I heard the trailing garments of the Night - Moment/any

[Giver]

Alight is the passage of morning; pastel and muted, and then filled with chorale birds. He watches her – has watched her for their whole lives, like it was something he was meant to do without even being told – as she flows like a swift, smooth current between rocks and driftwood, careless but for the monster she knows too well from the yarns spun by their mother. (Her mother?) And he is the one meant to protect her from the friction of her own path, blockading her swell and undertow and turning her to safer pastures.

He is louder.

He is the roar of a constellation born, bottled and chained to her neck like a pendant. Fashioned from stars, revelry and teases, he was meant to be his mother’s boy until mischief came in the night and plucked him naked from her stellar web – told him his own tales; a boy taken from his cradle undercover of night and restored to his family by daybreak. Now he is her man. Her guardian and watcher. He follows at her shoulder like a hound.

It is love, to be fair, that keeps him there.

Years ago, he would have said that it was because they had been formed in the same darkness and fluid. That they had encircled so much in that formative time, that when they were free they were not free from each other, but bound. And then he came to see how carefree she was. How aimless and reckless. She took her mother’s cautionary tales as just that. Fables – in dusk, just before they curled up at night to watch the stars he made around his body, she would ask to play the monster and the princess among the pines –

…but Giver could taste something much different and much darker on Malis, like her words were made vivid in her mind. Too vivid and he wondered...

Nor does he believe that they are two of the same one, not anymore – this too he thought he could feel to, from time to time, in quiet and unsure moments. As a boy, Giver found himself, one too many times, considering the idea that his own fact could be a fiction. One whose tails and tops he dreams about to this day, but he finds himself unwilling to toil over it when he wakes. He has her to watch over, after all, while that monster hunts.
***

He leaves her behind, reluctantly, because she insists on it.

Like her, he feels there is safety in the Chamber (foolhardy, that may be). So he passes on his own (so unfamiliar to him) from the pinewoods and beyond, by night, where he feels a common kind with the stars that gather in their formations and twinkle their long-dead light down. Past steeples of mountains in the far distance, and the faint scent of saltwater, to the open air of the Meadow.

Here the sky is expansive. A fishbowl arching above and crowded with pinpoints of light. Far below, the man is alone, and alone is as foreign to him as the sun is to their comfort in the dark.

[Spear + Spark]

Spark is by herself for the first time in well, forever.
She is the sleepless one, the bold adventurer that sucks in a breath of night air and takes that first frightening step elsewhere, without him.

The mountains go by, but they are busy biting at the sky.
Forests go by, but each branch is uplifted towards sun and stars.
Rivers go by, and she fords them easily despite the suck of their currents against her legs.

Spark is fresh of her mother’s milk and new to the taste of grass in her mouth; instinct bids her to chew and swallow it. It is palatable but lacking, as she transitions from one stage to the next during her foalhood. There is no height to her, she’ll tend towards smallness but any perceived daintiness is just that - perceived, for she is feathered feet and sinewy wildness beneath her tovero fur. Most of her is pale as the gleam of light on old, old bone but she has a pert black bonnet atop her ears and poll. She has too, the black shield upon her breast that makes her sacred medicine in her mother’s eyes - the only Medicine Hat that Scalped has thrown in all her incessant, immortal years. Spark was her twin in the flesh, only black in the parts that her mother was as red as copper pennies and spilled blood.

She ought to be tired from her travels; they should have exhausted her completely but she is fresh from them, capering beneath the stars on legs that she is fast growing into, as their length is less spindly and long. Spark does not stop to consider her surroundings; she is aware in the way that all horses are aware of things - she listens, she sends swift darting looks to the land that springs up all around her in the shape of tall grass that she could easily hide in, still. She almost thinks to, to creep and scare the slumbering horses around her but that is a game that Spear would enjoy far more than she ever could. It wasn’t in her to frighten others unnecessarily so; Spark required reason for the things that she did, they had to make sense in her expanding brain before she followed through on the action.

Her traipsing takes her right into the path of a silver buckskin stallion that seems altogether too terribly alone. Spark’s small heart swells with nameless emotion; he looks so small beneath the stars but he is hands taller than she will ever be. Her path then collides with his, the pull too strong to ignore as she comes to rest at the point of his shoulder though she touches her small nose in the crook of his armpit, sucking in a breath of stallion, sweat, and somewhere. Spark leaves her pale cheek against the round of his barrel, feeling it inflate and deflate at every breath he takes. She never really learned boundaries, and if she had, she was still the kind to break them recklessly if it suited her, like it does now to lay with her head so comfortably against him. He stayed her course for the moment, anchored her restless self to his starry orbit and there she stayed, looking at all the stars above their heads that twinkled indifferent to the things that played out beneath their cold faraway light.

[Giver]

The pressure is familiar. So is the way his intercostals seem to tauten and quiet – automatic; responsive to the press of a cheek or chin – with the responsibility of not disturbing her. Alight had rested her head there before. Alight has rested her head there before. Does, sometimes, and falls asleep to that familiar, measured rhythm. 

He has never resented responsibility, or Alight. He loves her and even the realization that they were not as similarly fashioned as he grew up believing hadn’t hampered it like one might think it would. It certainly hadn’t dimmed what was still a lifetime of togetherness. That dawning had been a harsh one, to be sure – too bright and too hot; slow-burning – but he had mellowed it by closing his eyes and turning his head from it.

It shone over his shoulder like a tempered fire, licking out for disorder.

He is not one to chase chaos and emotion – beautiful and ugly – with abandon. That is Alight. It cannot be both, otherwise how would she survive? Giver soothes her entropy. It may not have been his natural role if things had played out in the intended timeline; had the witchy mare not intervened. He may have been meant to be like star births and deaths; he may have been meant to taste disorder more often than not, but that is nature and nurture. Now he bends to intrepidness like a caring pair of hands cupped around a flame. ‘Careful,’ he has whined more than once to her, golden-skinned and indigo-haired and free. One day it may occur to him that it is her freedom he is shackled to, but tonight he turns his head and she is there, instead. And there are no chains.

He can tell she is spirited. He needn’t feel it from her, though he can – as if something beyond her body talks to him, reads itself like a book, though not always very clearly – he can tell by her boldness and by her aloneness. Black-capped and chested, too small and far too without accompaniment, he feels the need to draw around her. (‘Don’t you know there is a monster out here?’ 
‘I’m safe with you, though, right, Giver? You’re not a monster. And besides, mummy says the monster wants me, so don’t worry. You worry too much.’)
Once she had been as little as this, but so had he. And she had been wrong. He couldn’t have protected her then. In truth, he couldn’t protect her now. 

He doesn’t know what to do. He grew up much like she had – in the company of another, who he knows like the ridges of his own chest and the hollows of his knees. So he lets silence stay and feels a strange comfort in that fact that the little one is here, at least and with him, instead of in the hunting grounds. “Do you want to see something?” he whispers, gently stepping away from her. For her own protection. He does what he knows. Around his skin he gathers the ancient light and energy that lives above their heads, it blooms to a delicate glow. Inside the soft, light teal aura, little points, like the mimics of stars, twinkle and line up in constellations. It is mild and warm, but he knows it is best not to let her try to touch it so he watches her closely. “My sister used to love this.”

Giver keeps it around him like a bright blanket. “What is your name?” He doesn’t think to ask where her mother is. Sometimes, his folly is thinking he can be enough for them. “Mine’s Giver.”

[Spear + Spark]

He is nothing like Spear.
Honestly, she had no expectation that he would be.

The differences between stallion and colt are beginning to mount in the spaces between his breathing and his heartbeat. She can hear the distant throb of that slick glistening meat inside of him; the lullaby of his being lulls her to a complacency that she has never known. There is something about him that makes her forget about Spear, and that is a hard thing to do because Spear grounds her to this earth - he is her life, and she is his. But him, ah… that is another story entirely that is still being told in the way she keeps her cheek tight against his sleek side.

Spark is never this brazen, but tonight, it feels right to challenge all that is proper and contained - to shake up and stir loose the very idea of order. It fed her recklessness, made her press herself into the girth of him as their silence stays the course, drawn out but comfortable until he breaks it with a whisper as he leans in close to her. She looks up at him, nose upturned, with one eye black and the other red; he asks if she wants to see something and before she can answer him, he has stepped away and the night swells with cold and loneliness like it never has before and Spark mourns the loss of him against her already.

She gives an audible gasp; there is soft teal light that gathers and swells around him. It moves like air, flowing over his skin until small pinpricks of more light burst into being; they twinkle and take the shape of the very constellations that line up above their heads and Spark is growing dizzy just from looking between the stars up above and those that materialize at his command. “I can see why!” she exclaims, though it is a soft exclamation for she is hushed by the star-magic he stands just inside of. Spark wants to touch it - touch him, but the way he stepped back from her tells her it is probably unwise to touch either the stars he creates or the mild heat rising off his flesh during the creation of them.

He looks beautiful and sad in his starry dress; isolated, even. A small black ear bends his way as he asks her for her name and tells her his; she slides her mismatched eyes towards him, still peering upwards through all that lovely teal light. “Spark, and Giver, this is so incredibly beautiful.” She feels a little silly - she, a foal still! - telling him that his gift is glorious, that she has never encountered the likes of such on this earth in her short time upon it. Spark thinks that there could never be anything as beautiful as this, and she cannot help the way her nose extends out to him as if to bridge the gap between that glow and him, but she knows they won’t touch - not while the stars spin and dance across his skin and the in the spaces between Giver and Spark.

The stars above pale in comparison to this;
“I’ll never be able to look at the stars the same way again,” she tells him, with a quiver of her lip.
Her sorrow is shallow, almost feigned, but there is truth that underscores the thing that she has said to him. For Spark, the stars will never be the same again now that she has seen them twinkle alongside his skin in that queer blue-green light.