[private] wide awake in a world of lullabies

[aletta]

”I know,” Aletta says with the weight of knowing, of living a life that has been full of those lessons.

The silver mare tears her upturned face away from the blanket of stars and instead focuses on Warden. She doesn’t sugarcoat the words, does nothing to uplift them to the heavens that stand watch over them. Over him. Aletta certainly knows that life is hard. It had been one of the first lessons she had learned in her youth (small, frail things such as children weren’t likely to survive on the Mountaintops). The gray mare has always liked her certainties and that life is hard is one of them.

It can be cruel.
It can be hard.
It can be uncaring.

The blades of those truths have all chiseled something away from Aletta, taken and bled something from her that makes her the defined figure that stands beneath the starlight with Warden. ”It’s very hard,” she shares with him. It’s almost hard not to smile. (It’d be an empty thing, if it did come. It doesn’t.)

It doesn’t come because Aletta thinks she hears the echoes of defeat rolling in the baritones of his voice. Though they have met under the cover of darkness, she didn’t think him old. His shoulders didn’t seem burdened with the gravity of numerous years, his mind not yet fogged by the regrets and troubles that come from years worth of making mistakes and (hopefully) learning from them. He has other troubles, she knows. Aletta understands that he knows and the weight of his knowing has extracted a price.

But defeat?
Defeat is something she has never understood. (It  always comes back to the basic instincts for her - for fight or flight and the gray mare will always choose a fight.) It’s something as foreign to her as Beqanna remains - as she forces it to remain.

”Like a prison?” she asks with her head raising to his. Aletta is about to tell him that his life is only a prison if he allows it. The bars are entirely his making. But she remembers. She remembers Valerio leaving. She remembers Lilliana being born and raising four children on her own, watching her eldest take up his father’s mantle at far too young an age. She remembers the threats that came and went and how she fought them because that was the only option.

She remembers Kalina coming back from Liridon without Brynn, with a story about their Goddess and how her dearest friend in this life sacrificed herself for her daughter.

She remembers how that imprisoned her. How that grief still haunts her.

"Bend the bars,” she tells him. "Break them, burn them, shatter them. We are born dying, @[Warden]. Take your joy where you can and illuminate your life with it. Otherwise,” Aletta stops and looks up again, turning her attention back to its rightful place. "Otherwise, there is only this. Darkness. Emptiness. Nothing.”
Aletta has found solace beneath her stars but that knowledge has only come from a life well-lived. Something, she assumes, that Warden (who seems so young!) hasn’t done yet.

"You know the endings,” she says and wonders for a moment if his Magic works against him. If he has perhaps seen his own demise. The thought practically makes her shudder. Everything in her voice becomes edged, wields a blade because she wants the sharpness of her words to rouse him back to defiance. Back to life.

"What of those who love you? Who might come to care for you?” There is an unspoken accusation there. Has he thought about what his defeat would mean to those close to him? Gentler, softer because she is a weaver of tales and she wants him to find the moral in this one, she adds: "There is your story to consider but what about others? If you bind yourself to…,”, she pauses, not knowing what to call his Magic. Marcelo always claimed himself as a Seer but it might be different for the Night Watcher. "By resigning yourself to darkness, you might be condemning someone else as well.”