her such a brilliant beacon of light in her darkest hour? His coat may have blazed proudly the colours of Solis, but he was as brilliant as the fullest moon, and he pulled at her like the goddess did the tides, and she felt blessed that his gaze made those churning waves soft.
“I’m afraid I cannot speak much for my timing,”
the mare offered a ghost of a smile, the corners of her lips turning up in a gentle curve.
“For you see, it seems your presence here has done me the same turn.”
The woman lifted her gaze for a moment heavenward.
“It seems that Caligo has blessed us with this chance to silence those demons without carving out our pound of flesh.”
Nefertari returned her warm golden pools to the stallion’s steady silver gaze. She had no desire to run, and as the stallion’s wing caressed her dark pelt, he brought with it the electric rise of the desert sun. If she were the twilight moments before the moon began to climb into the velvet sky, he would be the thundering dawn. He was the beginning of radiant light that pierced through her very being, and she knew in that moment that she could not lie to this man. They had shared only this small exchange and yet she felt so deeply understood. There was a secret promise in the way that his wing kissed her ribs, in the way he so brazenly held her gaze and begged her to walk with him into the endless. For better or worse, their gods had twined them together, and neither had the intention of letting go.
”You can call me Raglan.” She rolled the name on her tongue and savoured it like the sweetest wine. There was poetry in that name, a call to the void and a demand for something greater than this. It was an honest name, proclaimed loudly in festive halls with tankards thrown high, whispered softly in quiet moments to be cherished.
“Well, Raglan, you may call me Nefertari.”
She closed her eyes and sighed into his touch, moving so that she may lean against him and bury herself at the hollow of his throat. So that perhaps she could listen to the hum of his heart and his steady breath, so much like the calm ocean tide. She had no right to ask this stranger to hold her in this way, but she did so because to resist felt like she may as well have been spitting in the face of her goddess. Caligo had gifted her this quiet moment in the desert oasis, her own salvation in the form of a once drowning man. Who was she to deny them both this reprieve from treading water alone?
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.
There is something to be said about the power of an embrace. When one embraces a friend, the strength of that brief hold further solidifies your chosen bond. When one embraces their kin, the compassion that flows between each other soothes the soul. But perhaps there is none so powerful as the embrace of lovers. The strength to hold each other together even when it feels as if all the world has fallen apart, the compassion in each other’s darkest time of need, and the silent, blissful kiss that passes between hearts and breath just to be so near to each other.
It’s not a sensation that many become too familiar with, at least in Nefertari’s experience. One became entangled for one political gain or another. Wealth, power, magic, the possibilities were endless, but pure love was never any of the ones she saw. Perhaps two people could learn to love one another just as one could learn to love the freezing rain, but it always took time and it was never as easy or enjoyable. Her family especially seemed unaccustomed to love for the sake of it. Even her own parents, so low within the Vogelstein hierarchy, had only come together in the hopes of creating beautiful and talented offspring. They had done so, of course- the mare was enough proof of that. She would have been her ticket to glory.
Yet, as she stood at the edge of the desert oasis, curled into a man whom she had barely spoken to, she felt as if she might know that love. It was in the way that his wing folded over her abdomen and pulled her in closely, the way that his whiskers tickled at the base of her audits as his lips whispered into the silken strands of her hair.
”Starfated”
The word held her attention, drawing her mind towards a memory. Her small frame, delicately perched among silk and feathers and the niceties of home. Her parents had never been particularly loving, but her mother, in the short time before the mare’s Sight had started to develope, had enjoyed telling her stories. More often than not, they were slurred and never the same twice- products of overindulgence in revelry and, she suspected now in her aged wisdom, an attempt to run from the truth. Not so unlike herself.
Her favourite had been the one about two lovers. Her mother returned to it over and over again, and of the stories she chose to tell, this one changed the least. Nefertari had always enjoyed listening to her speak of the fates of the world, woven together by sisters whose knowledge was beyond any mortal knowing. It was a thought that comforted her in the late hours when she first started to see things she did not understand, and it was the reason why she sought solace within the stars. She had often pondered if she was not just a product of the great love of the two stars, brought down by Caligo to one day return and tell them of all the wonderful things of the world. Sometimes she still pondered it.
Nefertari sighed into Raglan’s touch, closing her eyes and drinking in his musky scent. It reminded her of warm sunlight and the first sound of birds in spring, triumphant and jovial. She nuzzled his chest, enjoying the caress of his feathers across her back and shoulders.
Her vision started to swim behind her closed lids. Slowly at first, and then rapidly. The mare’s heart began to pound in her chest and ears and for a moment she thought that she might have somehow started drowning in the sand. There was the strange sensation of multiple heartbeats, coupled with the impression of strands of silver and gold braided into each other, splitting apart, and coming together again. Over and over, lifetime upon lifetime, together and apart, and then together again. She was shocked back into herself, her knees buckling and dropping her body like a puppet without its master. The ringing of sharp whinnies in her ears dulled to a roar as the heart beats began to fade to the dull thud of just her own pained muscle straining against her ribs. The mare’s body ached, and she could feel the flood of tears washing down her cheeks.
The clairvoyant was no stranger to sudden onsets of her sight, but this had been different. She had the distinct feeling that this had been triggered, somehow. That it had been prompted by this strange stallion. She took a shaking breath into her lungs and squeezed her eyes shut once more, finding them blessedly clear of swirling colours, though the familiar tingle at her temples told her that a migraine was not far behind. Her legs would not allow her to move just yet.
“I… I’m sorry.”
She rasped, her tongue suddenly terribly dry and her throat thick with emotion, though if it was merely from the collapse or from the vision or both, she could not rightly tell.
