you're the beacon / gansey

[wound]

T he sun feels bright against her eyes — too bright. It stings and burns at the corners of her eyes. She tosses her head, throwing her silvery forelock in front of her face in hopes of lessening the weight of the sunlight. When her chin lowers again, her daughter stands before her, so close they are practically touching noses. Wishbone’s amber eyes are hazy, as though a fog were covering them. When Wound steps back, an audible sob chokes out of her mouth. Dread fills her stomach, winding between her intestines and against her liver. Her daughter — her beautiful, dangerous, reckless daughter — is covered in sticky, maroon blood. It pools at their feet, soaking the sand they stand on until the grains are also saturated a dark red color. “Who did this?” Wound’s voice comes out in a delirious quaver, barely heard above a deep roaring in her ears. She swirls around, but she can’t identify the source of the sound. In fact, there is nothing around her besides a high, bright sun and endless sand and then dark, eternal nothingness in the corners of her vision. Wishbone sways, off-balance and looking for all the world like she’s walking dead. “Nerine,” the girl whispers. Then she’s falling, falling, falling and Wound is reaching to scoop her up. Wishbone suddenly snaps to a halt and — Wound startles awake, covered in a thin layer of perspiration. It’s nighttime, but the numerous constellations above provide enough light that she has a sense of her surroundings. The echo of the ocean’s waves register as the deep roar from her dream (rather, her nightmare). Wound shivers, rising from where she had been nestled among fronds along the outer fringes of a Tephra forest. Taking a deep breath, the silver bay begins moving toward the shoreline. Her hooves meet pebbles at the treeline. It’s a picturesque view in the night, with the moon reflecting off the quiet tide of the ocean. There’s a slight breeze (enough to cool her skin from the sweat, but not enough to send shivers down her spine) and Wound watches as a whale breaches for a breath of air in the near distance. A sigh leaves her lungs, allowing the refreshing constellation-glowing view to clear the cobwebs of the nightmare from her mind.

credit to nat of adoxography.

@[Gansey]

[Gansey]

my words are unerring tools of destruction

The sounds of Tephra’s night used to be soothing. When he was a rescued waif, the songs of the Kingdom at night had gone hand-in-hand with curling up somewhere between or beside his adoptive parents and Valensia and drifting off to sleep in a pile of warm bodies and feathered wings. Lately, though, his nights are conflicted. Tephra is a close to his heart as his little found-family, but as his adoptive father’s temper grows shorter, he can feel his attachment to the Kingdom fraying along with their relationship. So tonight, he’s restless, awake, and wandering the Kingdom, looking for reasons to love it anyway.

Something sends him towards the ocean shore, and he follows the instinct. He has nothing to lose, he’s not going to sleep tonight anyway. The rocky shores are not unfamiliar, but it’s not a place he’s spent an extraordinary amount of his time. He’s a winged being, after all, with little interest in swimming, and the ocean holds no adventure for him like the mountains and the plains. He can, vaguely, acknowledge the beauty of the night sky reflecting on the ocean, and briefly he stops to smile and reminisce about sneaking down here at night with Val because she was convinced there might be sea nymphs who only came out at night.

There’s a noise up the beach, and he raises his head out of his own thoughts to look at the mare he recognizes but doesn’t know personally. He was a late-blooming child, uninvolved as of yet in anything official or political, but in contrast he knows dark-colored Wound is heart and soul to the Kingdom and its King. He meanders in her direction, trusting to the sound of displaced rocks and pebbles and shells to announce his presence and saying absolutely nothing, just offering a smile that is simultaneously bold and shy.

gansey

and I've become unequipped with the ability to disarm them