The boy nods like he understands but Tarian thinks he doesn't. How can he? How can he even begin to have an understanding of the cosmos and the constellations? His life has barely begun. It is a blink to them, if that. If they have taken any notice of this star-marked child at all.
But they have, he thinks as his blue eyes flick over the dark parts of Isakov's coat again. They have taken notice and it would appear that they would claim him as one of their own. This child who is of the stars and yet some part of Tarian can't grasp that the yearling fully understands what he is claiming. It's his uncle, the gray pegasus thinks. He spent far too long within that twilight cove listening to his bay uncle speak of wonders and miracles. When he should have found some band of warriors (or even renegades, it didn't matter much when he first arrived in Liridon).
He should have been something - drilling, sparring, preparing.
And instead, he tucked himself away with Jay and listened to him speak about the ways the heavens moved. How their patterns in the sky could be reflected in the changes on the Earth below - for all the ways that stars moved from season to season, they could bring tidings of change or war, of prosperity or peace. One only needed to look, said Jay. And Tarian had nearly scoffed. Don't you remember her? He had wanted to ask. Don't you remember Orani and the way she would flit from dream to dream, like a bee traveled from flower to flower? What about her mother, Keav? And Arawn? Do you not remember all the ways they moved on this Earth and across the sky because they were stars and they did as they pleased, stars mingling with the dreams of mortals?
There had been no patterns there.
There had been nothing to glean from the stars that Tarian had known about futures or prophecies or mysteries that might be revealed. (But this is why his Uncle was a Shaman and Tarian was a soldier; Tarian had always trusted more in what he could see than what he could feel.)
It's perhaps because he is still thinking of his uncle that makes him more melancholy. His somber nature gives way to softer contemplation. "I thought that stars might be like us," the stallion says. "Maybe the lives they led above us might not be so different from the ones we lead here." She had proven him wrong. He had hoped that, "I thought that a star might stay."
"Do you know about gravity, Isakov?" Tarian warns. "Do you know about all the ways it can pull apart?" His gaze turns darker, sharper as he studies the boy. "It called her back. And that was why I knew-," he stops himself. They both know that @[isakov] is not Orani.
"You looked like her," Tarian says, straining but finally admitting what he had first seen in those shadows where the shade of a boy had stood.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength
which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.