03-04-2018, 11:27 AM
Saedís, her starlit face flashing his loss as her own. Saedís, bright-eyed, became gentle as he leaned into her – lending him the tender warmth of her heart. How his words soften her young face, how their companionship lulls the storm-grey of her eyes into stillness. She cannot know of that which he speaks; of loyalty and kinship, for they are things she has seldom known. Saedís – belonging only to the stars and the sea and the otherworldly recognizes only the same sea-longing in his eyes; another child of Water left parched upon the ground.
O! To be so torn, and she is muddied by her indecision, earth and water together until she is no more than she is; a small mare – with the indecision of dreamers in her eye. In that, she is so unlike Warrick who has become one with the sea, wind, sky and earth of his home, who knows every face from another, who glides through life with the essence of ocean on his skin, inexplicable sorrow in his eyes, who designs every action himself.
Saedís does everything by chance: each breath is erratic; each movement unplanned; she leaves them to fate just as she leaves the earth and the wind, the rain and sunlight, certain of her own inability to control them – but even then she is certain that the earth deliberately leads her forward, the wind to whisper tales of the world in her ear, the rain to wash doubt from her skin, the sunlight to illuminate her path: some may call her insane; claiming that all of existence is as she wishes it to be, but she is simple and true in her thoughts… these things are hers, as surely as she is theirs’. Just as she is sure Warrick knows the names of every horse who has crashed haphazardly through the boundaries which he has set so eloquently around the lands themselves, marking border from border, Kingdom apart from Kingdom; he knows the names, the words and the eyes of those who would call themselves Tephrans – for it is in his mind, his body and his blood to know. She wonders if he had known from the first moment that his first hoof had crossed the borders of these lands which will always be his own. He belongs to these lands just as she belongs to him – to his lion-heart and star-soul. To him and all the other souls that she keeps in her heart; to the gentle ambition of Wound, to the sun-bright kindness of Amorette, to her lover Garbage – as fleeting as time itself. Yes, she thinks, she belongs here too – dream-song and stardust.
It is startling, but it is there, always there, as the stream beneath the meadow-soil, as the bubbling of water in the midst of rock; it is there, and even she, even Saedís, cannot run from that which is invariably of her own flesh; it is there, and there are no excuses; it is there, and it will always be there, for it is of the eternity of the sea.
”I think.” she begins, ”That you and Tephra have been the salvation for many lost souls” and here; she presses her pale-white forehead into the tangles of his neck. She lends him the white-hot brilliance of the stars that was given to her – they erupt from her like lava from his volcano, swallowing the darkness around them, coating them in galaxies and brilliant star-beams. He has brought her a moment (however fleeting) of peace, and now she brings him the stars he so desperately seeks answers from. They twirl and dance around him; a plethora of embers – distant and ethereal. She closes her eyes against their brightness – wondering if he will find what he looks for in the faces of her stars. She wonders if he will see the faces of those he loves.
”Tephra didn´t give you a family, sea-hawk, you did. She would be lost without her protector, lost to the whims of sea and time.” her voice is as gentle as the whisper of moonbeams and stardust that press against their skin; a gentle reminder of who he is.