[open] all love must leave

[Evenstar]

can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars,
I could really use a wish right now;

Once, she had been alone on purpose, and hated it.

She hadn’t known yet how to shield herself from the emotions that rolled off them in waves, overwhelmed by their anger and their sorrow. It was not a power she had been born with, and certainly not one she had asked for. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask her mother for help—her mother, that angel-beauty with the wicked morals that Evenstar never could make sense of. It didn’t matter that Ryatah could have taught her how to close herself off, to only let in what she wanted to get in. 

Self-imposed exile had been the easier (weaker)  option, hiding where their emotions could not find her.

But the lands are not as they had once been, and soon the solitude had not been a choice. No longer did she have to go to the far shores or the depths of the forest to evade the masses; they did not exist. And she finds that she misses it—misses their medley of emotion, being pulled by the tide of their despair and buoyed by their joy.

She is alone now, and still she hates it.

She stands now in a quiet meadow, beneath the hush of night. There is the soft rustling of a cold wind through dying leaves, the empty knocking of bare limbs against one another, but otherwise it is silent. It had been a relatively mild winter, and though there was no snow on the ground the grass had a dull, tired look to it, as if it had given up and would instead sleep until spring. She could not say that she blamed it. 

Something about the cold seemed to make the stars shine brighter, she thought, as she looked up at them through the soft plumes of her breath in the air. It was a cloudless sky, and the night seemed to stretch on for infinity, glittering black, with the starlight blinking like a thousand suns. She watches, confused and transfixed, as starlight seems to stream towards her, the ribbons of it braiding together in their descent until they collide with her skin. For a moment, her body flashes white-hot, eliciting a soft gasp of surprise.

She cannot explain it, but she can feel them, the stars that now burned inside of her chest. They hum like electricity, threading themselves through her veins much like the empathy had. Hesitantly, she reaches for that thread of power, letting it flare and staring in wonder at the silver starlight that creates a shield around her.

I'm praying that this stairway leads somewhere like Heaven's door,
and when you get there don't look down

evenstar

[Zilla]

The afternoon is long gone. The meadow has settled into a still, moonless quiet, darkness lying heavy over the tired grass. Frost has sharpened everything to hard edges. The stars included, small and fierce and very far away. A low wind threads through the treeline, rattling the few leaves still clinging to bare branches, and Zilla’s breath ghosts out in slow gray clouds before fading. She has been here a while, cropping what little the grass still offers, in no hurry to be anywhere else. Solitude suits her, or the world has decided it does. It always decides the moment it catches the skull of her face and the old horns curving back from a young head. She stopped arguing with first impressions long ago.

Even unlit, her diamond armor drinks what faint glow the night allows, giving back a dim, iridescent blue across her shoulders that swells and dims with her breathing.

She sees the light before she sees the mare. It peels loose from the sky somehow and pours downward, strands twisting together as they fall until they meet the stranger’s coat and sink into her like water into dry earth, gone. Zilla’s ears pin and her jaw stalls mid-grind. For one beat, the plates along her shoulders flare white, seams running with fire before she has decided anything at all. Then it settles back to blue and her ears come forward again, she resumes chewing. A stranger has just swallowed a piece of the night, and Zilla files it away with every other thing the world does without asking her first.

Then, because it seems worth mentioning, she crosses the quiet ground toward the pale silver ward the light has gathered into. With every step, the last of the glow slides from her armor, silver against iridescent blue, two coats of light grown on two backs, neither of them asked for.

“You’re glowing,” she says, flat, laying the words between them like a stone. Not wonder, not warning, only a fact. It does not occur to her that a mare alone beneath the stars might not want a skull-faced thing with ibex horns stepping out of the dark to point it out. It rarely does.

“It suits you,” she adds after a moment, in the same weatherless voice. She means it gently, whether it lands that way she could not say. She never can.

@Evenstar