She remembers this world, and does not all at the same time. Her coming here had been fleeting, but the call of home had pulled at her heart and so she had followed it. It was a moment she regretted, wishing she’d not chosen to go and fail at what her father had been so strong at. With the knowledge she was no longer bound to the world she’d been born, able to finally sever the ties and let the world there continue on, she’d left with Karsi always at her flank.
Despite the feeling of being unable to live up to the expectation she’d had for herself, she’d found Avitus there, and she adored him. She hoped to see him again, and tell him exactly what she felt.
She smiled to herself as she thought of him.
“Your thoughts are escaping, little one,” rumbled Karsi’s voice.
Ciaran just smiled at him.
They both had passed through the wall of thick fog and cloud, both feeling a strange burning and pain that clawed at their hide but it had passed and beyond the fog lay a world that was so different and open to her. With wide eyes, the feathered lass stopped.
The ground was dark and starlit, the sky overhead twisting in a vast array of colour and light, and here and there the ground gave way to the same dancing light. The horizon slipped into another cloud of nebulae, and Ciaran was mesmerised.
And Karsi at her flank, despite being reserved, found himself feeling overwhelmed. He stood and looked up, watching the dancing light of the stars, and beyond them a comet raced. Ciaran watched it, and took a step. The sound changed, and echoed all around her in a loud way that made her pause.
“What is this place?” She asks, and her voice sounds so small here. Karsi has no answer, and the pair continue to stand and stare, as words and motions failed them both...
There is a part of him, wisened and old, that wonders if this is the place he will one day find his way to. If in death, or some other strange afterlife, the keeper of the dead will lead him into the stars.
It is only fitting, he supposes. His people once told a myth—and this is the very reason the sun sigil burns so brilliantly at his brow—that each night the sea put out the sun. Every night there was a battle at the end of the earth before the sun, again, rose.
But what is the sun if not a star?
What is Orestes, if not the sun?
He walks mesmerised through the nebula, the twisting cosmos that dance about his hooves. There is stardust gleaming in his eyes and strewn out in the air as though it belongs there. Perhaps Orestes is dead.
A voice echoes out across the starlit darkness. What is this place? a girl asks, and in the asking her voice echoes.
Orestes eventually decides to walk toward it, with Ariel beside him, until he sees a girl and a bear.
He knows what he must look like, walking through the strange galaxy before her. He glows so radiantly his face cannot be seen, and the light does not seem to emit from his skin, no, but from some place within him. Ariel, too, burns gold, gold, gold.
Orestes cannot help it.
“It is a magic place,” he says aloud, and seems to answer his own thought. Orestes states what may seem to be obvious, but then elaborates. “This region changes to the whim of the gods. At this moment, they’ve chosen it become stardust, fantasy, perhaps Olympus itself.”
When she moved this time, Ciaran looked downward and watched, fascinated, as she settled her leg back upon the surface - not earth, not the ground for the starlight beneath her felt like it should engulf her if she stepped wrong. Yet as she took that step, as the sound of the solid material beneath her echoed inside the void, there was a burst of light around her hoof. A brilliant array, that trailed out and then was gone.
Not unlike the way that, at times along the shore of a nameless isle she had walked across, the water had boiled with bioluminescent life. When she had walked in it, it had been so bright it illuminated every part of her. Oh, she’d danced in those waves and now, Ciaran felt that same urge.
A figure clad in stardust and light was coming her way, trailing the magic in their wake - and Ciaran spun in place, feathered crest rising and her own tail drawing lines in the clouds, sending eddies of light circling away from her. She danced, standing upon hindlegs with neck arched, forelegs tucked as she spun in place and watched with mirth in her eyes as the nebula responded to her movement.
Iridescent light bloomed in the swirling clouds, as Ciaran was momentarily awash in the brilliance, but her eyes come down as the stranger had come near. Far brighter than her own, her eyes narrow a little so she might see the figure hidden in the light of the stars, but they appear like they are both made of the same - this one, and the glowing feline alongside the figure.
Ciaran cannot help but smile, as Karsi braves the dancing light to stand at her flank.
“It looks like the lights above my mountain that I called home. It feels like I’ve become one with the night sky and it feels so … right,” she says, as it had welcomed her with open arms in a way she’d never expected.
“What is Olympus?” She queries after a moment, as Karsi gives a small grumble in his throat. Ciaran trills quietly back at him, but her blues find the gold again.
“Apologies for my ill manner,” she says, more to appease her grumbling companion but feeling like she was in the presence of an unearthly being as well, “My name is Ciaran - the one who walks at my side is Karsi…”
The magic should cause him to marvel, Orestes supposes. He cannot discern reality from fantasy; nor can he decide if the cosmos he wades through, like so much water, is true or false or some strange dream. Orestes walks through interstellar clouds made up of dust and who knows—perhaps hydrogen, helium, ionised gases—but that doesn’t seem quite right, as he breathes and lives through it. He walks around strange, towering cloud-like pillars made of up of vaguely golden light and darker clouds, too.
Orestes cannot help but smile, either, at the girl and the bear as lost in this real-but-not-real world as he is. “I agree. It is just like walking through the night sky.” And infinitely more intimate, infinitely closer. Orestes glances back from the direction he came, amazed to see a path of hoof-prints lighted up behind him, as if by disturbing the dust he caused it to glow. He glances back at her. “Olympus is the legendary home of the gods. Not Novus’s, but… gods, somewhere, I suppose.” Orestes smiles a little sadly. He can not quite remember who told him the story of Olympus, or where, but he knows it was a time before Novus when the sea still loved him.
He shakes his head at her apology. “There is nothing to be sorry for. I am Orestes, and that—“ he gestures his chin at the lion, who has wandered from him yet again. “Is Ariel. Are you new to Novus? Perhaps we could walk together.” He extends the invitation without second thought.
