laugh hard, it’s a long way to the ground; any

[Carinae]

astra inclinant, non necessitant ------ (the stars incline; they do not compel) She walks at the witching hour. It is not because she is any kind of demon or witch. It is because nighttime – especially heartbreakingly clear nights such as these – is where the stars are closer, when she can throw her head back and stare at them till her eyes burn. It is because this is the time when her coat becomes black, scattered with stars, mirroring the night sky. It’s nostalgic and lovely and makes her think, as she so often does, of space, of their timelessness when she had always reflected the stars because everything had been stars, stars up and down and all around her. Now she is terrestrial, though she does not know what catalyst caused her to become so. Her heart-home is the stars, so she has found nowhere within Beqanna to stay. She wanders, nomadic, sees ice-lands and jungles and deserts, but mostly she just stays in the meadow. The meadow, she knows, is where her type belong – the nomads, with their restless hearts and fickle faiths. Though she finds it easy not to speak (she is not truly an alien but it feels like that sometimes, how she is sky-colored and was born amongst black holes and nebulas, how her mother was a star and her father, a god), she does grow lonely. In space there was always sister her mirror-twin. Here there are a few faces (including a joyous, tailless boy), but none were constants in the way sister was, not even close. She walks at witching hour on the cloudless night, a constellation draped across her back, wishing, as always, on all the stars. carinae

[dolohov and lestrange]

sorry first post with them. so gross. plus cassi words are intimidating. just excuse the words. D:

And I said, ashes to ashes, we all fall down. I wanna hear you sing the praise. I said, ashes to ashes we all fall down. We got innocence for days. Everybody burn the house right down. It wasn’t surprising that they were on their own. Elite would certainly never have won any best mother of the year awards. They never knew their father but both secretly considered him foolish for even talking to their mother. She’d half-heartedly made sure they were weaned before her disappearances ran longer and longer until eventually she never returned. But the twins were not disheartened. They both knew it had been inevitable. Dolohov and Lestrange were both on the cusp of adulthood - consisting of a varying mix of pink, gold, and silver and long, lean bodies. They were wanderers, scavenging the earth in ways they only knew how. Though it was night time, brother and sister wandered aimlessly through the quiet, still night. Lestrange often times suffered from bouts of insomnia during the night and Dolohov was reluctant to allow her free reign of the meadow alone. So they walked in companionable silence, with Dolohov serving as lookout and Lestrange’s thoughts sporadically moving through her mind and her limbs sometimes moving drunkenly. But he is used to her many idiocrasies and remains unconcerned for the most part. He mostly hated the hallucinations and the nightmares; slurred speech and sluggishness he could easily handle. She walked at her own pace while her brother trailed close behind. Swaying slightly, she was certainly enjoying their impromptu late evening stroll. But her amber eyes soon flicker to a moving night sky right in front of her and her destination is suddenly clear for once. Dolohov grumbles disapprovingly under his breath, but she pays him no heed. Soon a pair of pink-tinged palominos stand before the breathing constellation and amber eyes (one pair in wonderment, the other pair in dubiousness) stare unguardedly at the stranger. They’re not really aware of societal norms and how staring could be considered quite rude. Nonetheless, Lestrange breaks their silence as her burning curiosity could wait no longer. “Did you fall?”

[Carinae]

astra inclinant, non necessitant ------ (the stars incline; they do not compel) She wonders if meteors remember falling. She does not. What she remembers is this: she had been there, as usual. Usual being a strange term, of course, for nothing was usual about the way she grew up, the way she watched galaxies fall into black holes, the way time seemed to go on both forever and not at all, the way she existed without oxygen, was able to subsist on nothingness. She had been there, and perhaps she had been watching her sister – she often did, she liked the liquidity of her movements, tried to mirror them. Maybe she had closed her eyes. Maybe she hadn’t. There had been no sense of falling. It was more like waking from a dream. She went from nothingness to grass beneath her feet, coat changed from ink blackness tinged with the cosmos to a bright blue studded with clouds. Suddenly space was beyond her reach again and she was terrestrial. She wonders, on her worse nights, if it had been a dream. She wonders this as she learns more and more of how impossible it was, to live the way she had. But then there are other nights, nights like tonight when she can practically taste starlight on her tongue and she knows it was real, all of it was real. She spots the twins as they spot her. She takes in their own coloring, the pinks and grays and golds. She offers a smile, hesitant but there, although perhaps unnoticed in the play of shadows. “I can’t remember,” she says, quite honestly, “it was like I blinked, and then I was here.” carinae

[dolohov and lestrange]

And I said, ashes to ashes, we all fall down. I wanna hear you sing the praise. I said, ashes to ashes we all fall down. We got innocence for days. Everybody burn the house right down. Lestrange is well aware of what it’s like to wonder if she lived in reality or if she wandered freely in a dream world. She could never quite accurately explain her shaky grasp on reality to her brother; she lived and breathed hallucinations most days. Although rarely did they occur when she was wide awake - she was plagued during her moments of drowsy unawareness. They were disconcerting yet accompanied with occasional amusement and delight. Sometimes she daydreamed that she was walking amongst clouds while other days she watched giant shadow creatures engulf the other horses of the meadow. She always reveled in how unsuspecting the stupid horses were of such magnificent predators. She especially enjoyed relaying these small hunts to her brother for he thoroughly appreciated a good spot of hunting every now and then. Dolohov certainly never thought any less of her when she fell into her little bouts of confused reality. Dolohov was perhaps the one steady thing in her life. He hadn’t left her side since the beginning – determinedly following after her through the birth canal to even now when she wished to investigate a strange fallen star. He was careful to never fully smother her free ranging tendencies, but he remained ever vigilant when it came to potential threats. Although he may not be the largest of creatures, he could certainly be a vicious little thing when it mattered. He pulled up alongside her left flank just as she breathed a quiet “Fascinating!” through her lips. The young stallion knows that she’ll have thrown all caution to the wind just by the fact that this stranger appeared almost as fantastical as some of the things she regularly saw in her own little world. Dolohov glances amusedly between the two mares, although he is already aware that he has to be the voice of reason if the situation unravels into instability. He offers a small, somewhat guarded smile to the cosmic stranger and studies her with a sober curiosity. “Did you perhaps hit your head on the way down? You could be suffering from memory loss.” Lestrange gasps with sharp worry and scrutinizes the length of the stranger as if she could diagnose memory loss from her outside appearance alone. “That sounds troubling. Does your head hurt terribly?”

[Carinae]

astra inclinant, non necessitant ------ (the stars incline; they do not compel) They are alike and unalike, the two of them. There are times when Carinae has thought herself mad. There have been too many improbable – if not impossible – worlds. Space, the aching vastness of it; but also the quest world, the world of dragons and trolls and fire where she had hurt and burned and died. (It was there she’d uncovered her darker heart, the heart bred into her by her father – the discovery that, sometimes, it was a pleasure to burn.) She is a woman stitched of three worlds, but truthfully, she only aches for one. She misses the stars fiercely, the fact they adorn her like jewelry come nightfall (assuming it is a clear night, at least) is a small comfort. She’d had a twin, too, her brother who had matched her in every way. She wonders about him. Wonders if he is in the stars or if he, too, has fallen. She smiles at them, glad for company. While she wasn’t particularly social (it’s still something that doesn’t sit comfortably with her, in space there was only her queer family and sound didn’t carry), she is lonely, here, grounded in the terrestrial world. “It’s possible,” she muses, “but when I appeared here, nothing hurt.” (Nothing physical, at least.) carinae

[dolohov and lestrange]

And I said, ashes to ashes, we all fall down. I wanna hear you sing the praise. I said, ashes to ashes we all fall down. We got innocence for days. Everybody burn the house right down. The notion of different worlds had never occurred to Dolohov. He lived in the here and now, what he could see with his own two eyes. He didn’t really trust in fantastical tales that others seemed to wax on and on about. Who’s to say that everyone wasn’t a dirty liar to begin with? Perhaps it was his mother who had inspired such disillusion with the world. But he had never sheltered a child’s naivety with the world. And for all her wondrous visions at times, he knew Lestrange harbored the same distrust within her. Outwardly, Lestrange appeared to be an innocent and sweet little thing. But at times she delved into the deep recesses of her mind and did not share the same opinion. Her visions could often times be quite gruesome, but yet she reveled in them. While Dolohov could mostly be taken at face value, Lestrange was the snake in the grass. They are but two sides of the same coin and neither one could fathom the thought of becoming separated. Lestrange was always fascinated with the thought of something otherworldly, which was why she remained so enamored with this brilliant star-woman. While Dolohov still had some reserves, Lestrange often wondered if her affliction was caused by something supernatural. How else could she explain the randomness to her hallucinations? It certainly wasn’t a gift as they were useless and uncontrollable. The star-woman seems puzzled about her predicament and the twins enjoyed a good mystery. “Well, you certainly don’t seem the worse for wear.” Lestrange eyes her accordingly. “Maybe your brain just stopped working. I think you just forgot how to float.”

[Carinae]

astra inclinant, non necessitant ------ (the stars incline; they do not compel) She is entirely of different worlds, a patchwork of them. Space, where she was born and bred and raised on a diet of black holes and collapsed suns. Where she grew for centuries and not at all, where everything had an exquisite timelessness to it, existing and not existing in such a dark place. And then she fell, into another world – the quest world, with dragons and stags and trolls (and the ghouls, the ones who hunted her, left her with a scar across her back). That world had moved entirely too fast, that world had offered her a taste of blood, of the ruthless heart that had lain dormant inside of her. (It’s dormant once again, but sometimes she dreams of how it felt to burn.) Those worlds make her, and now this: this world of the meadow, of passing strangers like ships in the night. Of catching their eyes, for a moment, as clouds or stars dapple her back, but then they look on (she is remarkable but she is not so remarkable to keep their attentions for too long, not in this rainbow world where they are all colored and magical). This world, terrestrial, where she is grounded and the stars are light-years away, where her brother is gone, where she is, ultimately, alone. These worlds make her, have built her into the woman before them now, star-speckled and smiling but for a longing in her eyes. She envies them for their closeness, for she had once been the same, with Cosmas. No one had understood her as he had, made of the same star-stuff, the same knowledge of what the world might look like when it went screaming into the void. “Maybe,” she says, and for all she knows, that’s it – there’s no rhyme or reason to why she’s here, no more than there was to explain why she’d existed in space the way she had. “And where did you come from?” she asks them, then seems to remember something. “I’m Carinae, by the way.” carinae