 what is dead may never die;
She knows almost nothing, but she knows this place.
She'd followed them here, the words of others who had whispered in the meadow and the field. She'd hung around the fringes, listening in, picking apart their conversations from afar until she got the information she needed. She has never been here before; indeed, she's never been much of anywhere before, but as the land opens up beneath her she knows that she has come to the right place.
Will she find her mother or father here? She isn't sure, and she also isn't sure that it's important. Their identities may be one of the few things she knows with absolute certainty, but there is nothing that drives her to find them. They are simply pillars of her world, things that support her existence. She does not need to converse with them; there are no answers that they can give her. They are as unreachable and unknowable as the sun and the moon, as abstract to her as any constellation. But they are equally vital: without knowledge of them, surely she would be lost.
She walks with desultory, meandering steps. Her pace is slow, but not especially careful. She drinks in the world around her, the bowl of the mountains that give the Valley its name, the choppy landscape that has so obviously (to her, at least) been recently chewed up in a major way. It is healing itself, she can see that too, but it is not yet healed.
The snow is here too, and she likes it no more than she had in the meadow where she'd first found herself. It is cold, and she does not like the cold, but she refuses to shiver. She dreams of a world where she can will the chill from her bones.
Unimpressed, she halts to more effectively survey her surroundings. She must almost blend in, a grey creature against the snowy grey backdrop of the Valley. There is nothing remarkable about her – nothing to indicate who she is, or what she's been, or how little she knows. Perhaps if the ground were not snowy, the wilting plants might tell her story, but it is not spring, and snow does not shy away from the touch of the time-tossed filly-mare, the girl who should not be here, but is.
A stranger, or perhaps really, just strange.
but rises again
Aletheia harder and stronger
 | | Skegg\uc0\u491 ld, Sk\'e1lm\u491 ld, Skildir ro Klofnir | Thorunn wears her grief like a cloak, covering her and hiding her from the world. She sweats under it, the droplets of repressed emotion threatening to soak her entirely. At first she openly sobbed into her father, but he wasn't far behind mother. She loved Librette, but she adored her father. She wanted nothing more in this life than to be just like him. To be loved by him. To be his shadow, his image, despite looking so much like her mother.
When he was gone, all she had was Val.
But Val was less and less in the Valley and more and more in the Amazons, with Natyl (her half sister, their half-sister).
And Thorunn? Alone in the Valley, with its echoes that haunt her with the memory of her parents. She is simultaneously comforted and horrified by it. One minute she can almost smell her father, the next she is reminded that he is gone. Her emotions run wild through time and space until, at last, she is set to wandering the Valley in randomness.
That's when she finds the celestial girl, perched innocently, looking more like a dove than a raptor. Thorunn approaches with her usual sense of distrust, fully aware of the dangers in the world. Val may never have seen them but the death of their parents made it too obvious to her. This stranger could mean so much.
"Can I help you?" she asks, her voice cracked from sorrow. | | Thorunn | | immortal, mind-reading immune daughter of Covet and Librette |
what is dead may never die;
Someone approaches, and Aletheia turns her head to regard the girl with cool detachment. She is a strange kind of angel, this celestial girl, time-tossed, space-weary, and now spat out for some strange reason into the land of Beqanna with nothing but names and a powerful sense of strangeness.
Looking at the approaching chestnut, she has no idea that the girl is her half-sister. Aletheia doesn't even know what Librette looked like, only that Librette was her name and the Valley was her home. She doesn't know that the woman is dead, but it wouldn’t have mattered much to her if she had.
She observes this girl with cool detachment, her eyes not malicious, but simply…distant, uninvolved, perennially above the fray. She can see the way this girl looks haunted. She knows what it is to be haunted – perhaps she even knows what it is to do some of the haunting herself. She doesn't know what it is that chases the girl, she doesn't know what it is that ruins her and saves her. She hasn't decided whether she cares, but is leaning toward no.
Can I help you? The girl asks, and Aletheia blinks lazily. "No." she says, plainly. Her voice is flat, emotionless, but not otherwise unpleasant. She sighs and decides to continue. "But I am not looking for help." If she is going to live in this place, she might as well get to know the inhabitants. Or at least, she assumes that this girl is an inhabitant. Why else would a girl be found wandering the borders?
Or perhaps that's the custom. She wouldn't really know.
"I live here." she says, possibly by way of explanation, possibly as an unrelated comment. "This is the Valley, is it not? Clearly, she is not good at conversation yet. She is absolutely certain that she's found what she is looking for, that this is the Valley. She can't explain how, but she can feel it in her bones. And yet, somehow it seemed like a good idea to ask.
And now she is entirely content to watch the girl, waiting to see what kind of answer she comes up with. It does not even occur to her to give her name. It does not occur to her to ask for the girl's. It just occurs to her to stare, in silence-by-default.
but rises again
Aletheia harder and stronger
| | Skegg\uc0\u491 ld, Sk\'e1lm\u491 ld, Skildir ro Klofnir | Thorunn recognizes the distant look in the other girls eyes, but she mistakes it for a mirror of her own sorrow. Her distance is because of death, Thorunn reasons, when really it is life. Her own inception. She's entirely unaware that the other girl comes from a place so foreign to Beqanna (yet so familiar), because she seems no different than herself. Thorunn is always projecting herself onto others, assuming their motivations are much the same as her own. She's so wrong in this.
Yet, so right. There's a connection between the two that neither have quite placed a finger on.
"Oh," she says when the girl declines her help, watching her eyes sweep the land around them. Thorunn's own orange ones follow her path, taking in the desolate land. It's empty these days, just echoes of the two greats who've since...
She swallows.
But the girl keeps talking and she has a momentary distraction. "You do? I've never seen you before. I was born here." and then, "Yes, this is the Valley." It's strange, the girl claims to live here but is unsure of where -here- is. While she wishes to be stoic she is still a child, and still ever curious. "How long have you lived here? Why have I never seen you?" The words are tumbled, reeling from her mouth before she can stop them. | | Thorunn | | immortal, mind-reading immune daughter of Covet and Librette |
what is dead may never die;
As Thorrun takes her turn to speak, Aletheia finally begins to notice the girl's demeanor. It is similar to her own, quiet and subdued, as though somehow faraway. But she does not remember this girl from the place she's been; even with her memory fading, turning from technicolor to black and white and finally evaporating altogether, she would remember if this girl had been there. So it's not that – but then, what?
The girl seems surprised to hear that she lives here, and proceeds to pepper her with questions. Aletheia cannot help but smile, a small smile that looks exactly like her mother's (although she doesn't know it). At the end of the day, Thorrun is exactly the age she looks, unlike Aletheia, who has the benefit of so many more years (how many exactly is unclear) packed into a body that shouldn't be able to sustain it. If the situations were reversed, Aletheia could easily have held her tongue almost endlessly.
And, to a point, she does, letting Thorrun finish everything before she even starts to talk. She's got all day to explore, to answer questions. Aletheia is still learning of the concept of time, and so minutes don't feel precious to her. There is no hurry if there is no way to measure what it is to be early or late.
"I think I may have lived here forever." she answers honestly, without irony. Her voice is flat, as though she's speaking facts in a lecture, but beautiful and lyrical as though she's speaking poetry. "I was not born here. But I think I would've been, perhaps should've been, or at least, could've been." She does not explain further.
"As it happens, I've never seen you before either. Our paths simply…haven't crossed." Her voice arcs upward at the end, a verbal shrug. She smiles again, her mother's small half-smile. "I doesn't surprise me, really. You can't be everywhere in the Valley at once, and whatever you might be seeking here, or expecting to see…" she pauses for a moment. "I am not it."
She doesn't know that it's impolite to say these things. It never occurs to her that she shouldn't highlight the fact that the girl is obviously looking for something, or running from something, or both. She may know nothing of the world, but she knows that any horse who would wander the borders like this must have a reason for doing so – pacing and seeking are the same among the stars or on the planets. She doesn't know that, down here, such things are not discussed. And she certainly doesn't know that the oblique trauma she is so unknowingly driving at is the death of her own mother, and the death of the closest thing that Librette had ever had to a lover.
but rises again
Aletheia harder and stronger
| | Skegg\uc0\u491 ld, Sk\'e1lm\u491 ld, Skildir ro Klofnir | The other girl speaks in riddles and Thorunn can feel her patience run thin. She is not one to take her time discussing the flowers or speaking pretty things - there are other things to do. There is no time to waste, this life is short. She's unaware (or at least, doesn't understand) her immortality quite yet. The death of her parents is still very fresh and reminds her time and time again that it's only a matter of time until she joins them. All she has is Val and the Valley, and the former is too independent to be tethered to her.
She tilts her head and pauses just long enough for the mare to continue, before snorting indignantly. "I'm looking for no one, just who is here. And I am sure you've never been here, at least not forever. I was born here. My mother and father," the slight catch of her voice may betray her, does betray her, "they held high ranks here. Can you say the same?" | | Thorunn | | immortal, mind-reading immune daughter of Covet and Librette |
what is dead may never die;
"Yes."
She says it as easily and unhurriedly as though she is remarking on the weather, and with even less inflection. She takes it as fact because she assumes it must be fact, not because she knows it to be true. How could she know, really? She had not been told of titles or honors. There had been four things, four things she knows, no more and no less. But surely, surely if her parents were tied so closely to this place, they must have had a high rank.
What would she think if she understood what her father was to the Valley? What would she think if she understood what her mother was to her father? If she knew the details (or, really, lack thereof) of her own conception and existence? How would it warp her to understand? Perhaps it would break her. Perhaps it would ruin her. But it probably would not – she would probably take it in stride, blinking as her mind adjusted to the new paradigm, and continue on, unflappable.
She lets the silence hang between them for a moment.
"Yes, I can."
She does not hesitate, speaking again smoothly and quickly, soon enough that Thorrun cannot get a word in edgewise, but unhurriedly enough that it is clear she does not feel defensive. She has nothing to prove – not here, nor anywhere else. It's merely that her companion has asked a question, and questions imply that an answer is needed (except when they don't).
Her icy eyes watch the girl with a cool interest. "My name is Aletheia." her voice is calm, unhurried. "The Valley is my home." There is an almost-rhythm to her normally so affectless voice as she speaks, pausing ever so slightly in between as she recounts the few things she knows. It's almost poetry, this little list of hers, and coming from her icy lips it cannot help sounding like verse."Carnage is my father." There is one more piece, one more verse. This is the time that she should pause longer, for added dramatic effect. This is the moment before the pin drops, the last second of silence before everything will tilt. But she doesn't pause longer. She does nothing but speak, because she doesn't know. "And Librette is my mother."
The words are out, and suddenly the things she doesn't know are enough to fill an ocean.
but rises again
Aletheia harder and stronger
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