I should have loved a thunderbird instead
at least when spring comes they roar back again
Aegean has siblings, but he has never been particularly close to them. He knows that he carries pieces of them inside of himself, even if he could not tell you which belonged to whom. He just knows that he is a tapestry of his mothers’ love and a reflection of the world in which he was born. He was the Prince of the Silver Cove and then nothing and then a resident of Hyaline but these external things did not define him.
He continues to weave stars and snow but he grows surprised when they begin to morph into something outside of his control. His gift has been something that he has needed to learn for himself. It was so close to what his mother could do—weaving reality into dreams—but his had been given to him later in life. He has needed to understand the threads that hold it together; he has needed to understand it for himself.
So today is when he learns how his gift does not just react to him.
How it is so easily influenced by those he is around.
Because the stars begin to grow further apart and then fill with the ocean of his childhood. He tilts his glowing, antlered head in some thought, curious at how one of the stars becomes a fish that quickly zips through the air and then another grows and grows until it is a translucent jellyfish, slowly going upward.
Before he knows it, they stand in the middle of the sea and he can smell the salt on the air and can hear the dull roar of waves, the way that the water moves around them. It holds onto its star-like quality, leaving it dreamy enough to not be mistaken with the reality of the water, but it is real—real enough.
In awe of his own creation and how it has seemingly come out of its own will, he turns his head back to the little girl, thinking back on the questions she had asked and he had failed to answer immediately, too lost in his own thoughts again. “No, not sad,” he thinks, giving her as serious of an answer as he can. “I love both my dreams and the ones I make for myself in equal measure, even if they are different.”
He catches the tear on her cheek but does not stop to think that perhaps it is sorrow.
He, too, cries at beautiful things and thinks nothing of it.
“I will stay,” he says because he has nowhere else that he needs to be. “However long you need.”
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
(I think I made you up inside my head.)