[P] nostalgia for the familiar

[Aeneas]

and a softness came from the starlight 
and filled me full to the bone

When Aeneas wakes up in the middle of the night, it is because the storm has passed and the energy of it has charged him like a battery. He leaves his rumpled sheets and sneaks to the window; drawing the thick curtains aside. The Prince stares out at the Terrastellan countryside, shrouded in snow. 

From the vantage of the citadel where they live, he can see across the entirety of Sussoro Fields and into the brimming trees of Tinea Swamp. It is all white, white, white. He has never seen so much snow, despite being born in winter; this is the largest storm of his life, thus far. The moon is half-full above the fields; shaped like a winking eye, and the stars a plethora of silver dust thrown in fistfuls across the black expanse of sky. 

Aeneas leaves his room, quietly; he tries not to wake his sister, but knows his energy is radiant. It fills the room, nearly humming. His skin glows bright and when he steps out into the unlit corridor beyond, he becomes his own lantern.

The young boy walks through hallways full of tapestries; he passes by a statue of Vespera and bows his head reverently, wondering if in the land of the gods she sleeps. He pauses for a moment and asks her, in his head, if the night makes her feel shy, too.

Aeneas doesn’t expect an answer, though, and continues on. The sound of his hooves is repressed by the thick wool rug beneath them. He finds his way deeper and deeper into the citadel, until he stands in a moonlit window overlooking the city of Terrastella. 

There is something magical about it, all shrouded in snow and starlight. He doesn’t think he has ever seen something so beautiful.


☾

@Marisol"speaks" space for notes

[Marisol]

someone will remember us
i say
even in another time

Nothing has ever been so terrifying as the existence of her children.

It is not the brief, cold fear that flashes through her on the battlefield. That one is bright, acrid, soaked in adrenaline—tipped on a spearpoint like poison. It is not the dull, gnawing anxiety of being ruler, the one that sits in her stomach day after day after day as she weighs the options, sated only by the faces of her people safe at their festivals and in their homes. It is not even the cement block that pulls at her legs when she thinks about death and drags her into the riptides.

It is all of these and worse. Infinitely.

Marisol cannot sleep, cannot breathe, cannot eat. The world is haunted now: around every corner there is something new to live in fear of, and every shadow in the castle is filled with some monster that might tear them apart if she is not there, watching, ready to fight. The very few moments that Gunhilde and Aeneas are out of her sight are enough to send her spiraling. It is a kind of paranoia she has never felt before, and the worst part is that it is righteous. This is not something, like so many of her other problems, that she can ignore with logic.

So when she pokes her head into the kids’ room and sees Aeneas’ bed, the sheets rumpled and empty, it is pure dread that floods her and roots her to the floor. For a moment she is frozen, her panic a living, volatile thing that squeezes her like a victim of Medusa until her heart stops and her lungs threaten to collapse.

Marisol closes the door, as quietly as she can manage while shaking, and steps back.

Once the door closes and she’s shut into the hallway, her trembling grows intense and violent; heat floods over her, then a wave of bitter cold; and finally she remembers to turn her head, though only when her vision has already begun to grow black, and sees his flickering cosmic light at the end of the hall. And the relief that washes over her is god-given.

"Aeneas." Her voice might be trembling; if anyone knows Mari's weaknesses it will be her children, and so she has already almost given up on hiding them. She comes up behind him, steps silenced by the plush carpets, and presses her mouth against his angel-small shoulder.

He smells like home.

And outside, the snow keeps tumbling down.

“Speaking.”

credits

[Aeneas]

and a softness came from the starlight 
and filled me full to the bone

Aeneas feels her before he hears his name spoken by her tongue.

He is still too young to find the words that explain, well, the way everything passes through him; the way that living things seem to pause, for a moment, within his heart before carrying on. Everyone in his life is a brief flash of lightening across an otherwise blank sky; and always, the electric current runs through him first. She is upset; he is filled with dread, because of it. The emotion is nameless to him, manifested only as a faceless kind of demon—a black deeper and darker than the night, a black that belongs to the deep sea in a storm, a black that has never seen the light—

And then the light is there, and that passes through him, too. 

Aeneas. Her relief is nearly tangible. He turns to look at his mother, having gone from radiating light-to-red-to-light-again. Aeneas smiles, a broad, delighted smile. “Mother,” he greets, warmly, and turns his head into her soft touch.

One day, he might learn that the comfort of an embrace is one of the world’s briefest things. The moment is golden, even as it passes from actuality into memory—he looks away from her, to gaze longingly into the storm.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he whispers. Aeneas is quiet for a moment, after; he stares longingly into the wilderness beyond their citadel, into a venture he has yet to undertake. After the silence has stretched, however, he says with piercing, childlike insight:  “I am sorry to have made you—to have made you feel… that way.” For Aeneas, there is not yet anger or sadness or loss, only the pit that opens up whenever a heart breaks, no matter how small the fissure.

☾

@Marisol"speaks" space for notes

[Marisol]

someone will remember us
i say
even in another time

Sometimes, Marisol thinks—the world is incredible.

What a life this is. She remembers being hungry. She remembers being an angry, starving child: more bones than flesh, more pain than compassion. Constant fighting. Not just against her wild-eyed mother or the stony Commander but against herself, against the girl in the mirror who wanted to and would never go home. And the leery glances of the other cadets whether she was pinning them to the ground or daring to take a well-earned break.

She remembers there was a time when the sky sang to her more often than the sea did. There was a time, not so long ago, when she could not even imagine what it felt like to drown. Is she better, now, for knowing?

She remembers there was a time, even more recently, where Marisol was convinced she would not, could not, ever exist outside the scope of her duties. Commander. Then Sovereign. There was a time when love was a foreign thing, a far-off storybook ideal; there was a time when the idea of having children, a child, even, was untenable.

But looking at him, Marisol cannot seem to recall any of these times. There is only here. And now. Here and now, with the cold room growing warm, and the snow still flurrying outside, and the lights dim and warm as coals.  And in this soft not-darkness, the boy she made, so perfectly, delicately built that it aches just to look at him: the too-clean snip, the clouds of thick white hair. More than anything, her memory evades her when she looks into his eyes—soft, and gray, and innocent.

Marisol sinks down beside him. The stony floor is cold—she almost flinches—but there is a fire blazing in the wall, and warmth seeps into the Commander’s body as she pulls Aeneas into her side, tucking him carefully under one spotted wing.

“That’s okay,” she mumbles into his hair. It’s not, but he doesn’t have to know that; he will have his fair share of pain, Marisol is sure, once he leaves her. Why kickstart the process? She continues: “It looks like a painting, doesn’t it? If de Clare had painted this—what do you think he would call it?”


“Speaking.”

credits