06-13-2020, 07:34 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-13-2020, 07:35 PM by aletta.)
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
It does not surprise him that he waits for nightfall to venture out beyond Tephra. Where some find the quiet and stillness of night to bring solace and comfort, Warden only finds distress and turmoil. Insomnia now plagues him out of habitual evening flights, born out of avoiding sleep and the ones who are featured in his terrible visions. Often he finds himself in the forest - a terrain so different from the black-sand beaches and the never-ending glow of the volcano that it is almost relaxing, but never enough to allow sleep to find him. But tonight, because her glass figure paints his mind more often than he liked to admit, he flies further.
His wings are like molten silver beneath the pale summer moon that shines brilliantly in the cloudless sky, stars winking sleepily at him as he takes his course. It is so still; no wind finds him except for what he creates himself with each push of his mighty ivory wings, the twisting of his midnight blue horns amassed by thick tendrils of his mane and forelock. His deep ocean colored eyes timidly view the milky spirals of galaxies that trace the night sky, alone in his thoughts as his wings take him further and further.
At some moment he begins to tire physically and decides that he would have to rest for at least a little while. Glancing down, the horned stallion finds himself soaring over the meadow - the golden-green grasses below cloaked in moonlight and shadow. He snorts softly, white nostrils flaring, and then the tiniest twitch of his feathers starts to bring him downwards, landing quite solidly onto the flat, dry landscape.
With a giant sweep of his wings they tuck into his sides. He is about to turn and fix the stubborn ones who remain out of place from his flight, but his ocean gaze fixates on a silver woman in the not so far distance. There you are. He tilts his head inquisitively, for a moment thinking she was addressing him, but then watches curiously as she stares up into the heavens. He follows her gaze, searching for what she is looking for, but only finds the silent cold stars above. He snorts sharply, his eyes falling back to her as her voice reaches him again across the still, quiet meadow.
Warden’s mouth presses into a thin line and his dark tail flicks across his auburn haunch. He begins to make his way towards her, his head lowered lazily and his wings loose at his sides. Upon reaching a comfortable distance between her and himself, he halts and glances up to the sky again, a look of indifference on the sharp edges of his face. “Do you really think they hear you?” His voice is deep and heavy, filled with incredulity yet thin with something like hope. His father would chastise him for saying such a thing; Warrick always looks to the stars for guidance and solace, but his son could not find the same comfort in things that are so far away from this world. He grimaces visibly, uncaring in the way he does so, not at all slighted if she were to see the obvious distaste on his handsome face.
“And if they do - do they even care?”
For too long has he asked the stars for guidance, to alleviate his foreseeing abilities from him, to give it to someone who could handle such horror, but they remain as they do now; silent and twinkling, only stars - incapable of compassion.
WARDEN
@[aletta]
06-15-2020, 09:08 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-18-2020, 01:43 PM by 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?”
06-17-2020, 12:25 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-17-2020, 12:25 PM by Warden.)
She speaks as if she knows the stars and their mysteries, and perhaps she does, but it does nothing to alleviate the deepening frown on his white face, his deep oceanic eyes roving the eternal expanse before them as if something would start to happen. Even to this day his father, Warrick, would look to the skies for comfort and guidance, calling upon their wisdom as if they held all the answers. Warden would stand beside him, as a colt and even now, as a stallion, and follow his gaze but would only find emptiness and silence, a great indifference that seems so fitting.
The rigidity in his spine loosens just a bit; his own experience with the stars and the cosmos does not necessarily define the truth, he reminds himself, and the deep auburn of his shoulder rolls in an attempt to smooth the sharp edges of his posture. Her question is innocent enough, a mere curiosity spurred out of his obvious lack of fondness for the night sky, but he begins to simper, feeling himself suddenly too small and too insignificant beneath the open expanse, his lips twitching into a grimace.
Warden’s white wings fidget at his sides, a deep hum of thoughtfulness in his throat. “Many things,” he tells her plainly, pausing to draw a deep breath, “but mostly that the future would not come to pass and that curses would be broken.” Warden’s face becomes distant, hard and unreadable. It is perhaps the most she will get from him, for he would rather keep his fore-seeing abilities and their terrors to himself. “If anyone would be capable, it would be the stars, right?” His voice softens just so, his question not so pointed at the stranger but towards the stars above, pain and fear tightening his throat.
A moment passes and he inhales deeply, the autumn air cool and dry in his nostrils. “Perhaps I ask for the wrong things,” he says thinly, flicking his dark tail against the auburn of his flank, his eyes narrowing before turning to glance at the silvered woman near him. “What have you asked for that they’ve answered?” Something like jealousy swirls around him, but at the same time inquisitiveness - what is it that stars find important enough to answer to?
WARDEN
@[aletta]
he's a grump i apologize
he's a likeable guy i promise
06-18-2020, 06:48 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-18-2020, 06:59 PM by aletta.)
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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.
She’d done the same thing, once.
"The future always comes,” she clips back at him, looking back up to the vast sky too sharply. His words are echoing a memory that cuts through the acute edge of her own, remembering that she had so often wished the same thing. That the future wouldn’t come, that present she stood in wouldn’t exist at all. It’s stifling in her throat and Aletta finds it easier to not answer him at all than to tell him that he might be asking the wrong questions.
Warden’s voice softens and for a moment, she is reminded of Malachi. There is a stirring against his bay sides as those pale feathers catch the corner of her dark gaze again. Like the pegasus can’t quite settle beneath their celestial company. He reminds her of Malachi - her eldest boy - and she wonders if there is a colt underneath the stallion, a stargazer still lingering beneath the skin of a skeptic.
"What if they can only see?” Aletta asks. She has never doubted that they have been up there since the beginning of everything and that they will be the last things hanging, when it at all comes crashing down. The wanderer has always assumed that they knew the whole story: from the bright beginning to the dark end and had some gravity in the telling. It’s never occurred to her - not until now, anyways - that they might only be the narrators.
The revelation gives a new perspective to her own. They had heard. It didn’t mean they had altered or intervened.
"I cursed them,” Aletta says with a humorless laugh. She remembers the raw rage, the way it had burned through her, straight up to them. "I lost everything so I accused them of being jealous.” Her eyes - a rich mahogany - flash to a depthless (mirthless), angry black that might be imperceptible in the depth of evening. She knows the picture that her golden lover had imagined, that her children adopted; a serene, silver mare praying beneath the stars, hoping that if she was devout enough beneath that twinkling altar, her offerings might be enough to bring Valerio home.
What none of them ever speak of (or care to remember) is the tired, furious Regent with the responsibilities of a herd on her slim shoulders and four sets of young eyes looking to her for guidance. None of them ever seem to recall that Aletta had damned those shining stars long before she ever praised them.
The answers wouldn’t come until much, much later.
"I never asked,” she says, lingering between the memory and the sham.
"Change seems to be their favorite heralding.” Aletta looks up again, remembering those two messages that the stars had sent. 'The stars have heard you,’ said the startalker’s daughter before Valerio had come home, haunted and haggard from war. And then the Oracle herself - Keav - had proclaimed years later, when it had just been Aletta: 'Go Beyond.’ As if the stars knew about the dreams. Malachi and the wildflower bower. Lilliana and the shadowed forest. Jay and the burning beach. "They tend to be somewhat cryptic," she adds dryly.
"They told me to go Beyond my mountains, so here I am.” It could be a trick of light but the moonglow softens her face as she glances sideways at Warden, trying to assess the stoic stallion again. "So,” she quips, "what would you tell them?”
If futures can’t be changed and curses can’t be solved, what would Warden say? Aletta has learned to find their presence a comfort but that has come from years of travel, of learning, of living. Where was @[Warden] on this journey? Did he curse or did he pray?
aletta we turned our back on ordinary from the start show me the sky falling down
photo credit to charlie---x
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