There are a million stories she can read in those fine almost-gray lines between the stars. She can see arcane words weaving tapestries of light above her head. Each curl of almost-light between the black, each flicker of a star that is different than its sister beside it, each comet swooping low to brush a kiss against her feathers--
Each bit of this place is bellowing at her by way of glitz and coldness, fire and stone, heartbeat echoes on glass and the whisper, whisper, whisper of the black as she walks through it with her wings spread wide.
She is touching as much of this world as she can, breathing in the void and the creation. And it's still not enough.
It's not enough to summon her home, to loosen the curse around her delicate throat, or drain all the molten star-blood from this mortal cage of flesh and bone. It's not enough to silence the visceral hum of a dream or cool the fire of a star-war song from the back of her lips. It's not enough to summon down the comets, or the moons, or the orbital rings to drape themselves upon her brow like a hundred different crowns woven into chain.
Warset's steps keep up their heartbeat drum and her wings keep up their frantic fluttering begging for flight. For miles she walks on through this cosmic cage. She walks until she forgets about the fog caging them all in and the sea roaring for their bones beyond that. She forgets about the golden boy and his wild hunt, and a crow with golden wings and a feral, toothed smile. She forgets about everything but that humming vibrating though her bones like a tuning fork against a diamond.
She forgets about everything but the way that this skin is not the right one to walk among the cosmic realm.
Ahead a sword drawn out in that almost-light between the points of flickering stars lowers towards her (drawn perhaps by the sorrow of her form or the humming of her soul). Warset quickens her pace to the constellation. She starts to run.
And when she finally makes it to that almost-light, almost-sword, almost-memory, she lays her cheek against a molten star and starts to cry.
Beyond the stars, beyond the fog, there lies a boy – lost… long lost. He was called a wanderer, but that was a lifetime ago. There would be those who had forgotten the child, vanished in time. Still, Pan had been lost before.
In a way, he had been lost from the beginning – destined to find his way only for it to slip through his fingers. There was a certain poetic aspect to his being, for the lost boy never seemed to stay in one place for long. Wanderlust had been his longest friend, and his heavy chain of burden at the same time. It had brought him to wonderous places, introduced him to a circus of characters. Still too, it brought him loneliness, for curiosity drove him onward, spurred by the promise of adventure even as those he loved faded away one by one, like dying stars in the sunrise.
In the darkness, he found the luring unknown. He had embraced the island of change, and it had swallowed him whole. For countless nights, he had wandered through the void, unsure of where he was, losing track of time as days faded to weeks. Weeks to months. The only solace for the child was the quivering otter at his side, safely tucked away in a sun-faded satchel which chattered against his neck as he moved.
His feet were sometimes weary, his mind sometimes played tricks on him… but Pan pressed onward into the unfamiliar, gathering little bits of stardust and treasures as he went. Some days, he hummed as he traveled. Some days, he cried from the loneliness. But through it all, the scaled child was hopeful for what lie beyond.
He steps through the mist, into the starfield once more. It is a place he knows well now – a place where he had called home for whatever time had passed. As he pads silently through the maze of stardust, there is a chill that spreads across him – an omen which suggests the winds of change had come again. His seafoam eyes are wide and bright as they scan the fire-flecked darkness. As they find the girl.
In the darkness, she is the only thing he has seen for months – and the boy cannot help but stare. She weeps, but instead of comfort, all he can offer is a curious approach. Hello? he finally whispers, his voice rusty from disuse and uncharacteristically shy as he sways a few paces away, watching the star girl in the night.
Before, she was a wide-eyed child with great enthusiasm for the world, but little understanding of it. Before, she was forced to learn on her own, a difficult task growing up both motherless and fatherless. She discovered loyalty and loss, anger and angst. She found passion and purpose; she found love and lost it, let it destroy her. Where was she now? What did these changes mean? It left Elena with a headache that made her vision blurry.
It was everything that had happened to her in the past year; it was the way she had been consumed by what she had thought was love. But was love this painful? Did love take everything from you and then give nothing in return? Was love this demanding, this selfish, this excruciating?
She had no barometer.
She had watched her parents in love, but she had been too young to understand it, to know the weight. She knew they looked at each other and took kisses from each other’s lips. Elena had known love from her parents, but had understood it in little else. Until she had met Lilli, and Lilli had offered her that unconditional love, forgiving and forgetting, promising her cousin the world even if she had little else in return to offer.
And right now she didn't know where Lilli was, and it killed her.
She searches for reminders of her, and Elena heads to the place where flowers bloom and the fog settles just so to make you believe you are in a place made entirely of imagination and fantasy. But when she moves through the fog, Elena finds that she is not alone in her mourning for another life, another time.
This could be meaningless, this meeting of strangers in the fog and the stars. Except no moment is truly meaningless. They are all important and individual, formative in some way, and this one will be no different for either one of them. Another piece of an important past, someday. She knows this, Elena knows this, and that is why she goes to the girl who weeps and the boy who whispers.
“Does it hurt?” Elena asks her, a strange question. What hurts? Her body, her soul, her heart. Elena has felt them all and she recognizes the pain in another’s tears and the little girl inside her that comforted her cousin in a field of dead flowers wants nothing more than to take it away. Her smile is hesitant but kind as she moves to her side, next to the boy with emeralds shining in his eyes.
She cannot help in this moment to find the mare beautiful and Elena feels the pinch of guilt dig in her stomach. She is beautiful in her sorrow, in her agony, and Elena admires her for it. "My name is Elena,” she finally offers, her voice made of fog. It is a lilting voice that is distinctly feminine but not overly so. Easy, pleasant, calming. It is the kind of voice you want to hear in the midst of chaos. It is the kind of voice you want to hear when the storm simmers into action. But not the kind of voice to whisper soft nothings. “Do you want to be alone?” She asks the crying girl.
‘Please say no,’ that selfish part of her begs. Elena is a slave to the companionship of others and she would gladly soak her shoulder in tears if she just didn't have to take the lonely road back home with only the darkness to keep her company.
* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.
Starlight and stardust start to pool in the cracks of her cheeks like blood, like her sorrow has torn asunder the heart of a the constellation. Her own heart is hungry for the silver blood and her teeth feel like hollow black holes beneath her lips. The glass beneath their feet grows slick with the light leaking down heavy as a hurricane rain. It laps at her hooves like a tide straining, and straining, and straining, towards a thing made of moonstone.
Warset, in her sorrow, hardly notices. All she can taste is the bitter sweetness of the light dripping cold and thick down her face. Her cheeks are still flush with light when she turns towards the boy and the girl, their own eyes blazing colorful in this world of black, and light, and glass.
She wonders what it's like to have parts almost too vibrant to look at, parts stained with color instead of with cosmos. Her wings rustle at her sides, each feather catching the light, and dust, and the roaring echoes of their three hearts in the still space. A searing pain dances though her insides.
On the other side of this realm, beyond the thick fog, the sun is starting to touch lightly the horizon. The wildcat in her bones purrs for the heavy blood-like thickness of the light. Hunger is a ravenous thing gnawing at her trembling organs.
Warset pulls her cheek from the molten star. Blackness rushes back into her cheeks, and wings, and the spaces between the diamonds peeking out from the tangles of her mane. In the blackness she trembles. “Stay.” She says the word with all the fiery brevity of a star crashing through the atmosphere. Across the silence, and the glass, and the reaching blackness, her voices echoes on and on. Like a single note of a song it echoes onward.
Her hooves sound like music as she steps closer to the boy with emerald eyes. Once she had greeted stars this way, with blackness and bits of light hanging from them like feathers and crowns. And when she offers him her nose it's with the quickness of the moon peeking out from a storm-cloud-- there and gone. “I am Warset.” The sword constellation glimmers in the corner of her eyes as she watches them with both longing and a dark undercurrent of predatory focus. Her body burrows into this mortality and the ruby moon at her throat starts to swing.
The last moon-bright tear blinks from her eyes and falls to the black glass floor. The sound it makes sets her heart to trembling as finely as her bones. It feels like each inch of this form is being made and unmade. The spots of white on her skin shimmer like holes chewed out of the night sky. The memory of it makes her ache enough that the rush of it clings to her voice. “Where is the end of this world?” Her wings drag across the glass, wiping away the last trace of that light-fat tear. And the look she gives them both quickly becomes something more, something darker, than sorrow.
She looks like the stars – so much like them that it is hard to know where the world ends and the mare begins. If Pan wouldn’t have seen such things before, he wouldn’t have thought her something real at all… but in his many years (for Pan had many years, despite his childlike wonder and appearance), Pan had seen all manners of creatures. He had walked with gods, swam to the depths of the sea with dolphins, and in some worlds, he’d even flown without wings. Here though, he had found a strange sort of world – a world with no door, with no way out. Here, he’d been trapped and lost to time, for… who knew really? It had been months.
I’m Pan! he quickly adds as the golden mare and the shed-star share their names. And this is Oliver. he gestures to a furry brown otter, now nestled between his ears, peeking out from under his mane as he rests along the crest of Pan’s neck. He offers a gentle smile to Warset, as if to tell her that all was okay. Still too, the boy is pleased to have found company in the dark void of the star field. When he’d come to the island, it was something different in its entirety… but the magic must have shifted, and trapped him in the process.
She asks the question that he too wishes to know – was there a way out of this island? For months, he’d been looking… but he hadn’t found one. He hadn’t found anything really – just one shade of magic to another. It was a wonder then, that he’d even found one creature in the void, nevermind two. If they were able to enter this place, surely there way a way out. Where did you come from? Surely you could come back the way you came?
Don’t cry… he adds, It’ll be okay… we’ll find a way out, together. He shifts slightly, sending a well-worn brown satchel sliding across his shoulder. Rummaging through it, he pulls out a golden eagle feather, one he’d collected a lifetime ago during his travels. Offering it to Warset, he gives a second smile, this one more encouraging than the first. Here – Someone told me once that birds are the messengers of the gods – that when you find a feather, it is a gift from a spirit. He liked the sound of it, for it offered something more romantic than a simple coincidence. Maybe the gods will guide us home…
Which gods, it didn’t matter… Pan believed in them all. He had regularly worshipped each of them at Verenor Peak, just as he had in the Rift, and at Ravos. The boy had to believe that they would come to rescue their followers. Without the faith, he would have lost hope long ago. There had to be a reason that he’d been stuck in this place for so long. Maybe, it was to find Warset and Elena, and to help guide them home once more.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
Elena had listened to the story Orani had told to her son, Jacob. A story about why his godfather was not there to tuck him in at night beside his cerulean freckled mother.
That Jay, her cousin of bronze with obsidian locks adorned with a feather, had grown wings of stardust and starlight and flown to the cosmos above them to save the moon. That he sat in the sky now, battling for the moon and bringing it back into the sky, before the bandits would once more steal it away. And thus, the lunary cycle was born.
In that story, Jay is a hero.
Instead of just another one who left them all behind.
Blue eyes find her own when she turns and Elena is once more startled by her beauty. In the same breath that the star wonders, so does Elena. She had always admired Orani and Jay for their relationship with the heavens above them, Elena had been so unable to comprehend them and their beauty. She wonders too about this mare, to be made of stars, what bliss it must be. But then why does fall down her face like the milky way?
She turns back to the fog. This world was strange. It reminds her of Beqanna, of Taiga and its heavy fog. The magic of it sends a child down her spine in a shudder. Elena turns to the boy beside her. Magic. So much magic. Elena both searches for it and wishes for it to be lost to the world forever.
Stay.
And so she does.
“Okay.”
She watches her two companions touch and lets those tiny cupped ears flutter forwards to catch her name. Blue eyes quickly turn to the emerald eyed companion with something akin to amusement within them. “Hello, Pan—and you too Oliver,” she says. She wants to laugh, as she eyes the otter from behind his ears, but it feels wrong here, like she may just shatter the illusion and will wake up back in Hyaline, the dutiful politician that feel in love with the wrong boy.
That final tear falls and Elena winces, just once before her face falls into a solemn frown with the next words the mare speaks. “I’m not sure,” she voices with concern, Elena forever the girl unable to hide her emotions. “I only just got here and—I lost the way I came in,” she says and realizes, perhaps, this may have been her first mistake. She had been so concerned for the girl of stars that her own safety had been disregarded once more. She turns to Pan then, listening with heartfelt silence before nodding in agreement. “I think it would be worth a chance, Pan,” she says, so quick to easily believe in another. “Warset,” she directs her next comment to the mare, tries so desperately to keep the tremble of compassion from her voice. “If we go with you, can you make it?”
Can any of them?
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,
and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident,”
Holiness returns to her as fast as it had left beneath the weight of her mourning. They step closer, flesh and bone to stardust, and something tightens around her heart like a comet's tail. Her blood starts to sing a song that sounds like remember, remember, remember and each star-pit trembles in a cage of light for the fury of her moonshine blood. The beat of her heart feels bruised as the boy offers her a golden feather.
She does not take it, not with the holiness rising as the mourning sinks down into the black spaces of her form.
Warset tries to form her lips into the shape of a smile, of something mortal with teeth made for foliage instead of universes. At her sides feathers starts to whisper a hush, hush, hush to the trembling star-pits begging to fall around them. The silver of her gaze shines, and pulses, and turns hot with the wreckage of her sorrow. And she does not turn that look to them in the same way she turned her smile. Her eyes race across the constellations, and the blackness caught between them like oil between sea and stone.
How sweet it would be to take to the blackness, and anoint her wings in blackness and moon-silver, while they look up like rabbits at a hawk. She blinks with the thought of it, and her sides inhale once in a sigh that has nothing to do with sorrow and everything to do with a longing to pull this world apart star by star.
And she wonders what would fall to the earth if she chewed out pieces of this ink black sky. She wonders what would shed off from her teeth and her lips like teardrops.
“I am done with my sorrow.” Her voice rings like a bell when she tosses away the last of the light catching on the planes of her face. Darkness pours in as she takes a step between them, lifting her eyes towards the places where the space is the darkness. The whisper of her wings turns to storm-moan and sea-crash. Night is falling outside this place and each moon starts to lift, and lift, and lift like a cloud upon a mountain. Her soul is roaring when she turns back to them and says, “of course I can make it.”. The last of the mourning falls from her form.
The wildcat waiting beneath wants to devour the pity from the lines of their faces.
The star wants to shake lose the cells of this form.
And the girl, oh the girl, only wants to lift her head up to the sun and feel the heat race down her sides like rain.
But it's the star and the wildcat that turn back to the golden mare and the sea-child with silver fire dancing in her eyes. It's the star that smiles with teeth and sings, “come, together we will find the end.”, like it has never forgotten how to be holy.
Something washes over the mare – a sort of darkness that gives the boy pause, even as she turns from his offering. Trying hard not to be offended, Pan quickly tucks his prized feather away, concern edging at his seafoam eyes even as hers seem to clear and set with determination. In that moment, the immortal child has to wonder what she was thinking about, but as quickly as she’d drifted away in her own thoughts, she’d come about once more and seemed to perk up and shake away her grief. Strange, Pan mused to himself, but he wouldn’t dwell on it for long.
I am done with my sorrow.
And that was that. With the matter of fact phrase, Warset did, indeed, look done with her sorrow. Now, she took an appearance of one who seeked. It was a look that the adventurer colt knew well, and he returns the mare’s grit with a hopeful sort of smile.
She knows the way, and Pan doesn’t even hesitate as he steps to follow her. In a way, this trusting persona was his greatest potential for downfall. Time and time again, the boy had been led astray by his hopelessly naïve nature, and yet the trust never seemed to waiver. It is simply Pan’s way to believe the best in others, even in strangers.
He babbles with mindless questions to fill the void of silence and Warset’s assurances. How did you get here? I feel like I’ve been in here forever, but when I came it was different… there was fire, and then this place just seemed to appear out of the sea… strange magic, truly.
Despite his circumstances, the boy could not resist the pull of adventure that had brought him here. He’d been lost – perhaps more lost than ever before – desperate for change. The Dawn Court, which had always been a home-like place, had closed its borders following a series of gruesome murders. Then, Pan had nowhere to go.
He’d run to Denocte, to Terrestella, but nowhere had given him peace. Instead, the scaled child had decided to slip away in the night, seemingly unnoticed, making his way to the island where he’d been trapped for many moons now. But it was time – time to go back, to reunite with old friends, to make new ones.
Hope shone bright in his eyes as he fell into an easy pace beside his companions, grateful for the company, even as a small part of him which had grown to love this place of wild magic protested at his leaving.
take this burden away from me and bury it before it buries me
She doesn't remember much from the time period where her father had been murdered and she had wandered into Beyond where Marcelo had found her. But she imagines it sort of felt like wandering through this starry land. Eternal, dark, never ending. It had ended though, standing knee deep in the snow, shivering as amber eyes looked up to find the earthen ones of Marcelo staring down at her. In the end, it had felt like almost no time at all between her father yelling for her to run and Marcelo lowering his head to draw her in. “I saw you in a vision, I knew you would be here, the future seer had said. “You are safe now, cousin.”
Elena watches as Warset turns away from Pan’s offering. Her heart breaks a little for the boy, but she knows what it is like. She remembers little girl with red hair handing her a flower and Elena letting it fall to the ground, refusing to reach back out to her. Elena has been both the victim and the bully, even when she has not intended it to be so.
She is beautiful, she is so beautiful. Elena tries not find admiration for the mare as she stands there with agony staining her shoulders, but the stars have always been such a mysterious thing for Elena and so this mare follows to be as well. ‘Stars are kind things,’ Orani had told her one night in Paraiso. ‘Most of the time anyway, but they are always such unpredictable entities.’ I is these words that move Elena closer to Pan and to eye the mare wearily. Grief makes you do silly things, makes you think things you would never have thought before. Grief has no pattern, it has no promises.
And it is only when Pan smiles that Elena does the same. She looks to Warset then and Elena cannot help but breathe in the magic she posses. She bows her head slightly to peer up at her with silver blue eyes. “I don’t doubt it,” she responds, sweeping those eyes underneath her long, dark lashes. “If anyone could another through a field of stars, it is a star herself,” she says boldly. For if she were not a star, well, Elena does not know what she could call her. Had she not seen the same shimmer, the same shine upon Azrael? And Elena would never consider him anything other than her North Star. He could point in any direction and she would never falter, she would always follow.
She stands close to Pan, looking to Warset as their leader, there is something heavy in her chest that tells her this will not be simple. Nothing is ever simple. This shouldn't surprise her. Rather it should be more surprising that she is shocked that getting out may be more difficult than she initially thought as she stands there and scans out to the stars around them. “Even a circle has an end, if you can push through the edges,” she says before coming to stand beside Warset. She is humbled in her presence. “Lead us to it—please.”
so take away this apathy bury it before it buries me
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,
and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident,”
Ah, but the stars have always been as bloated with light as they are arrogance.
Even in this mortal form, with her wings large enough to paint silver-dust trails across the black-glass floor and her ears curved like two olive branches of a crown above her head, she drips arrogance as much as she drips light. It's bold now that it's risen like a tide above the sorrow. And it's a flash of dark-ore in her eyes as she looks up the stars dancing, and singing, and flickering a song above their three heads like sparrows above a church coopla.
Her blood wants to sing back as much as it wants to loop a noose of iron around each star hanging in the blackness. And it wants to roar and bellow until the world is as fallen as she is. Later she'll tell herself that it's the softness in the boy, the innocence that has never seen a battle-field drowned in light and shred planets, that silences the furious song banging against the backs of her teeth.
Later she'll look a the island and never let her hooves touch the lava-rock of the bridge as she flees from this cage of memories. Later she'll feel like her wings are spent.
“This place called to me.” She says with the imprint of the sword constellation flashing like a far-off storm at the back of her eyes. And she looks like a wolf-star when she turns her face up, up, up to the moon arching above them and the stalls starting to fall like waterfall currents as whatever magic lives in this place starts to die. Warset does not question it, nor does she stop walking and listening to the echoes of their hooves on the glass like it's her own heartbeat encouraging her to go on, go on, go on.
She does not look at Elena as she guesses the horror of the knowledge waiting just below her skin. The constellation flashes again like lighting when she presses her eyes shut in another rush of her almost-forgotten sorrow. Her secrets are the only thing she knows how to hold onto now.
It's the secrets of the stars that lead them onward through the silence thriving between the hard tap, tap, tap of their hooves. And it's the secrets that she follows on, and on, and on until the blackness starts to become flush with the soft golden-glow of the dawn through the fog barrier.
Her body trembles with the magic of that fog. Each ounce of her star-blood races with fear as it presses in at them like the tentacles of a great sea monster. Instinct has her wings sapping out, her lips pulling back in a snarl, and her tail lashing at her hocks like a whip. Her soul roars to fight, and run, and destroy all at once. This feels like being caught in a rip-tide of falling all over again.
It feels like being cursed.
She turns back to Elena and Pan with her teeth still bared with every wild instinct screaming in her body. “The sun is on the other side.” Perhaps something not bloated with arrogance and light would have draped her wings across their backs in comfort as the fog stars to rise above their ankles like the sea.
But Warset can feel the light in her blood dying against the violently broken magic and so she does not wait for them before plunging into the fog like a roaring bullet. And she does not look to see if they made it before her wings carry her as far from the memory of her sorrowful tears as possible.
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