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