Her darkness comes like the night above them. It comes in rhythms and waves - reminiscent of tides and seasons and daybreak and night. Constancy and consistencies all found in nature. The darkness comes in with its black veil and then comes the dawn to lift it. Again and again, in a way that reflects the world as she has known it.
"I do," she retorts back at him because it is a truth to her. Luck is the convergence of those elemental forces; it is merely being in the right place at the right time. When the tide turns. When the dawn comes. When the wind sings. So, of course, she believes in her stars. Aletta watches the way that he drops his head like his disbelief is the reason that hangs it so low. An ear flicks behind her, listening to the cicadas court the darkness with a song. Why shouldn't he hang his head, some part of her thinks? Why should he believe when he has made it clear that he has asked and they've never answered.
His spirit isn't like sweet Brynn's, though. It isn't something gentle that needs bolstering, something to help stay above the floodwaters of living. Despite his incredulity at her question, Warden rises again to answer her. What he tells her though makes her stand eerily still because it is not the Night Guard she hears. Somebody has told her this before, echoes of the past shimmering before her in the shadows and starlight. Of her blue-eyed daughter from those last days on the Pass - the last time they were all together: 'You don't understand,' Lilliana had said, finally breaking under the weight of always running. 'I can't keep doing this,' she had said and that is the voice she hears when Warden says that he is buckling under the weight of knowing.
(Aletta doesn't know the burdens he carries, the way that the future looms in his mind. She doesn't know how it might make him ache when the only pain she allows herself is to her mortal joints when the weather turns too quickly, when the frost comes sooner than anticipated.)
"I don't," she tells him plainly. "You are still standing before me. You are still here. I am no more able to talk to a ghost than a star." The pale mare, outlined by star shine, exhales sharply. "You exist therefore you bruise. A mountain turns into a valley but it does not mean that it is always laid low. At some point, the land rises up again."
In the years since that night in the Pass - when the winter winds had blown cold and her children began to pale from living - Aletta told them much the same thing she tells Warden now (though it comes out softer than the tone she had taken with her eldest son): "If you are done asking, you might as well be done with living."
Her head lifts as she considers the contours of him - from the spirals of his horns to the way that he holds his wings to his sides. The brevity has started to fade from his voice but it doesn't dissipate from her proud stance. "We will all die eventually, @[Warden]. And-," Aletta falters here, struggling because she has never doubted her stars. (And a part of her thinks that his premonitions aren't from them at all.) The wanderer heatedly speaks again, finding her faith. "It's not the ending that matters. It's the heart of the story - the things we fill it with. Fill the center of it with moments that matter. Fill it so close to bursting so that when Death does come, it is not the ending that matters."
It would come anyways, stars or no stars. With his premonitions or without them. Much like her answer, the one he might not want to know.
we turned our back on ordinary from the start
show me the sky falling down
photo credit to charlie---x