Eik’s words echo still in his ears, like little bits of sea-foam that brush against his memory (don’t you feel there’s something off about it?) He had wanted the island to be for them, not for Novus at all, not for the gods. Nothing but wild magic, feral and strange, all gifts and no curses. But then there was the unicorn. Time is here. Time is free. And now the midsummer sun is a high, baleful eye above him, beating down on his back, and the sea might be nothing more than glass with strange shapes passing darkly beneath.
Time may well have found its freedom, but for the horses that freedom is meaningless; the Dusk king has long since lost track of how long he has travelled the island. That initial birthing pain, black-ash sky and fire on the horizon, might have been a month ago or only a day. He feels like he has explored the virgin forest for days, with Corrdelia, with Eik, with Moira. Has he slept since stepping off that terrible bridge? His body is weary but his mind is whetted, a hungry blade cutting deeper, asking for more. But that has always been a dangerous request.
He does not test his magic against the sea. He is afraid of what it might mean if nothing responds (is it Vespera, a delayed punishment for his blasphemy?). Asterion tells himself that it is enough he can feel it stirring in him still, restless and unending, drifting in currents the true sea does not reflect.
Cirrus, he thinks, finding it suddenly unbearable to stand here, alone. He is relieved when she answers, long moments later (filled only by silence where there should be birds, and insects, and the lap of the waves). All is well, she tells him from the battlements of Terrastella’s castle. And you?
All is well.
For now, he believes it. All is well - Marisol is a kelpie with her attacker still unfound, and Raum walks the island, unseen as a ghost. All is well - Florentine is having a child, and Eik and Isra are having daughters. All is well - somewhere Moira waits to see him again, and in the last memory she has of his eyes they were not laden with sorrow but joy.
It is life. It is home. And when he turns from the shoreline (so deeply strange, more than anything he’s seen of Novus) back into the shade of the trees Asterion tells himself that it is enough.
He walks, though of course he can’t say for how long. There is a part of him that looks for a doe with an answer blazing in her eyes (or perhaps a challenge) and antlers of gemstones. There is a part of him that hopes out of the corner of his eye to see a flick of seaweed or the glint of sand, a dragon born from beach, shells for eyes and dripping seawater and a smile that beckons and pleads. But in this he is disappointed. There is nothing, only him, no sounds to break the silence (not the sea, not the breeze) but his own breathing and his own footsteps. He thinks, once, that he hears the laughter of a brook (the laughter of something, anyway); he thinks that he hears voices, but when he stops there is nothing, not even wind through leaves.
Just before he decides to return to the beach, and stick to the shoreline in hopes of finding others, Asterion finds the waterfall.
He had thought (foolish man!) that by now he must have walked every inch of the island, learning its valleys and hills, each cave and bay and stream and cliff. But he has never seen this, a silver line plummeting a hundred feet, mist thrown high at its base, a rainbow arching out beyond it in a delight of color - and all of it caught still by time. Almost the bay laughs; almost he bends his head to drink from the stream unwinding at his feet, though there’s not even a ripple to disturb the scatter of light at its surface. All around it smells of green and growing things, and perhaps he should feel afraid, but oh!
Asterion regards the waterfall, liquid but frozen, caught up in time. The saltwater king inhales, and reaches out with the great well of his magic -
holy places are dark places.
it is life and strength,
not knowledge and words,
that we get in them.
“Uncle Ashmarian!” The boy yells as he skips from rock to rock. Nimbly he leaps a crouching cat as if it were a rock (for what does a boy born in a time stuck still know of the living?) The world around him might watch his progress, bright as a phoenix, fast as a cheetah, if it could move. The boughs of willows hang unmoving. The grasses do not sway. The wind does not groan. The sounds of a boy running echo and echo. They sound like a god’s feet, fast and loud and clattering in a world made only to listen and now never do.
The boy pauses, crouched upon a rock. His head is slung low, a mane, raucous and wild tangles its way down his slender young neck. Its ends set the forest aglow with a dawn light that has not risen here for… days? Weeks? Months? The mid-day sun hangs, ever bright, ever still and darkness never comes. Leonidas is a boy who knows nothing of shadows and darkness. He knows sleep with the heat of daylight upon his back, he knows the burn of sun upon his sundrenched eyelids. He has the golden eyes of a hunter’s sun and he turns that gaze upon his sister, holding her, one moment, two, in the gold of their world.
Then he looks back to a king that stands before a waterfall’s silent roar. Water tumbles and tumbles and never falls an inch. Mist arches high and the boy lets his gilded gaze roam over the silver of it and wonders how it would feel upon his skin.
Suddenly he is leaping like a deer from his rock. Suddenly he is running swift as a rabbit that leaps from log to log and over brush and root and between great tall trees. He runs like a creature born into the woodland, like a boy too in tune with the strangeness of Time. He laughs and does not wonder how it echoes and echoes and echoes. He closes in upon his uncle and crashes into the still-pool mirror of water and through its great waterfall arm that ascends and ascends reaches and reaches. The waters groan and shift and fight. they move unnaturally, wrongly and fall still in his wake. But what is abnormal when you are born into it?
Leonidas is an arrow, aimed for his blood, for a man as dark as him, with stars upon his skin and eyes that whisper of water living and water flowing. “Ashmn-“ He stumbles, over tongue and tooth and tries again, “Ashmurian!” Out of breath and out of words the boy stops before his uncle and looks up with a grin of gums and too-few teeth.
Feminine laughter bubbles bright like flowers and melodic as peeling bells from behind Leonidas. It is bigger than the newborn boy of thin shoulders and wide, wide eyes. “Careful, brother, or he will show you-“ And it is too late, for already Leonidas is ripping a small wooden toy from the tangle of his mane and holding it proudly up to the still sunlight. “Papa got me this today. Ashmer has one too!” The boy declares, ignoring his dam's warning.
Already the carved cheetah is stalking her way up the Dusk King’s shoulder and across his side. The small boy growls like a tiger and knows nothing of the true sounds that cheetahs make. He does not lift his gaze to wonder what the wheeling birds, frozen in flight, might sound like.
@Asterion | "speaks" | notes: thank you for threading with him! Please bear with me whilst i work out how to write him and who he is!
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Laughter bubbles bright like flowers and melodic as peeling bells. It is bigger than the newborn boy of thin shoulders and wide, wide eyes. “Careful, brother, or he will show you-“ And it is too late, for already Leonidas is ripping a small wooden toy from the tangle of his mane and holding it proudly up to the still sunlight. “Papa got me this today. Ashmer has one too!”
Behind the boy Florentine arrives in gold, as at ease as her son, though her lavender eyes burn bright like a star. Her muzzle presses into the groove behind her brother’s jaw. She closes her eyes, inhales and remembers, remembers him. “You have hardly been home, Asterion.” The girl murmurs, as her eyes tip up to the skies and the falls and the trees, the pool, the whole island that stretches out, strange and wonderful and beautiful. “So we knew we would find you here… I have so much to tell you…” And she is smiling for not even a frozen world and the ire of gods can keep her joy at bay. Not now, not now. “Lysander and… Aster are coming too. You are an uncle to a nephew and a niece,” Her eyes lower to her son and how a cheetah still roams through galaxies and rich, rich earth. “Leo, what have I told you about using others as play mats? At least ask first.”
But the boy is not listening, not when he is mapping stars and imagining worlds. “We came to find you.” His mother murmurs to her brother. “So you can meet them, so Daddy can meet them…” Florentine pauses, holding her stuttering heart tight, swallowing it down, down. “We are going today, now. Come.” And now there is no smile upon her lips, but hope for a brother who will say yes again.
“Aster,” he says, to call the girl’s attention away from her brother, already racing through the grass, the path of an arrow now crooked, now true. “Daughter,” he says, (though she is already looking at him) because it is such a new and strange thing to say, more precious than ichor, sweeter than ambrosia on his tongue.
When she looks up at him, her gaze full of unmoving gold, Lysander can’t help but press a kiss to her forehead, unblemished white soft as fawn-skin. She permits it, though something in the curve of her neck tells him she would rather be away, coursing through the wood like her twin, and after a moment he straightens with a grin.
“This is for you,” he says, and without a word (she’s as quiet as a willow nymph, their little girl) her gaze drops from his own to the wood-carved cheetah he holds extended. Delicately she takes it, and he watches her examine the sloping shoulders, the curve of tail, each lovingly placed spot. “It’s just as quick as your brother’s,” he says, smiling still, and then tilts his head in the direction Leonidas and Florentine had vanished in. “Are you?”
At this her gaze lifts again to him, and Lysander thinks he sees the beginnings of a grin (oh, but slow and strange as the grin of a crescent moon) before she is gone, pale as a dove flashing through the green undergrowth.
After a moment (after a sigh that he cannot quite account for, though he should be used to worry by now, the feel of it like an iron-woven cloak across his shoulders) the once-god follows. There is nothing but silence, and far ahead the sounds of his family, until he begins, softly, to sing.
Asterion does not get the chance to see if his magic has any effect against the island’s. There is a voice, a shout, his name - and then there is a boy, bursting through the waterfall, scattering droplets like ice or glass or nothing more than light. The pool shivers in his wake and Asterion is stepping back, dark eyes wide, wondering who, who is this child of gold and earth-dark who knows his name and calls him uncle. Of course his heart already knows, but his head is slow to catch up, when it’s only been days (has it?) since he last saw his sister, and felt a baby kick.
And now, against all reason, here is the child, rushing up to him, and the king is smiling, too, and laughing, and joyful and wondrous - for what else is there to do? Doubt?
“That’s a very fearsome friend you have,” he says, as the carved cheetah treks across the dune of his shoulder and his ribs, its wooden paws ticklish against his skin. (Ashmer has one too - what could that mean?) The island is near forgotten when his eyes lift to find Florentine walking toward him, except for a whisper in his mind that says it is the answer, it and the wild magic that drives it. He leans into his sister when she tucks her nose beneath his jaw, though his eyes do not leave his nephew, and his heart is still wondrous of these strange miracles.
“I don’t even know how many days have passed here,” he says, and cannot think of more than a couple nights spent here, where all the crickets sang a different song than the mainland. But now they, too, are gone. “But I know I haven’t been gone long enough for this.” And he can’t help but laugh again, when she says she has so much to tell him; how much of an understatement that seems. “I can’t imagine a more perfect surprise.”
There is a patch of pale ivory amidst the deep green foliage, and then a flash of gold - another foal, stepping like a fawn from beneath the trees, her back like her brother’s dappled faintly in gold. Aster, he thinks, and as Florentine continues he is only half-listening, his heart too full of wonder for anything else. When Lysander emerges behind her Asterion’s gaze lifts and meets his, and the king hopes the nod he gives can convey what his words cannot. And then - today, now, come.
The star-marked bay looks at Florentine, now surrounded by her family. He feels the sun hot and full on his back, as it has been for hours, as it may be for days (or forever). Light shatters off the frozen waterfall and the still pool, and there are no birds or insects or animals to cease their hum as Asterion considers for one breath, two.
He was afraid to meet his father, afraid to leave Novus. But now, after everything, with his sister and her magic and her world-cutting dagger, and her family that has some of his own blood, too, he finds there is no room for fear. Only for wonder, and only for hope.
“I suppose now is as good a time as any,” he says, but something in him whispers that there may never be another time at all.
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What could be more perfect than this? The press of her brother’s skin against hers is firm and warm and wonderful. Even in this strange place - a volcano place - Florentine cannot help but smile when she stands amidst her family.
She turns as whitelight gleams and Aster appears, less a girl as a divine creature carved of a god’s marble. Her daughter is silver and white cut through with a gold that gleams brighter than any Florentine has ever known. Is this like your blood once was? She once whispered into Lysander’s ear as her lips traced the gold of her slumbering children. Not even a Time girl can dream of a gold more wonderful than theirs. Not even a Time girl can think of children more perfect than these.
Flora knows Lysander’s blood runs red now. Oh she knows how it feels warm and frighteningly fresh as it covers her throat like a scarf. A shudder slips through her torso and her heart trembles for the horror of her memory. This day might never have been, if she had not leant her dagger to other skills that day. She swallows down the thought, pushing it away as she steps instead toward Aster, pressing a kiss to the filly’s warm brow. Then she reaches for Lysander, though she remains beside her brother. Her lips press a fierce kiss to the corner of Lysander’s and she cannot help the smile that grows, for what space is there within her for anything but joy? It swells to fill every inch of space until Florentine feels fit to burst.
She draws away from the kiss and looks at the world still static about them. “I almost wish that this moment can be frozen forever too. That I might somehow remember it as perfect as it is now.” Yet there is more joy to come and anticipation is a lance through her veins. It is electricity that jolts life into her and pours a laugh from her lips as rich as spring earth.
Her breath escapes her in a whoosh, her smile fades yet her brows rise and the girl laughs shortly, sardonically. “Yes, it was all a bit… fast and definitely unexpected.” The gilded girl pauses as she lets her gaze watch her children and their twin cheetah toys. “She is named after you, you know?” Florentine breathes, suddenly more serious, suddenly anxious of what her brother might think. “Aster and Leonidas.” She says their names, for Asterion, for her, for the wonder of twins.
At last she sighs, at last she pulls herself from her brother’s embrace and moves past Lysander. Her shoulder brushes his, her side, her flank, her hip. Her heart skips, playful desire slips like gasoline through her veins and her tail flicks at his chest as she lays a nip upon his haunch. Her smile is wicked and her giggle a thing of gods and nymphs.
“I think it’s time we go.” She sighs and cannot help how her heart leaps, how suddenly wonderful everything feels, how suddenly terrifying. She left her father a child and yet returns with children of her own. Guilt bubbles for all the times she has not left to find him, all the times she said no to Lysander. Urgency, desperation to make it right now, slips whitehot through her body and her breath is wild in her lungs.
Florentine looks back to her family: her boys, her girl and she smiles as she turns back and lifts her silver dagger. It warms, oh how it warms and wakens and fills with magic! It leaps to cut, to split worlds before its cleaving edge. She presses and worlds cave. Reality bows and Time whispers and tears. She inhales and it is not Novus she breathes, but the Riftlands, its air metallic and magic laden. It is ancient and feral and it calls them home.
It feels like something from a fairy-tale, to watch his sister’s family around him while everything else stands frozen, bespelled and slumbering. What story, he wonders, are they turning the page to? Asterion promises himself that he will do anything to make it a good world for them. That their beginning and their far-away ending, too, will be a good one, a kind of story to keep telling.
Oh, and he must remember to live it, too - so he reminds himself, as his sister breathes warm against his neck, and she speaks of her children. Suddenly there is silver limning his gaze, suddenly his eyes are stinging with tears that he hides against Flora’s mane. But Lysander is beside them, then, and the twins are playing, and all he says is “I can’t imagine more of an honor. A lucky thing for her you’ve shortened it, though.” And he is smiling, and his heart feels as full as billowing sails, as he watches his sister greet her lover and raise her dagger up, where its edge catches the light of the stalled sun and splinters the world silver.
He has never seen her use her magic. At first there is nothing, nothing but the racing of his own heart, beating hard against his ribs, tight with nerves and excitement. It is easier to focus his attention on the sharp tip of her knife and not on the feelings that churn like a Charybdis within him, hope and excitement and the worry that Flora says is his birthright from his father.
Oh, and when that first wind blows through, stirring the leaves and air of this world with the scent of wild places untouched by such civilized hands as had made a home of Novus, Asterion can’t keep himself from stepping forward. Closer, closer, until he can see the world begin to take shape, until he can hear the hum of magic (of worlds whispering closer, crowding at the door Florentine opens). Light from some other sun comes spilling through, painting gold and crimson on the noon ground of the island. There are birds calling, in that other world, and wider and wider his sister opens the door, and louder and louder grows his heart in his ears. The king can feel his pulse leaping in his throat as the knife pulls, gently, gently, tugging wider the window. A leaf drifts through, borne on that foreign breeze, and it is golden with autumn. When it trembles on the ground before them it looks like a piece of gold shed from the twins.
The opening grows large enough to welcome them, but now Asterion is hungry for more - how many worlds, he wonders, how many pathways of stars could she open windows too? How many skies, how many creatures, how many distant wonders of time and space could they travel? And still Novus is frozen around them, without even a cloud to drift on the breeze. But when the king shivers, as his sister at last steps back and their eyes meet, he does not take it for worry. He does not think how strange, or even wait.
He only glances back, once, at the island with its waiting trees and its glass-still water and its motionless sky, and thinks of all the others it holds, the ones his heart holds too. And then he touches his muzzle to Florentine’s cheek, and inhales long and sweetly of the island air and the air of the other world (the Riftlands, his father’s lands) and steps into that doorway with sunset-light bleeding through, his shadow long behind him.
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Her smile is impish, even as her brother presses his face into the curve of her throat to hide his gratitude and his tears. Florentine continues to press the dagger into the air and call the Riftlands to her. She feels them both, Novus and the Riftlands coming together like planets. She feels their resistance, the press of two magics repelling, like oil and water, like two like magnets. Yet resistance is nothing new. Worlds resist her magic, but never have they been able to deny her.
And so, Florentine continues to press and pull and soon existence is peeling open before them like a curtain. Light spills in from her birthland and it smells as wicked wild as she remembers. Oh she swallows salvation down, she laughs as she feels this ancient magic spill over her angry and wicked as ever.
What delights and horrors does it hide beyond this window of hers?
The edges of her rift window are fresh and sharp as a cut. They glow white with matter, blazing hot like nothing she has ever known before. Her magic peels away in sparks and the worlds repel each other. Time blends through the open window, like heat meeting cold air. Everything mists. One world moves slowly, the other fast and friction growls in their ears. They rub, rub, rub.
Asterion stands with awe in his eyes and Flora smiles. He steps up and her stomach leaps, it is a bird taking flight as he steps eagerly through her window and is gone. Hurry, hurry, her excitement sings through her soul. She is too keen to be in the Rift again, to gather her whole family together at last, one place, one time.
But the magics are begging her to knit them back together, as if such strange worlds should never have met and long to be apart once again. Their corners begin to fray, resisting, and then their edges meet and press and twine and suddenly the window is sewing itself shut. Florentine presses her dagger to it, cuts them open in each place they mend and the window trembles, wildly, angrily. She frowns and her dagger is singing, with rage, with worry, with effort.
The Time girl turns to Lysander and whispers softly, “Go, quickly, the magics are… wrong.” And she is frowning, cutting again and again but as fast as she reopens the wounds the window is healing itself. This is not how her magic has ever been – worlds have yielded to her as sweetly as butter beneath her dagger. Their resistance is as futile as the skin of a fruit; each cut as easy as a sigh. Asterion is gone, he stepped through and he is alone in the strangeness of Rift. Her stomach twists and she looks to Lysander, the other half of her, the only one who knows Rift as well as she. Florentine leans and presses her lips to his, “I will send the twins after you and then follow them.”
Lysander goes, into the feral world of the Rift. Florentine wonders what monsters lurk where they have gone – or if they might step into paradise. Yet her brother is powerful and Lysander knowledgeable of the mysterious ways of the Rift worlds. They will be safe until she joins them. They will protect the twins in the moment it takes her to join them.
Yet Florentine’s concern for what lingers beyond, is short lived for the window fights ever harder with each horse she allows to slip through her window. The portal convulses like a heart, throbbing, sparking like live wires. The Riftlands blink before her, there for a moment and then gone, ghostly. They shimmer-shudder and grow steady at last.
“Aster, Leo, come. Go now, quickly.” Florentine breathes and if she knew what was to come she might never have let them step up to the window and then through. The window swallows them, they disappear from their mother’s sight, but oh the edges of the window are knitting ever faster and though she presses her dagger to them, they have become hard as iron. They close and close and close and there is nothing The Dusk girl can do to stop them. The magic in her veins is keening and writhing. Her nerves blaze as if lit. Her every fibre aches with the wrongness of this moment. She is raw and red within for her every effort to keep her magic dominant and her head is sharp with the ache of her body. Her magic convulses and pulling her dagger from the edge of the window she leaps through as the cuts bind themselves together fast as a blink. Her window, once large grows smaller, smaller, smaller.
---------------
Leo stands, confused. Beyond him the island stretches out as far as his eyes can see – just as it was before he and Aster stepped through the portal. He turns to the window he just stepped into – no, through. Aster turns with him and they see the window fizzling shut. The edges of the world their mother cut open are binding together until at last they are the finest line and then a mere dot and then…
The tip of a dagger thrusts desperately back through that final mere dot of light, opening it wider and the world of the Riftlands gleams brighter than white light. Sparks blaze as if the blade is upon a whetstone as if it is grinding down, down, down. And maybe it is, for suddenly there is a blade’s screaming crack and the tip of the dagger snaps, splitting into two. The final fissure of the window snaps shut like teeth. There is no light to be seen where there once was. There is nothing to disturb the air before them.
The window is gone….
Their family is… gone.
Leo steps to where his mother was – back through the window she had ushered him through but nothing moves. It does not press against him as it had. It no longer whispers in his ear that he is not wanted in that Rift world his mother tried to take him and Aster to. It does not say that they were made of this world and that Novus alone is where they belonged… It says nothing. There is no window anymore but oh he feels the writhing of the Island’s magic as it reels in the wake of the Time Travelling Girl: A girl who stands with her lover and brother and weeps over her lost children and her broken dagger.
At Leonidas’ feet, where he dropped his little cheetah toy, lies a true cheetah cub. It moves like no other creature he has seen. Beside it another cub stands and yawns and stretches. Each of their features is so much like the toys he and Aster had and yet, their toys are nowhere to be found. “Circe?” The boy croaks, his voice meek with shock. The tiny cub peers up at him, pausing from where it reaches curiously for a thin shard of silver - one of the remnants of his mother’s dagger. The other piece lies a little way from it. Leo lifts them, his breath slipping past his lips in a whoosh as he passes one to his sister.
He turns with wide, wide gold eyes to survey the clearing around them, where the waterfall still hangs still and silent. Everything was so silent. Never had the boy felt so small, so alone. “Mama?” He calls and waits. “Papa?” He shouts a little louder and does not wait so long. “Uncle Ashmerion!” He shouts so loud his voice shatters at the last. Yet still nothing stirs, though the whole island echoes with the sound of a boy’s cries. All the island watches, immortal, frozen, wrong.
Leo steps into Aster. He presses his face tight to her throat, nosing his way beneath the fall of her mane. The boy breathes in his twin’s smell, all the parts of her that smell of their parents and Uncle. He trembles and feels the press of her heartbeat against his, both as wild as birds. Both wild in their twin frenzy of loss.
** <3 Just to clarify, Asterion, Lysander and Florentine have now left Novus <3 **
florentine rocking your pretty flower world
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
09-03-2019, 01:56 PM - This post was last modified: 09-03-2019, 01:59 PM by Florentine
And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun.
—
Oh, she is eager to watch that supple blade cut the air and find a world where there is nothing.
Aster remains silent, watchful, a little slip of moonbeam against her father’s dappled shoulder. Her eyes drink in the sight of her uncle and his coat of stardust, her mother and her shining gold. And that little sliver of trembling air that opens to a sky that is not their sky, a world that is their world (as all worlds are, as Florentine has told her).
There is no sound of birds or insects, so sigh of sea or breath of wind, to disrupt the sounds of their family. And then the breeze of that other world rises, and tangles through her curls, and there are birds crying there (she has never before heard birds, Time has stolen the voices of the island) and how badly she wants to step through then! She curls her little carved cheetah more tightly against her breast until it is as warm as her skin; she watches her uncle the king step through, touches her muzzle to her father’s side as he follows. Aster remains as still as a hidden fawn as Lysander kisses Florentine and is gone through the doorway her mother has made.
And now that doorway shivers! The filly shivers too, her blood as alive as sparks, no fear but excitement. After a world of full-stillness, at last things are happening, and she is too young to see the worry and fear on her mother’s face. She presses her lips against her mother’s neck as she goes through that shrinking door -
and out the other side. There is Leonidas, and there is the waterfall (still frozen, bound tight by Time) and there is the grass and the forest and the glaring sun and the blue blue sky.
And nothing else.
Aster whirls now, her small ears pinning, just in time to see the cut sparking like a god weeping ichor and flame. When the dagger snaps she thinks it is the loudest thing she has ever heard, and she presses her side into her twin’s, still staring, until movement and sound draws her golden-eyed gaze down to their feet.
There, much like the foals that stand above them, are two cheetah cubs, the hair of their backs long and silver, freckled with spots the way the twins are with golden dapples. How strange, she thinks, and lowers her nose to the boy-cat, who stares back at her with dark eyes. When she whuffs at it gently it bats a paw at her nose and she withdraws with a snort, half-wary, half-delighted at this newest mystery.
But the motion of her brother draws her attention to him, and silently she receives the shard of dagger, examining it closely. It smells hot, like the magic of the island, strange and unnatural. She is examining it still, the cub mewling at her feet, until her twin begins to call out.
“Hush,” she says then, when his cries fail to rouse even a bird from the trees. Aster thinks that if there is anything left to hear them, it maybe ought not find them. When he tucks himself against her (the way they tuck against Mother, against Father) she runs her muzzle over his shoulder just as Florentine had soothed her days before. “Hush, Leonidas,” she says again, remembering what their mother had said. Wherever your brother is is home.
“Our blood is made to travel Time,” she echoes, though Aster does not know what the words mean. Yet she holds the piece of dagger tighter still, tight enough to cut and taste her own blood (if it were not magic holding it). “They are not lost. And we…” her gaze falls then to the cheetahs, clinging to one another the same way they did, familiar and strange. The only living things for miles. “We are not alone.”
There is nothing as the boy calls out. Nothing stirs, even the smallest inch. The island is as silent as it has ever been and it is not even that the boy expects anything to stir for this is their world – a place of stillness. He cannot imagine it any other way. But he does look for the gold of his mother, the evergreen of his father, for the stars of his uncle… but there is nothing in the loveliness of this island. There is nothing but daylight and shadow-light mysteries that go on and on as far as his gilded eyes can see.
Hush. Aster tells him, her voice more grown, more still than he has ever heard it. The boy rushes to her and presses his lips into the groove of her shoulder, their touch the only thing that will stop him crying out again. He does not trust himself, the words are there, they carry desperation with them and they beg to be cried out into the silence, no matter how in vain it might be.
He takes a breath, long and deep and all of it tastes of Aster and time and magic. He drinks in that taste again and again until he feels it unwinding the binds of him like fingers working upon knotted thread. He unspools and listens to his sister. Hush, Leonidas she tells him again and he releases a shuddering breath, his name is a balm upon her lips soothing the wounds of his parents’ sudden departure.
Our blood is made to travel Time. He listens but does not comprehend. He does not think for a moment that his twin does not either – so assured are her words. She is his keeper of mysteries, she is the one who asked their mother so many questions whilst he strove to fight and play and run. She already knows so much more than he and so, is it any wonder that he heeds her words and never seeks to doubt her.
They are not lost and we… we are not alone. A cub at his feet, his cub, presses and rubs its cheek against his knee. It mewls small into the air and reaches up his limb with its forefeet to bat at the golden ends of his tangled mane. It reaches and reaches and tumbles backward into the grass, its balance lost as it strove too much, too soon. Slowly the boy draws his face from his sister and looks down at the twin cubs.
Though he looks at the cubs, they are no consolation for the absence of his parents. "Will they come back?” The boy asks his sister, hopeful that she might know, that her quiet calm is because she knew of a plan or at least of a solution. "Is it just us now?” His voice is tremulous, small and fearful of her answer. He looks down to the cubs - just us now.
His breath is tight, but he drags the air in deep and steels his body. "Mama once has a tiger to protect her didn’t she?” Leonidas muses softly as he strokes each cat. “Maybe that is why Papa gave them to us? Did they know they were going to leave us, Aster?”
He asks and already knows that any answer she gives him will hurt, so very much.
