[private] wide awake in a world of lullabies

[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

[Warden]

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]

[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?” 

[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

[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

warden is perfect.

[Warden]

The future always comes.

There is no hiding the way her conclusion brings rigidity to his posture. The looseness in his muscles fade in an instant; drawing taut beneath the mahogany of his skin. The truth in her statement brings a pained grimace onto his ivory face, lips rippling as he struggles to hide his reaction. Warden tucks his head, the spiraling blue onyx of his horns becoming more prominent with the movement as the inky black of his forelock fall away. He grits his teeth, the muscle in his jawline jumping with the pressure. “Always,” he replies bitterly, attempting to keep his mind from remembering the visions of shattered glass and how she calls his name so desperately, terrified and frightened, searching for him for protection. It would come to pass, just as his vision of his father’s sickness and the plague, just as his premonition of the war; just as they all do.

A visible shudder trickles down the broad of his back, where he then rolls his shoulders and straightens, snorting sharply. His gaze does not go to her but to the expanse above them once again, heaviness and solemnity in his ocean blue eyes. A single black-lined ear flicks towards her at her question, hard lines pulling at the disappointment in his expression. “Then they are not as all-powerful as my father has made them out to be.” Warden’s eyes now peer from beneath his furrowed brow at her for now, it seems it is his turn to listen.

The stallion is not sure if the darkness that shimmers in the silver woman’s irises are a trick of the light or something more, but it is enough to allow his brows to prick in veiled curiosity, his face a bit more handsome without the harshness of pained anger he so often wears. She speaks with experience and with a bit of brutality herself and Warden quietly remembers this about her: she appears to be much more than a timid, all-trusting star-gazer. She speaks of their cryptic ways and he snorts, nearly chuckling, at the irony - maybe his visions are from the stars then, for a puzzle is all he is ever given to see and to comprehend. “Cursing them seemed to rouse them,” he mentions to her with something that resembles humor, though it does not show on his face.

Another question is pointed in his direction and when she glances at him his gaze swiftly falls away, lifting to the silent and twinkling sky above them. His lips purse in thought, a shooting star scraping across the skyline as he did so. “Maybe I wouldn’t tell them anything; they already know.” He pauses. Perhaps his visions are the stars’ way of speaking to him. He grinds his teeth, hating the idea immediately.

“You can call me Warden, by the way.” A silence grows between them and though they are but strangers, he finds it comfortable. After awhile, he quietly asks: “Beyond your mountains?” There is a hum of inquisitiveness in his voice, wondering if she had meant metaphorically or literally, his gaze falling to hers as he once again pulls himself from the starry sky above them.

WARDEN

@[aletta]

[aletta]

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She tried changing it once before. Aletta had tried to stop the future from coming. There had been a night, once, where she thought that if she didn’t close her eyes then the dawn wouldn’t come. And if daybreak never came, he couldn’t leave. The gray mare couldn’t ask him to stay because it would have gone against prophecies and revelations, and though Aletta can certainly be selfish, her love for Valerio was not. And to him ask to stay when it had been so clearly foretold that he had to go would have torn and tattered the last pieces of their broken and fraying hearts. So she had stayed awake to defy the dawn and it came anyways. It had been grey and melancholy; it had been cold and desolate but it came and took her lover, parts of her family and her home with it. The future, she had bitterly learned, would always come whether her eyes remained opened or closed. Always, says the night watcher and Aletta looks away from her stars. How had he come to learn that lesson as bitterly as she had? Had there been a dawn or a dusk, a day or a night that taught it to him? Was it where he learned his skepticism of the cosmos where, as he claimed, his sire thought them all-powerful? ”Perhaps not,” Aletta speculates and then lets the words fall. There is nothing but silence that hangs around them. Turning her attention back to the shadowed pegasus, she watches him. Does he feel it? After her rage and her fury, after the tears and heartbreak, those shimmering sentinels had still been there. Some might think their silence cold but Aletta - only after breaking and then trying to put the pieces of herself back together - felt the silence turn into something more. Maybe those fateful stars lack power but she had learned that they held presence. Comfort for some, apathy for others. Wrapped up in the midnight quiet, she wonders what he feels now, if anything at all. Whatever he does in their celestial camaraderie, the stallion snorts and makes a smile quirks against the corners of her dark mouth. Not fully but a twitch and she can feel her brow arch: "It makes my temper sound otherworldly.” (There had been some renown to it - not that she will ever admit it. The Grey Mare of the Mountain. Iron Wraith.) Warden looks to the stars again - as if he might find his answer up there - and Aletta follows him. She lifts her head, craning up to watch as a shooting star streaks across the sky. He wouldn’t tell them anything, he says. They already know. The older mare can’t see the way he clenches his jaw in this dark but there is something in his pause that tenses them both. They know - the beginning, the middle and the end…? Did he share that knowing with them?  Something in her expression gives way - that carefully neutral facade that Aletta has learned to cultivate over the decades - rippling into a new one. Curious (she was a story-teller first and foremost) but more than that, she was hopeful. For the first time since she had left her Mountains, she feels it rising in her silver chest. If he knew the endings of so many stories, maybe he knew the ending to this one. To hers. "So you know too, then.” She is tempted to ask but refrains. The question is begging on the tip of her tongue but Aletta guards it with the years that she has experienced. Aletta silences it with an iron weight that came from ruling and fighting and loving and losing. Warden. She turns the word over in her mind. A guard. A watcher. The wanderer looks away from the heavens again to regard him, adjusting the name to her stargazing companion. It suits him, she thinks. "Aletta,” she offers without flourish. Without explanation or politeness. The word is a quick, deft stroke through the dark. He knows and she dreams. It prompts her to say, "I kept… dreaming.” Aletta looks away from him and then up. Her head motions towards the galaxies that dance above them once, thinking that he might understand. "So I asked them.” It feels like a secret that they both share, now. Asking stars instead of wishing on them. Arcane words that have sent her across worlds to find the hidden meaning - to find the end. Those with the Second Sight carry around an unseen weight, she knows. The possibilities of so many futures hang on just a moment, just a single word. She has no right to ask @[Warden] the Night Watcher and yet it was a prophet who told her about Murmuring Rivers, who told her about Valerio’s homecoming and an Oracle who had deciphered part of her dreams, that sent her Beyond everything she knew. Maybe the Guard could be the third part of this journey; the Prophet, the Oracle and the Guard coming together to help find her answers. She shouldn’t ask, and perhaps there should be more eloquence in her question, but Aletta of the Mountaintops has never been anything but herself and that mare has always been direct and forthcoming: "Do you think you could help me?” aletta we turned our back on ordinary from the start show me the sky falling down photo credit to charlie---x

sorry, i wrote you a novel.

[Warden]

“Perhaps it is,” comes his remark, a semblance of humor dancing in the darkness of his ocean-colored eyes. “Maybe you should speak for me instead. They seem to hear you.” There is a laugh at the edges of his shadowed voice, a gentleness that he uses to veil the hope that lies deep within it, afraid to speak his wishes aloud as if speaking it would make his hope shatter. He is still staring up at the winking and sleepy stars, celestial and silent and worlds away, silently praying they would rouse from their sleep and awaken before him, come face to face with him and tell him why they chose him to bear their terrible secrets. 

So you know too, then.

Her assumption causes him to draw a quick breath, his muscles drawing taut beneath the auburn and ivory of his patched skin. He lowers his head slightly, but his gaze refuses to meet hers. Her voice is curious and soft, and he knows by the way it sounds that she cannot begin to comprehend the weight of foreboding that comes with his ability - the curse that he carries. He is frozen beneath her stare, unable to give away any kind of hint at the raging of his mind save for the tiniest jump of his brow and twitch of his pale mouth. 

When he remains silent she continues, giving him her name. His breath releases in a gentle sigh, but the rigidity in his posture remains just so. She is on the cusp of discovering the haunting of his ability, and the reason why he curses the stars yet longs for their intervention in the same breath. He almost hopes she discovers his plight, though he knows nothing will bring him peace - not truly. 

Warden’s ears press against his neck harshly as her question falls into the stillness of the night air. It is an innocent question and perhaps had Warden been having a conversation with anyone else he would have taken it differently. But Aletta is not everyone else - she knows what she is asking just as he knows what the answer will be. Despite the outward display of anger in his tense posture, the stallion does not move away from her. 

He knows what her assumption is and he suddenly found himself wishing that he was like his mother - where the future could be seen from all sides, both good and bad, so that he would be useful, that he could share wonderful sights with others and not find himself hiding from them. But darkness is all he sees in his futures - death, destruction, lives ripped apart - never anything beautiful or hopeful. Only shadowy futures of those he meets; forced to look into the darkest parts of their lives and continue his life knowing that he cannot do anything to stop it from reaching fruition.

He is no Oracle, no Prophet.

He is the Bringer of Death.

“No,” he answers in a quiet breath, his voice low and seeping thinly through his teeth. He inhales sharply, stomping a forehoof into the meadow grass. “I am not what you think. You should count yourself lucky that I have not already seen your future - and you should ask the stars that I never do.”

WARDEN

@[aletta]
um never apologize!!! 
I love your novels

[aletta]

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If she were a more prideful mare, she might have smiled. Aletta has no qualms about her temperament - not when it had secured the borders of her home, not when it had given her a reputation that made rogues or herd stallions think twice about Murmuring Rivers. The silver mare will never be one to be called soft or demure; Aletta had been crafted from the peaks of Mountains and was as strong and resilient as the stone that had been bred into her bones. At this moment, she merely shrugs her small shoulders. Why had they answered her? It was something she asked herself often enough; their messages came in the heart of darkness - bringing a momentary flash of light - before they left her (stumbling) in this endless abyss called life. "Try again," the former Regent suggests. Aletta angles her head to glance at Warden again but the opalescence of his proud horns catches what dim light there is and the older mare looks up towards their imperial spirals. Looks past him to those silent, celestial guardians and wonders again what they must think of this world. Aletta even wonders briefly what they might think of her and why it is they don't answer her winged companion. As she has come to know, maybe the answer is in the silence. Or maybe not. "Ask again and again until they have no choice but to answer you," she murmurs. Above them, the sky shimmers in silence. No answers are twinkling in the quiet but the questions they are asking are to each other - to themselves - and perhaps don't require cosmic Magic just yet. (As much as she would like to deny it - to refuse to acknowledge that she even needs it - Aletta knows she will require the help of some kind to get home.) The lull that falls between them feels almost begruding with the wanderer having another revelation (that her stars might not be as powerful as they seem, that she might require Magic now) and the shadows fill with it. When her dark eyes come back down from their midnight vigil, Warden is looking away. There is a rigid set to his stance, a hardness to his shoulders that wasn't there before and a terseness that clips his words short. Aletta tilts her head slightly, her ears pricking forward as his snake back. Her relief exhales through her nostrils. No, he tells her and as much as it should frustrate her, she feels... calm. He inhales quickly, like he might suck in his anger that way. It makes her consider him, again. Nothing good ever comes from trying to contain darkness, she has learned. (The darkness can spread but it abates. A dawn must always come. There is always a light to pierce the dark. The stars can attest to that.) She doesn't know he calls himself the Bringer of Death. He remains as he was in her questioning eyes. When the Guard speaks again, Aletta lifts her head. The stallion stomps the ground but she is too busy studying his abrupt angles, the way that he reveals something else about himself despite the cover of nightfall. "I don't believe in Luck," she firmly states. It comes out harsher than she intends; where his anger seeps, hers blooms to ash. Warden claims he is not what she assumes and she snorts at that. "What are you then, if not @[Warden]?" All Magic is tainted in some way. It claims a price, always. "Have you tried asking the stars what is at the Heart of it?" His Magic, she means. At the center of him. The bay stallion never revealed what he asked, after all. Only that he did. aletta we turned our back on ordinary from the start show me the sky falling down photo credit to charlie---x

lets get philosophical, philosophical

[Warden]

The darkness that plagues his mind is devastating and unrelenting, a constant shadow that looms heavy and thick; deep and dark as it forces itself to be seen. It is inescapable, just as the future is for everyone. But the knowing - god, the knowing - tortures him more than he can even admit aloud. Even his family does not know the truth of the darkness that plagues him - not really, not in a way they can understand, much like the silver mare that gleams like starlight beside him. Rhaegor and Warlight might be the only ones who have come close to recognizing the burden he bears, but even then, there is no way he can make the darkness palpable for them. It is still just an entity, an idea, while for Warden it is very much real as it rushes towards him with its own agenda.

Warden’s lips curl unpleasantly into a creasing frown on his handsome face, the wrinkle of his brow creating more shadow to cross his pale skin, the darkness of his eyes sliding slowly towards Aletta’s. “Right,” he replies uncannily with a scoff, “you believe in the stars.” He is bitter in the way he now hangs his head almost lazily, no longer searching the night skies and their silent stars as he remembers their curse upon him. It isn’t Aletta’s fault, of course, and though he is fully conscious of the incredulity and rudeness in his voice and posture, he cannot stop as he unloads broken piece by broken piece of himself onto her.

The stallion tosses his head, inky tendrils of forelock spilling in between the deep blue of his twisting horns, imagining how ironic it would be if a vision came to him now, of Aletta. It’s almost a humorous thought - how fitting - but there is a piece of him, the unbroken part, that hopes he will not see her fate. Her next question, heavy with accusation and clipped with the sharpness of her voice, brings his gaze back to her with a thoughtful expression that quickly turns aloof.

“You don’t understand,” he replies bitterly, his voice grumbling and frustrated. No one ever will. His eyes tightly shut as a rattling sigh shudders from his lips, shaking his head gently. “It’s more than I can bear.” Warden’s chest tightens, creating a thin and weary voice that floats into the nothingness of the air that surrounds them.

“The heart of it?” Warden almost laughs. “There is no heart of it. It’s all a game. A sick, terrible game that brings them entertainment - to give a mere mortal a glimpse into the future, to watch him try to fathom all the death and the destruction of everyone he loves - without giving him the power to stop any of it.” The stallion catches his breath in his throat. “There is no point and that will be the death of me.”

The same silence from before falls between them, groaning and twisting with the weight of his words in the air. It’s full of tension and he wonders if the stars will smite him for speaking his thoughts of them aloud. He nearly prays they will.

Warden finally sighs, closing his eyes momentarily as he shifts his weight on the black of his muscular legs. “I’m done asking,” he admits gently, the terseness that once resided there now fading. “I don’t think I’d like their answer, anyway.”

WARDEN

@[aletta]
wow he does not like being asked to question things LOL