[P] like the feathery soot of a smoky lamp,

[Warset]

“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"

When it rains she remembers how full of gloom the night had sometimes seemed. She remembers how the moonlight had turned the black to gray. How the light of all the stars had dappled that grayness with bits of dust that glimmered a little like rain as they fell onto a hundred moons and a thousand planets. Her wings remember the weight of that grayness when they raise out at her sides and flick the water from their feathers before she has even thought of doing such a thing.
 
Warset watches each droplet fall into the lake. She watches all the ripples spread out further, and further, and further from her reflection like planetary rings around her form. She watches and she remembers again how the night, her beloved night, was not always joyous with the adoration of stars. 
 
She remembers the war when the wind whistles around the sharp edges of her ruby moon. Even her marrow remembers when she steps deeper and deeper into the waters just to cool the fever of it, of a leopard looking out and seeing the gray not as rain but a night. There is a song on her tongue, not a memory of one but an ode to one. 
 
And somewhere, where the rain brings it back to her, Warset knows that if she started to hum more stars than one would come crashing through the clouds and the mist. She knows it just as she knows the mist would hide the tears that would pool crystalline in her eyes. She knows it just like she knows the sound of him (the leopard reminds her with a snarl in the middle of her soul) as he approaches.
 
 Every inch of her wants to turn, to see the judgment in his eyes, the judgment she had been trapped and bled for. Warset wants to turn and feel hate in her belly like a fire in a star at just the sight at him. 
 
But all she feels is sorrow as her wings collapse into the water, and her shine dulls to a gray so that the gloom of the mist might hide away her scars. “You ran.” She says and there is not an ounce of that hate she craves to be found in it, in her, in the shine of her eyes that is as waterlogged as a reed. There is only a brittle and frail sort of rage when she lifts her neck so that in the pale light of the mist-buried sun he might see how silver and slick her scars can shine. 
 
Almost like constellation lines on the mortal corpse of a star.  


"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"

art

@August

[August]

I'm the hero of this story
I don't need to be saved

There is a steady rain that feels almost like a meditation, the way it drowns out everything else. Aside from the occasional call of a crow or trill of a woodpecker from the cover of the trees there is no sound but the shh of water, cold against his back.

It’s not particular intent that brings him to the edge of Vitreus Lake - it’s just somewhere to go, somewhere away from the noise and smoke of the city. Maybe he expected his thoughts to clear, out here, but they remain as stubbornly obfuscated as the mist that shrouds the lake.

Here Isra had left him, here Erasmus had found him.

And here, like waking after the trials of the island, he wonders what would have happened if they…hadn’t.

But August’s mind has always been too busy for such maudlin thoughts. Still, it’s a ghost sort of day, and so he’s not entirely surprised when it’s another ghost he sees - some some kind of black swan, as he had at first thought, spreading her wings out over the water.

He’s relieved to see her, alive and…well, herself. But he also feels guilt, like he’d swallowed a chunk of peridotite. On the shore of the lake with the water up to his ankles and the pebbles and mud beneath his feet he waits for her to address him, and he doesn’t have to wait long.

Warset is not quite looking at him, or maybe it’s only the mist obscuring things. The palomino clears his throat, digs a hoof deeper in the rock and watches silt cloud the water. “You seemed to have it well in hand,” he says. A pause, and then, “I was a coward. I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t ask if the man is alive or dead. He doesn’t care about that, or Solterra. Orestes is gone (thanks the gods for that), the desert is crown less again, and he has been proven right about its temperament and that of its leaders. The sand can have it, as far as he’s concerned.

But she is something else. He’d thought she was Solterran (though the only thing she’d said was that she was from there, and motioned up to the heavens), but he supposed a pegasus could go wherever they wanted. How freeing that must be.

“I take it you made it out okay,” he says, because he needs something to say, and because she’s standing before him so it must be true.  

credits
@Warset