how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
He had been lost and then found.
Found and then lost again.
Although perhaps lost is not the right word for it. Can you be lost if you are the one to cast your boat out to sea? Can you be lost if you had purposefully slipped back into the fog and silence?
Because he had—he had.
He had gladly loosened his hold on this world and let himself fall beneath the waves. And he is glad, in some ways, that he had. Glad that he had missed the way his parents had torn apart. Glad that he missed the way his sister turned so savage—taking a kingdom and then turning her teeth on her supposed lover.
Glad to have missed the cruelty that seemed to define his family.
It did not leave him without the scars, but it did leave him molded by something else entirely. Molded by the howling winds and the yawning canyons. Molded by a loneliness that etched into his very bones. He became made in the image of his shadow, cast in the iron of his empty world.
Still, he thought of her. Of the girl who had watched him fall through the portal. Of the girl made of vine and branch who had greeted him when he came back. He thought of the sweet sadness in her eyes. Of the way she made his chest ache as a young boy and the way he carried it with him now like a bruise.
Even as he found his way back into the world of Beqanna, he feels the weight of it. Thinks of her even as he thinks of her magician of a mother, of his own tigress mother, the dragon who sired him. All of them swirling around in the back of his mind. The animosity between their families. The hurt—always the hurt.
It feels like a dream that he sees her and he inhales sharply at the sight of her.
He lifts a leg as if to step forward and then steps backward instead, letting the shadows reach dark fingers forward to curl around his legs, his chest, his neck. It obscures the iridescence of him but does not hide it completely. Does not shield the silver gleam of his hooded eyes as he watches her rise.
Part of him wants to go to her. To ask if she remembers him. If she has thought of him the same way that he has thought of her, but the rust of years spent alone holds him captive, roots him to the ground. Instead, he reaches down and brushes his nose against a pile of leaves by his hooves. They come alive before him, bumping against one another, crackling and moving. He nods his head at them and the begin to tumble forward, half on their own accord and half carried by the wind as they move to dance around her feet.
And he simply watches.
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )