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?
we turned our back on ordinary from the start
show me the sky falling down
photo credit to charlie---x