[open] i think i'm where the bloodline ends

[lannister]

i think i'm where the bloodline ends
i'll never do the right thing again

There was once a time that Lannister burst from the clouds like a meteor destined for the earth, like a prophecy and a promise from the gods. He once felt his convictions were pure - that they were honest if flawed, true but not yet tried. Such will was biblical, it was powerful, it was seething and hot like the last slashing breath of a vindicated soldier. The dream-weaver was a knight once. He strapped his anger to his body like armor, his desperation sheathed at his side like a sword. He swore promises to himself. He whispered prayers.

He lost time.

He lost focus.

He lost himself.

He bent reality.

There was never much more than a shell beneath Lannister's gleaming, handsome coat. Safety was what his father always taught him. The only place for him to live with such blooming power was where he did not need to control it - where no others would be tempted to control his magic. Elio kept him sound, tucked away and quiet. That is, until the loneliness crashed over him like the catastrophic wave of a tsunami. Sudden, suffocating, and deadly, Lannister had no where to put his pain.

Soon after, the games followed.

Sickly, uneven, oftentimes saccharine: the pieces of the boy that could no longer be controlled took the reins of his untethered magic. The games were boundless visions, catastrophes and tragedies and endless injury. There was sweet play, like the vision of a mother he would never know - a mother he never had in the traditional sense. He relished the affectionate moments despite how they warped around the edges. Soon, though - he tore those dreams apart in favor of the hurricanes, the tornadoes, and the utter senselessness of never knowing anything other than his own mind.

He wonders now if he flickers like his the mother in his dreams once did, boundless and yet tethered. The sharp tang of autumn rotting beneath his hooves brings that wandering mind to heel; and now he wonders if those dampened leaves flutter on the edge of reality as well, a sea of brown rushing up to swallow him.

lannister

[liesma]

i still chase you into heartache
Every time you take a step

Of dreams she knows so little.
She closes her eyes to sleep and sees only stars, she has been so wholly consumed by them.

How many hours had she spent as a child, worshipping them? Bending them to her will? How many hours had she spent standing so impossibly still in the center of the meadow while they rained down around her?

And now she paints the sky with constellations. Glance overhead and you might find a deer leaping across the sky, a wolf prowling, grasses swaying where they hadn’t been before. And when she gets lonely, as she often does, she pulls them down out of the sky and confesses all her secrets to them. 

She sleeps, certainly, but not to dream. And when she sees him, she sees the stars first. These stars are beautiful but they are not her stars. She does not think to call them to her, for she is not a coy creature, and instead wanders closer. These stars have the same nature as her brother’s stars, she thinks, somehow tame. They stay put, as if the air around him is the sky itself. As if he is some great celestial body. Her brother is of the sky, certainly, but this stranger does not seem to be.

“Hello,” she says. “My brother has stars like these,” she tells him for no other reason than perhaps to explain why she’s felt the need to disrupt his peace at all. “They’re beautiful.”

liesma —

[lannister]

you used to tell me we'd turn into something
oh, you said life was much better than this

It is incredibly hard for Lannister to accept any part of himself as beautiful after years of starving loneliness. The stars surrounding his body shiver and shine with his movement, gorgeous in their own ways but revealing too much of his skin. A coat once lustrous is now dull and near-brown. Bits of dirt streaking his golden stripes greedily devour what light his galaxies give off. Where there used to be full muscle shows hints of ribs and hips.

Being called beautiful is a kindness Lannister has not been gifted in ages. He stares blankly at the woman so confidently spoken, gray eyes reflecting the stardust around him. Slowly, that blankness turns into a turmoil of broken memories—flashes of the Lannister he used to be, even if that was only half of a man. He once knew to be charming, to be funny, to be intuitive and evasive. The echoes are too slippery for him to grasp—

but he remembers—

and he draws himself up—

“Who . . .” he trails off, voice rasping with disuse, “Who is your brother?”

Niceties escape Lannister, so he does not thank her for the compliment nor does he offer his name. He merely blinks a few times before clearing his throat.

“I’ve spent almost my entire life in the stars,” he finally adds, just above a whisper—a wistful lament, a bitterness sharp behind his teeth, a heavy tongue.

lannister

@liesma

[liesma]

i still chase you into heartache
Every time you take a step

He seems tired, she thinks, or lost. Or perhaps both. Hear it in how hoarse his voice when he speaks. See it in how heavy his head when he looks to her. She smiles when he asks after her brother. It had not occurred to her that they might know each other, that creatures with stars of this nature might find one another and make friends. “His name is Phosphorus,” she tells him and her fondness is evident in her tone. How deeply she loves each of her siblings, though she finds herself most tremendously jealous of this particular brother and her sister Zohariel.

“The stars love Phosphorus,” she says, her voice far-away with her envy, “the planets, too.” Both Phosphorus and his twin brother Hesperus acted as the sun to several planets, each of them the center of their own small solar system.

Still, her smile remains and softens into something wistful when he speaks next. She turns her gaze then to the sky overhead, studying the stars that wink down at them. She, too, has spent her life amongst the stars, though she cannot help but suspect that he means something altogether different. To pull the stars down around him would probably not give him a feeling of being home, she suspects, thinks it would probably only make him homesick.

“What’s brought you down to earth, then?” she asks, tilting her fine head. She thinks that if she had the power to exist in the sky, she’d never leave it.

liesma —