[private] wide awake in a world of lullabies

[aletta]

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?

Who is she now?

Aletta knows she is not a star-talker. She has no way of discerning their twinkling wishes or shimmering secrets. What they have seen, what they know, what they will come to know (or do they already know it? Does something as timeless as the cosmos already know the beginning and the end of everything? Or is that as they are - something infinite?) remains enveloped in the dark silence of the night sky above her and the pale woman has come to learn to be grateful for the knowledge of their company (though that is a patience that has taken years).

There are others who would look at up and see something less.
They could look up at those galaxies and not realize what vast, eternal company they keep. (And maybe for the Immortals that is different; maybe so much time passes that they no longer have the capacity to remember who had been at the beginning with them, who will be with them if the end ever comes. Maybe they simply no longer want to remember after lifetimes of it.)

The pale feathers of @[Warden]’s wings limn in this silver light and it distracts her. Turning her refined head, the approaching stallion is half-shadowed. She can see the stark white of his face - almost matching those mighty wings - as he comes closer and that's where she lets her dark gaze settle. Aletta can’t see the thin line of his mouth as he presses his doubts into it. His incredulity, though, she hears. It makes her own ears flick back. Is he of Beqanna? And if he is, are the natives of this land so arrogant and conceited in their magical abilities that they no longer rely on its origins?

"They have before,” states the wanderer. Raising her head, she studies the proud curve of his dark antlers and tilts her head. "Though I suppose it helps having a mountain or two to raise the words.” A forgotten daughter from a kingdom in the clouds, that was how she had gotten through her girlhood. As close to the heavens as a horse could get (and then later - in the Pass), surely those heights meant something. 

Her white tail flicks - the only outward sign at his ambiguity - and the grey mare asks with an upward motion of her head, as if the stars were privy to this conversation: "What have you asked them?”