awake my soul; magnus

[Fiero]

fiero to @magnus
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it is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves

This wilderness changes and shifts until he is simply lost - trapped within the tangled roots of time and loss. He can smell the scent of autumn honeysuckle, taste the salted sweat upon his tongue. He wanders deeper and deeper still until all is changed and time stands still.

Except time never stands still. No, the world around him still turns. Kingdoms rise and fall and then rise again. All without him.

He does not know what pulls him from his aimless wandering, or if it is the wandering in and of itself that brings him here - where the sulphuric air burns his nostrils and the heat weighs heavy against his skin. He knows his father is here. Perhaps that is why he comes to this particular doorstep and not another.

Autumnal eyes rest along the horizon, watching the inhabitants of Tephra mill about. He remembers that feeling of peace when he would look out over Heaven’s Gates so many years ago. He wonders if, perhaps, he can find that feeling here.

[magnus]

although this world is made of fearsome beasts that bark and bite
we were born to put these creatures through one hell of a fight

Fiero is a son of another time—another life, another version of him.

He is the cherished, adored lovechild between him and Joelle. The first woman to score his heart. The first and only woman during his first life. The one who has, arguably, left the largest hole in him. Her love and her death has been the single most defining moment of his lives; it is the gravity that tethers him and the ocean that ultimately carves him, winding its fingers through the caverns of his heart, his soul.

It has been years since Magnus has seen his autumn child though—now a man, he knows—and his heart nearly stops when he sees his forlorn, bruised eyes. He has so much of his mother in him that it makes Magnus ache. Makes him wonder what his life would be like if Joelle had crawled from the sea with him.

Would he still have these stones in his chest?

Would he have been content to live out his new lease on life in the shadows with her?

But such questions don’t matter because he had risen alone—has lived alone, even when surrounded by his fellow kingdom members and friends. They rise and fall in the same breath and he turns his mind toward the golden boy, hurrying to his side and embracing him. He draws in forward, breathing in that wild scent and closing his eyes. “Fiero,” his whiskey voice is thick with emotion, Magnus never having been ashamed to show the full, scarred breadth of his heart. “I have missed you so.”

magnus

@[Fiero]