[P] there is a dead spot in the night,

[Avesta]

the sun shines low and red across the water,



The market feels like a creature tonight. It has a weight to it that reminds me of flesh, and fur, and claw. The noise it makes, a hundred voices layered on top of each other like the night sky, sounds more like the lumbering roars of a monster’s hunger than the sounds of life. If there is music I cannot pluck it loose from the din enough to make out a single word of it. 
 
But I do not need to hear the words, or the chorus, to know that the sound of the song is one of joy. A joy so bright and vibrant that I wonder how the moon and all her pale and silver glory can hold it. I think perhaps I should linger in the crowds and lose myself to that song so that I might rediscover how it feels to be too bright for the night to carry. 
 
I should. But I don’t. 
 
I don’t think I want to be bright anymore. I don’t think I want to be gold, or silver, or any other color that this fragile city can name. I want to be the market with a hundred voices, a hundred songs, layered over my bones so that I am both as terrifying as a god and as unknowable as one. Perhaps then those that watched my mother sail off to war, with a child at her side and a dragon above her head, would not see Isra each time they looked at me. 
 
It has been a very long time since I have been anything like my mother. None of my stories, when I whisper them into Foras’s ear, have endings like hers. All of my stories end with the sea. 
 
Tonight though, I am in the belly of the market creature, and their fur is a warm shield around me. The market makes me forget that I began and ended with the sea in the story Foras is still remembering as he walks at my shoulder. We are still remembering it when we pull that fur around us and press close to the fires and the song of joy (the one that I can hear echoes of love in as I draw closer). 
 
Firelight halos my horn and I do not need to look up to know how wicked, how like my mother’s it seems, when a boy lingers too long on the tip of it. Nor do I need to know how each step my wolf and I take as we dance has no echo of the song in it. I do not need to watch my shadow know that when I dance it is like a tide pressing up against the icy shoreline of a wolf. 
 
I do not need to look to see my soul draped across the outside of me when I dance. 

@Layla <3

[Morrighan]

i'm done denying the truth to anyone
Cause I'm alive

T

here is something different to the way the fire flickers within the lanterns of the markets. Normally it's as alive as Morrighan's soul, but tonight it's almost as if there is a sense of calm. The flames are steadily burning and the glow that washes over Morr makes up for the absence of the moon above the sky. If she were to look close, she'd see the slightest sliver among the stars, but it's not enough to shine any moonlight down on the world. The fire is all she has now (maybe it's all she's ever known and felt close to).

Denocte seems to sense the difference too. It's in the way the breeze comes through and tousels her mane, it's the way the noise of the markets rise and fall like music notes. Morrighan feels it and can sense all the changes, but she isn't sure if she believes it yet. It all still feels like a dream and she's walking on clouds instead of cobblestone.

Some bow as she passes and she nods to them. Others greet her as "queen" and it still leaves a weird feeling as she continues on. She is not a queen, but she will gladly lead them and protect them all for as long as she possibly can. The title itself she'll have to get used to hearing.

Morr has reached the part of the markets that still bring about memories that sting. Even just watching the dancers reminds her of Al'Zahra. The curve of their hips, the way they move their bodies naturally to the music (or the music in their own head) and the way their smile brightens the closer others get. There had been that brightness, but there had been danger too in Al'Zahra's gaze.

But Al'Zahra is not here tonight. Instead, who she sees dancing is Isra's daughter, Avesta. Something about this doesn't look right, but maybe Morrighan just isn't used to the twins being so grown up now. Maybe she never will and will keep seeing them as the two kids she had to chase through the haunted maze. Just as she will always see Maeve as her precious flower child with a heart of gold.

"Avesta," she says, coming up to the girl's side but does not join in the dancing (she's not sure if she can again). "You've changed."

And perhaps, so has Morrighan.

{ @Avesta "speaks" notes: text }

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