[private] wide awake in a world of lullabies - Printable Version +- Beqanna (https://beqanna.com/forum) +-- Forum: Explore (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=1) +--- Forum: The Common Lands (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=72) +---- Forum: Meadow (https://beqanna.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=3) +---- Thread: [private] wide awake in a world of lullabies (/showthread.php?tid=27180) Pages:
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wide awake in a world of lullabies - aletta - 06-13-2020 There aren’t many things to complain about in summer. A lull sweetens the air. It becomes thick with humidity (as a daughter of the mountains she doesn’t particularly care for the heat) and the soft melodies of insects crescendos as sunset slowly paints the landscape. A bright, blazing red sun warns that the day is ending and Aletta is looking to the East, paying no mind to the West. Let the day end, she impatiently thinks. The silver mare is waiting. To the absent-minded horse that passes by the gray woman, it looks as if she is waiting for someone. Aletta has stopped grazing and her back is to the sun as it illuminates everything behind her. The day is dying in various shades of pastels; the innocent blues, the lovely lilac that deepens to violet as the sun finally disappears beneath the treeline and eventually the horizon. Day fades to night and what Aletta has been waiting for appears. There is only one and then twinkles two. Silently, a third comes into view and then a fourth. Suddenly, there is a sky full of stars and Aletta isn’t alone. There is a whole galaxy to keep her company. The pale woman smiles and lifts her petite head higher to better appreciate them. She knows what she appears by daylight; older, tired, aloof. By night? By night, she transforms and basks under their shimmering attention. She becomes young again - awake, attentive. "There you are,” she admonishes them. Aletta isn’t a star-talker but they have heard her before. (She has met the messenger to prove it.) "Took you all day,” the wanderer teases, feeling at home beneath their shining. @[Radar] its short but throw whoever at her RE: wide awake in a world of lullabies - Warden - 06-14-2020 WARDEN @[aletta] RE: wide awake in a world of lullabies - aletta - 06-15-2020 Underneath this same sky - from Paraiso’s deep valleys to the imperial heights of Craignair, the flats of Murmuring Rivers and even Beqanna - she has done this. The wanderer of her youth (and in the years that came after, it seems) fed the traveling spirit of her soul by aspiring to the stars. They have seen her at all the phases of her life; maiden, mare and now? RE: wide awake in a world of lullabies - Warden - 06-17-2020 WARDEN @[aletta] he's a grump i apologize he's a likeable guy i promise RE: wide awake in a world of lullabies - aletta - 06-18-2020
His eyes are roving the stars like a submersible searches the murky depths of the ocean. Warden is searching through the silence and the stillness for an answer. Looking for answers to questions that they are both pondering in the quiet that subdues between them. Aletta has turned her head to regard him, briefly, and watches as the angles of his face harden into a deep scowl. we turned our back on ordinary from the start show me the sky falling down photo credit to charlie---x |
WARDEN
She tried changing it once before. Aletta had tried to stop the future from coming. There had been a night, once, where she thought that if she didn’t close her eyes then the dawn wouldn’t come. And if daybreak never came, he couldn’t leave. The gray mare couldn’t ask him to stay because it would have gone against prophecies and revelations, and though Aletta can certainly be selfish, her love for Valerio was not.
And to him ask to stay when it had been so clearly foretold that he had to go would have torn and tattered the last pieces of their broken and fraying hearts.
So she had stayed awake to defy the dawn and it came anyways. It had been grey and melancholy; it had been cold and desolate but it came and took her lover, parts of her family and her home with it.
The future, she had bitterly learned, would always come whether her eyes remained opened or closed.
Always, says the night watcher and Aletta looks away from her stars. How had he come to learn that lesson as bitterly as she had? Had there been a dawn or a dusk, a day or a night that taught it to him? Was it where he learned his skepticism of the cosmos where, as he claimed, his sire thought them all-powerful? ”Perhaps not,” Aletta speculates and then lets the words fall.
There is nothing but silence that hangs around them. Turning her attention back to the shadowed pegasus, she watches him. Does he feel it? After her rage and her fury, after the tears and heartbreak, those shimmering sentinels had still been there. Some might think their silence cold but Aletta - only after breaking and then trying to put the pieces of herself back together - felt the silence turn into something more.
Maybe those fateful stars lack power but she had learned that they held presence. Comfort for some, apathy for others.
Wrapped up in the midnight quiet, she wonders what he feels now, if anything at all. Whatever he does in their celestial camaraderie, the stallion snorts and makes a smile quirks against the corners of her dark mouth. Not fully but a twitch and she can feel her brow arch: "It makes my temper sound otherworldly.” (There had been some renown to it - not that she will ever admit it. The Grey Mare of the Mountain. Iron Wraith.)
Warden looks to the stars again - as if he might find his answer up there - and Aletta follows him. She lifts her head, craning up to watch as a shooting star streaks across the sky. He wouldn’t tell them anything, he says. They already know. The older mare can’t see the way he clenches his jaw in this dark but there is something in his pause that tenses them both.
They know - the beginning, the middle and the end…?
Did he share that knowing with them? Something in her expression gives way - that carefully neutral facade that Aletta has learned to cultivate over the decades - rippling into a new one. Curious (she was a story-teller first and foremost) but more than that, she was hopeful. For the first time since she had left her Mountains, she feels it rising in her silver chest. If he knew the endings of so many stories, maybe he knew the ending to this one. To hers.
"So you know too, then.”
She is tempted to ask but refrains. The question is begging on the tip of her tongue but Aletta guards it with the years that she has experienced. Aletta silences it with an iron weight that came from ruling and fighting and loving and losing.
Warden. She turns the word over in her mind. A guard. A watcher. The wanderer looks away from the heavens again to regard him, adjusting the name to her stargazing companion. It suits him, she thinks. "Aletta,” she offers without flourish. Without explanation or politeness. The word is a quick, deft stroke through the dark.
He knows and she dreams. It prompts her to say, "I kept… dreaming.” Aletta looks away from him and then up. Her head motions towards the galaxies that dance above them once, thinking that he might understand. "So I asked them.” It feels like a secret that they both share, now. Asking stars instead of wishing on them. Arcane words that have sent her across worlds to find the hidden meaning - to find the end.
Those with the Second Sight carry around an unseen weight, she knows. The possibilities of so many futures hang on just a moment, just a single word. She has no right to ask @[Warden] the Night Watcher and yet it was a prophet who told her about Murmuring Rivers, who told her about Valerio’s homecoming and an Oracle who had deciphered part of her dreams, that sent her Beyond everything she knew.
Maybe the Guard could be the third part of this journey; the Prophet, the Oracle and the Guard coming together to help find her answers. She shouldn’t ask, and perhaps there should be more eloquence in her question, but Aletta of the Mountaintops has never been anything but herself and that mare has always been direct and forthcoming: "Do you think you could help me?”
WARDEN
If she were a more prideful mare, she might have smiled. Aletta has no qualms about her temperament - not when it had secured the borders of her home, not when it had given her a reputation that made rogues or herd stallions think twice about Murmuring Rivers. The silver mare will never be one to be called soft or demure; Aletta had been crafted from the peaks of Mountains and was as strong and resilient as the stone that had been bred into her bones.
At this moment, she merely shrugs her small shoulders. Why had they answered her? It was something she asked herself often enough; their messages came in the heart of darkness - bringing a momentary flash of light - before they left her (stumbling) in this endless abyss called life. "Try again," the former Regent suggests. Aletta angles her head to glance at Warden again but the opalescence of his proud horns catches what dim light there is and the older mare looks up towards their imperial spirals. Looks past him to those silent, celestial guardians and wonders again what they must think of this world. Aletta even wonders briefly what they might think of her and why it is they don't answer her winged companion. As she has come to know, maybe the answer is in the silence.
Or maybe not.
"Ask again and again until they have no choice but to answer you," she murmurs. Above them, the sky shimmers in silence. No answers are twinkling in the quiet but the questions they are asking are to each other - to themselves - and perhaps don't require cosmic Magic just yet. (As much as she would like to deny it - to refuse to acknowledge that she even needs it - Aletta knows she will require the help of some kind to get home.) The lull that falls between them feels almost begruding with the wanderer having another revelation (that her stars might not be as powerful as they seem, that she might require Magic now) and the shadows fill with it. When her dark eyes come back down from their midnight vigil, Warden is looking away. There is a rigid set to his stance, a hardness to his shoulders that wasn't there before and a terseness that clips his words short.
Aletta tilts her head slightly, her ears pricking forward as his snake back. Her relief exhales through her nostrils. No, he tells her and as much as it should frustrate her, she feels... calm. He inhales quickly, like he might suck in his anger that way. It makes her consider him, again. Nothing good ever comes from trying to contain darkness, she has learned.
(The darkness can spread but it abates. A dawn must always come. There is always a light to pierce the dark. The stars can attest to that.)
She doesn't know he calls himself the Bringer of Death. He remains as he was in her questioning eyes. When the Guard speaks again, Aletta lifts her head. The stallion stomps the ground but she is too busy studying his abrupt angles, the way that he reveals something else about himself despite the cover of nightfall. "I don't believe in Luck," she firmly states. It comes out harsher than she intends; where his anger seeps, hers blooms to ash.
Warden claims he is not what she assumes and she snorts at that. "What are you then, if not @[Warden]?" All Magic is tainted in some way. It claims a price, always. "Have you tried asking the stars what is at the Heart of it?" His Magic, she means. At the center of him. The bay stallion never revealed what he asked, after all. Only that he did.
WARDEN