i've never fallen from quite this high | aquaria

[Pteron]

and since you’re the only one that matters,----------------
----------------tell me: who do i run to?

The darkness has remained constant, a shroud across the formerly blue sky. Pteron has not felt quite right since the eclipse started. The morning after he’d met the doe-eyed bay mare in the Meadow, the sun had risen just like it always did. The parrots were just as noisy, the waves just as strong. The moon was rather high in the sky, and Pteron had assumed that there was an autumn storm coming in fast when the sky grew dark. Yet when he’d looked up, there were no clouds in the sky at all, and the moon itself was slipping across the face of the sun.

And then…it stopped.

There they have hung ever since, two motionless orbs in the sky. Bad magic, Pteron had thought, very bad. That suspicion has been confirmed since, and this steady trot that takes Pteron across the island has been a habit ever since. Just as he had willingly (and gladly, truth be told) abandoned all official responsibility to keep watch over the land he resides in, he’s taken up that mantle again. He’s no doubt that Aquaria keeps mastery of the sea, but that doesn’t mean that an extra pair of eyes on land isn’t necessary. In these times, it seems everything is necessary.

The air is brisk against his sides, unusual for the island, and Pteron pulls his feathered wings closer to his pied sides for warmth. The wind tugs at his blue-green mane, and though it tastes of salt and sand, there is no sunshine to brighten it and Pteron finds it bitter.

Something moves ahead, and Pteron falls still. He is invisible already, having decided that to be safest, so he is unworried about being spotted. He might be heard though, or smelled, and he raises his own nose to the air.

Aquaria. He nearly calls her name, but refrains at the last moment out of an abundance of caution. Instead, he projects a beam of happiness nearly as bright as the missing sun, firmly but briefly sending it in the direction of the distant nereid. Then he attempts the trick that Gale had been trying to teach him and makes himself invisible to everyone but Aquaria. Pteron has no idea if it is working (there’s no one else around to ask) but he spreads his mostly-white wings wide, a large pale shape even in the darkness.

@[Aquaria]

-- pteron --