It had been months since she left Hyaline's wisteria crown, placing it gently over two of The Sanctuaries up and coming stars. But she had exchanged it for a heavier burden, expanded her reach, and the mountains she left still called to her when it felt so heavy.
Solace is regal, full, well muscled under soft curves of motherhood and winter down. She drifts and banks like a falcon above her subkingdom, always watchful but only leaving the sky when necessary. The sickness which infected the very air here kept her away more often than it should have, but nothing could cleanly sever her heart-tie to Hyaline. It may be sentimental, she realizes as she dips below a cloud, but Silver Cove would never feel like home.
Movement catches the caretaker-queen's eye, her skull snapping in its direction as her wandering musings are interrupted. She glides closer, almost lazily, Kensa and Lie were perfectly capable of handling all of Hyaline's visitors, but curiosity often got the better of her.
She is not prepared for what she finds.
When she tells Kagerus this story in the twilight hours, whispered and soft as not to wake their youngest son, she will not remember how she came to stand before him. Only that she was in the sky like so many days, and then she was beside the golden king between the rattling bones of the winter woods.
"Amet," she breathes his name, letting it twist together with the pure mountain air across her tongue as she springs forward. His scales are rough against her skin as she presses herself to him, but she hardly notices. Supernaturally, frost is laced between the heavy tendrils of her mane and the scent of the sky follows her. But below this, the pristine and the frigid, the warm scents of her mate and family cling closest to her skin. After a moment she steps back to better see him, her crystalline eyes laughing and young once again. "You made it home."
As the words leave her, she realizes that she had always known he would.
we are the ever-living ghost of what once was
@[Amet] AHHHHHHHHHHH
