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