[private] i know you can't remember how to shine

[Lanterna]

It is still hours before dawn when she wakes beneath a sky already changing at the furthest seams. She can see a line of watery orange, but it bleeds to salmon, to pink, to a periwinkle blue before surrendering again to the star flecked dark blue of retreating night. She has always liked the way the sky catches fire every morning, the way those distant horizons match her so well, and as a girl she had daydreamed about going there to that faraway place. To that crease of color where it cuts a hole in the sky large enough to let the night bleed out.

She is old enough now to have let go of such youthful fancies, to understand that this streak of color is a place she can never visit. A heaven meant only for those yearning eyes to see and never touch. Maybe it is the place where dreams gather as everyone stirs awake, the place where dreams burn like kindling at the start of a new day until the memory of them is little more than a wisp of evasive smoke. Maybe no one would sleep anymore if they could remember all the things they’ve seen in their dreams.

She rises even though it is still early, and when she looks around at this familiar forested place she is unsurprised to find that both mother and Drakon are gone. Only dad is there with her, and though she studies the peace of his relaxed body, she is not entirely convinced that he is still asleep at all. He is the thing that keeps them anchored, the heart that beats inside all their chests. He is what binds them all when mothers wildness threatens to undo everything.

Drakon is more like mother than he is like dad, she thinks. And it isn’t because of the storms he wields, the tempests that track him like hounds ready to break themselves open against the stones of his will. It is because of the weight she thinks she has seen in those vast red eyes, the way she thinks he would burn even without the fire igniting against his skin because mother showed him how. Mother had never shown her, though.

She finds him easily enough, and though the ache inside her chest longs for her to be pressed to his side beneath the fading star soaked night, she is wary of the smolder in his charred black skin. “Is it safe?” She asks him in her quiet way, motioning to the fire that leaps across his skin. Their childhood had been one of taking turns in pain, of burning one another until they learned how to be more careful. She was always burned worse, though, always forgetting not to collide against him in a fit of laughter that turned to tears. Her flames hardly ever seemed to hurt him, or else he was an excellent liar.

“Can’t sleep?” She asks even though it is already morning, already time to be awake. “Me neither.” She watches him sidelong, and the flames of her mane and tail drift windswept over her dark and gold brindled skin. Her fiery lantern eyes trace his face and the shape of his back, follow the paths of cracked fissures before finally lifting again to look away at the pink horizon instead. “So,” a pause and a little smile, crooked in the corner of her mouth because she knows he already knows what she’s about to ask, knows that this question is as old as they are, “do you remember what you dreamed about?”

She has asked him this every morning they’ve spent together, with those lantern eyes cast always to that slice of salmon and peach along the horizon. That place she thinks is the keeper of dreams.

lanterna

like wildfire, it starts in my chest

@drakon

[drakon]

drakon—

There is little gentleness inside of Drakon. Little quiet and little things that could be claimed and tagged as tender. He is, instead, a thing of thunderstorms. He is summer rain and lightning that cleaves the sky in two. He is his mother’s energy spent and splayed across the warm, humid months and it follows wherever he goes. The grass burns beneath his feet. The rain that comes is violent. But for any piece of him that was to harbor something soft, something sweet, it would be for his sister. It would be for her alone.

So he is quiet as she approaches him and the smile he gives her is distracted but kind.

“Never can,” he murmurs back, his booming voice trapped into the near whisper—not willing yet to wake those around them. To announce their presence to the sleeping world. It was true though, and he knows that she knows it as well as he. How often sleep eluded him. How often he would sleep beneath the summer of his own making, glancing up at the promise of thunderstorms building over him. The rain barely checked back as his own gifts grew and his control grew with it, albeit slower.

He finally drags his red gaze back toward her, the smile brighter as he focuses on her face. “Safe as fire can be, I think,” he frowns then and glances down, flames racing up his legs in response to his thoughts and then snuffing out, leaving the spot smoking like a forgotten campfire. At her question, his gaze drifts again until he is looking back out at the same sleepy sky as she. “Eternal summer,” there is no expression that follows as he muses on it. “Wheat and sun and endless heat for as far as I could see.”