a mass of innumerable stars planted together - Spark

[Giver]

“If I want, I can make it grow brighter and hotter – it protects me,” he has never done it. Never even tried – has yet to sink his teeth into that strength and trial his own mettle. But he has always felt it – knew it to be so – in the way he handles that so-old energy around his skin. Always there is more and more – he can feel it give and take, a quintillion burning bodies feeding him at once. It is yielding, but powerful, to his muscles and mind, and he has played with the dimness of it by single lumens with quiet curiosity. 

He keeps it fragile and exquisite – for them.

(To don it like plated mail would be to make it a violent thing for those pulled too close to his gravity – defensive and angry in its heat. 

There is beauty in that too. But he had never needed it. He has never really known trouble.)

“It is nice, to be so close to them,” it is a precious thing to him. Otherwise they are so coldly distant, and while many are content for them to be so, he needs differently. He is impelled by them, at a cellular level – whether by something truly etched in his bones and poured in his blood, or by bindings of his own making (because somewhere along the way he had become convinced that they were keys, all of them, to many locks) – and so he can be contented only in the company of their miniatures.

“Spark…” 

It occurs to him, too late, to ask her where her mother is. His face grows dark, as it is wont to do, and his brow furrows (Alight always says he is too serious) – below them the earth gives a violent jerk and all around the land fractures and moans. His ears flick back and his stars fade as he lurches towards the girl.

“Spark!”

----

He is in starless dark. Taken. Plucked from his place (from her; how to find her again?) and thrown distances unimaginable and through galaxies innumerable.

Past constellations –

Two necks, curled together.

Horns curved back from a senseless face.

A witch’s claw, reaching.

Fire’s imitation.

When he awakens it is daytime. Leaden and dimmed by the upset, but through cracks in the dust he can see sun, harsh and close.

----

He runs, as naked branches whip his knees bloody – brambles pull at his chest, and they are so like claws. 

Where? He had scoured the mountain, but as he traced rock and dirt and rugged trees clinging to its sides, he could not find her. He wonders if they had perhaps passed each other by, she while he was in that endless dark – or he, while she was in transit, herself. Or if they had been brought to different precipices to face different gods.

Hopeless thoughts.

He followed that range’s spine until he could no longer bear the enormity of it.

If he is to find her, it would be where it began, or it would be somewhere in between. That place, he realized very quickly, was violent, inhospitable, and he could feel it corralling him downwards off its shoulders. So down, down he spiralled and flew, through reshaped land until he begins to see some semblance of familiarity. Somehow, by grace, the Meadow is as it was but for the snow and biting cold that punishes his unprepared body.

“SPARK!” His voice cracks as the cold constricts, he sputters and inhales, turning round and round.

@[Spear + Spark] - so it doesn't mess up your timeline/what you have already had her do post-cataclysm, you can totally interpret his searching the mountain as long as you need to. Like, hours, days, whatever. Also, if have already written what she was doing when it happened (and I'm sure you have.. shit, my bad, I did take way too long with this. Let me know, I can easily tie that end up.

[Spear + Spark]

Spark is amazed!

She can hardly look away from the exquisite way he regales her with his starlight manipulation; it is too much! Much too much for her, and she shuts her lips against a sigh, shuts her eyes against the quiet flare of it. How lonely it must be to belong to the stars, to make them dance and sing along your skin but never really be able to dance or sing amongst them in bodies as fleshy and tethered to the earth as theirs’ are. How terribly lonely, she thinks he must be. Bright and burning, a lone bastion of starlight in the dark that Spark - of all creatures, big and small - has gravitated to.

On a cellular level she is most likely nothing more than grass and blood, wind and bone, water and molecule. Maybe she is stardust and prayer, smoke and song, or the breath of some god blown into a handful of clay that some ancestor of hers’ came galloping out of. She is hoofbeat and heart - a spark, of something that has yet to be determined unlike him, who is made of the veritable star stuff that so many others spend so much time looking at.

(Spark can never look at the stars the same now, for having seen them swirl around his skin.)

He says her name like there is more of a sentence to come and she is left hanging on the edge of it, her ears forward and her eyes fever-bright as the earth jerks beneath them, slides and shakes, and the last thing she hears is the sound of her name from his lips in a shout --

Spear.

Spark.

They find each other, inseparable as always.

She begs for separation in quiet ways that are too subtle for her brother to understand; he is too busy being bored by her constant forays into meadow and forest, always looking but for what, she never tells him. It is the first time that Spark has kept a secret from him. Spear will always remember this, the way her face was sometimes pinched together in a frown or drawn with worry, and the way she almost always mumbled a word he could never quite make out but the feeling in her speech left him angry, hurt even. They took to bickering, which was uncommon for the two of them - they never raised their voices to one another in anger, maybe in shouts of play but never as they did now. He longed for explorations further abroad, and she longed for starlight in the dark on skin like fields browned beneath a summer sun. Neither could explain to the other that they were growing up and growing apart in some ways.

Time gathers them to its breast, pushes them away into the biting cold of a season familiar to them - Winter.

Spark is still the same - small, just not made sleek by summer.

She is all furry again, but it somehow becoming on her - a little wild, a little woolly, but wholly Spark.

Most of all, Spark is separate -

So she goes back to the beginning, in hopes of finding him because she needs a familiar face. Really, she needs him, starlight or not, she needs him and she cannot fathom why except that he is integral to her being. How that happened, she still is not sure but she trusts her gut - it has never lead her astray before! She is walking, thinking the slow pace is best to allow her to swing her head to and fro in search of him… her name is a sharp crack of sound, of cold and air in collision and she turns toward it before she has even formed a thought in her head - Giver!

His name is a bell that tolls from her happy lips, “GIVER!”

The expression on her face is one of glad disbelief as if she did not think it could ever be this easy for them to find each other again. She skips happily to his side, not any taller than before, still small and spry but certainly a little more plump and curvy than before - it is just hidden by all the thick shaggy horsehair that adorns her, as she pushes her nose firmly against his, inhaling his smell as if she has never breathed so deeply or longly before in her life. “Giver,” she says more quietly, rubbing her cheek against his dirtied neck. Spark pulls back long enough to look him over and he looks worse for the wear, and she has to wonder how badly the Mountain shook him before giving him back to her.

“Are you okay?” she asks him, concern evident in the way she looks him over and pokes her little muzzle into the nooks and crannies of his starless skin. It doesn’t occur to her that he doesn’t light up with a thousand tiny constellations, that his skin is dim and dark as any other horse’s skin is. Spark is too happy to see him, to sad to see that he is all beat up from his rough and tumble moments through time and space and the Mountain shaking everything up.

ooc: I'm sorry this took so long! I love you and it was absolutely perfect and fits into any timeline of theirs. <333


Spear & Spark

[Giver]

Panic. 

It burns like galaxies and solar flares behind his eyes and down the wrinkle of his spine. It turns him, ‘round-and-‘round, stuck it the immensity of its gravitational pull. Gyrating in orbit with the asteroids and minor moons that cloud his mind with... 

(He! Mr. Serious? 

Alight’s stalwart toy soldier; a steely, unmovable thing of stellar energy and wakefulness.) In his mind, between the roar of dying and crowning stars, he can hear a god voice command him to turn. To find pine needles and blue hairs, scent them like a hound and seek – that neither she is wrong, but that he had made a mistake, nonetheless, to come to this one first. Perhaps, a grave mistake.

‘Find Alight.’ 
—and it’s her voice.
He knows that. Honeyed, but thunderous.

For, had Spark not found her brother, first? 

But then, that is different. Whether she is clay or wind or rainfall, she is impelled at least in part, by the same-blood that animated them both in womb and then under plain, wide skies. Like the way stars make him electric – and unlike the way he is drawn to Alight. He had once believed it to be the same thing. A cosmic, incontrovertible connection that sewed them together by something more firm that even flesh and sinew. But he had grown out of it, become disillusioned, something Spear and Spark could never do. They could stretch, even come to resent, the leather that bound them. But they could not severe it. 

These are undeniable truths. 

Alight is not his sister.
(A half truth.)
Malis is not his mother.
(A full truth.)

They are truths that can be fiddled with. Disguised and play-pretend, for a time. They do not mean he loves anyone any less. Except, that he finds himself stilled, unimaginably relieved to see her. “Spark.” his voice is strangely calm, if not stuttered by his ragged inhales and exhales. A force of habit; a stalwart soldier. “I’m fine.” And he finds the weight of Alight feels sometimes all too overbearing.

“You got down, then… safe? From…” his brow furrows, inclining his head ever so slightly to the Mountain, looming, like an oncoming planet primed for collision. “whatever that was.” It feels all wrong to be so unsure. He is the hand that guides the fairytale, keeps it from falling into the dragon’s jaws. “Are you okay?” She looks okay, black-bonnet and slim, touching the whipped places of his body with kind curiosity and concern. “You have been somewhere safe.” It is all he could hope for, having been spit out from the brambles of a black hole, himself.

IMAGE

[Spear + Spark]

The thing that bound them had been tested.

Strained even, so severely, that neither had a hope of recovering the way it had been before -

Before!

There had been each other; stars and stallion, so unforgettable, even as she trailed Spear to the fork in the road. He took the left fork, and she the right, and from there, everything had changed for them. She had thought only of the star-touched stallion and it is a miracle that she had not broken a limb on a single misstep or blinded herself on a branch in her quest to not miss a constellation or a comet. He had left something in her; something that built up a black blinding pressure that threatened to burst inside her unless she gravitated back to him - Giver, not Spear, not her brother. So she had come back, and found Spear at the fork as if he had always been there waiting on her to appear just like that!

She sparks (ironic!) back to life in his presence; all smiles and joy on her small upturned face as her black and red eyes look fondly upon his countenance. He is incredibly calm, in a way that she has never known him to be and her small furry nose finds his once-starry shoulder in a comforting touch. Spark listens to his staunch assurance that he is fine but something seems out of place and she cannot think just what it might be that makes her think such a thought. She pulls back enough to give him a once-over with her eyes and indeed, he is fine enough (never a finer picture of horseflesh has she laid eyes upon in her jaded opinion!).

“Yes,” she assures him, small and safe against his side.

(She thinks she can hear his heart against her ear in its tuck against his skin, like a star imploding if stars imploding can be heard in the deep black of space.)

Her black-bonneted brow furrows;

“From… yes,” is all she can manage to say. Had it been the Mountain? Had it been the world’s womb so similar to their mother’s? She cannot fully say, but it had felt like being born again, squeezed through a tight dark tunnel of birth and thighs. There was no fluid this time though, no dark rush of water and blood and nutrients to sing wetly against their skins - only air, and sky, and openness. Such strangeness! That they had laid their eyes upon, twin gazes, black and red, had looked upon the unknown.

(She had known, even then, that Giver was out there - somewhere, a beacon of starlight that she spun towards, knowingly and unknowingly, and she never told Spear.)

“Yes, safe.” she repeats, after him. Her eyes swallow up half of his face and the sky beyond it; there should be stars there, she thinks - in the sky, on him, and she falls back against his side with a sigh. “And you, you have been safe too?” she queries, her voice tight with concern.

Spear & Spark

[Giver]

Time is a funny thing.
It had, after all, released him.

Or, it had tried to. But some things are harder to disentangle from – ask the fly in the web, or the fish on a hook; ask the princess in her tower, or the comet in his orbit. Alight and Giver, too, have their before and after, are just reaching their fork. (Giver can see it, but… time is a funny thing. Some places obey not its law but handless clocks of their own, like deep space or the iron core of a planet; some souls ride grains of sand down the sides of the glass universe, and accept that they are falling, while others cling to the outer-edges, like tree frogs, resisting the cruelty of that momentum.)

Time.

Alight is morning – dawn. She always has been. Bird-chorus and the slow meander of sunlight, in slanted shafts, across her face. A sunrise that does not end but stretches into oblivion; an eternal fire dancing on the thin sliver of darkness left clung to the horizon like an oil spill.
She is the universe, halted.
A pocketwatch with the cogs slipped out of place.

An anti-star, a never-night. One that would separate him forever and ever from his kin, if it could. If she could, she would. She would put a stop to the physics, the rotation, and keep him chained to her…
—yes, like a pendant of cosmic fossil, around her neck. Her stalwart toy soldier.

She would miss his lightshow, sure. (It had so made her laugh when they were young.) But he had begun to steal away at night, years ago, when he had first realized that those formations held knowledge that he was so eager to gain access to… And if he thought she had not noticed. Well, how foolish.

Their separation would not be gentle one, no matter how kind he tried to make it.
And he would. Because he loves her.

“Good. that’s good,” he swallows and does not recognize the gash of black against the horizon, anymore, but tries to keep to her. The more he turns from it, the more he thinks he can hear it, the low and ominous hum of something spectacularly large, approaching unbearably quickly from light years away. It had taken so much from him – sucked up and reconstituted the atmospheres of not just him, but so many others – that he does not doubt it is a harbinger. “I’m no worse for wear. I’m fine,” he lies, but it is a lie designed to be pretty. “You found your family?”

She can see that he is without his company.
There is some warmth, still, when she leans against him, to replace the utter cold left by their jilting. Around them, the dust is settling and behind all of that, the sun begins to dip into the gathering swells of pink and mauve, orange, like a fire being ebbed away. As day fades away, the shadow that comes reveals the infinitesimal glow that emanates from his body – from his mantle of skin, the core of his heart. He had not seen it before, as he chased wildly after the figments of her. Does not even see it even now, as his eyes are fixed on the black of her ears and forehead. It came at first like a stir in his gut as something sunk itself, stubbornly, into his sides, so steadfast that it had withstood the threshold of the Mountain.

Something ancient and cosmic, and every night it grows, feeding off the idol moon, until he is its mirror on earth.
Waiting patiently for the stars to reignite.

IMAGE

[Spear + Spark]

ooc: I don't know what this is, I'm sorry! :/

Time is not only funny but fickle, too.
Quite possibly as fickle as the slick hearts inside their sleek chests.

Her heart has never been more certain though, in both love and rhythm.
Each beat in her breast is a name, a sonnet of arterial blood - Spear and Giver, Giver and Spear.

(Spear is already incensed with jealousy though he cannot begin to guess why, only that Spark is changed, more than a little removed from him in ways that he’d never imagine - ways he’d never suspect could ever happen. He loved her, longed only for her happiness but he was her entire reason for happiness, how quick could she find another to usurp him in that role? Spear failed to think that he’d always have her, not as a stallion covets a mare, but because they are twins and he is her brother. He lies to himself, tells himself it is bloodright and birthright - Spark is he, like Alight thinks Giver is hers.)

Spark can hear the lie in his voice - he is not fine, and it concerns her because he has never told a lie to her, not her - never her. She cannot accept it and because of it, she encroaches upon his space with a bold brush of her lips against his cheek. “I did, and you?” Spark knows he has family too; these are the ties that bind them and the leashes about their necks that they slip loose from so that they can find one another, like stars in the dark that call a constellation home.

(Always, they gravitate towards one another.)
(Always.)

He is oddly bereft though… no stars surround him, and she realizes that he has suffered more than she ever could have imagined - he’s been struck dim and lacking, by magics and meanness that came from the Mountain’s upbringing. For the first time, she is hardened by an anger that seizes violent hold of her limbs, rendering them still and immovable. She fights to keep her mouth shut lest she anger the ears of a wind that should not be listening, but the Mountain hears all things and makes the universe bend to its bidding. Spark sighs, and the anger leaves her in small fits of shivers that bring her to his side. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs, knowing that it is not enough - could never be enough, and that angers her all over again.

Her face nestles in the crook of his furry flesh, eyes shut tight against the darkness that looms all around them. Sunset starts to leave them and in its wake, it trails a glow that startles her eyes open - “Giver,” she blurts out, surprised as she takes a step back from his side to make sure she is really seeing what she is seeing. “Look,” she breathes aloud to him in a pointed gesture of muzzle - “You’re glowing!”

Spear & Spark