let me whisper in your ear, star pony

[isakov]

throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

The anger has gone from the winged stallion, but the boy does not trust it not to come back. It had thrashed out of him unprompted the first time, there is nothing to stop it from doing so again. He does not relax, the boy, but the pulse begins to settle in the chamber of his chest and his expression begins to soften around some kind of wide-eyed wonder as Tarian speaks.

Isakov admittedly does not know as much as he’d like about the stars. Although he and his mother are drenched in them, he does not know if they truly belong to them. They have always felt just out of reach, even splashed across his skin. He is not a star in the way that he sometimes wishes he were. He does not belong to the stars the same way he belongs to the water.

He does not know much about love either. He does not know all the ways it can destroy, whittle away the marrow of the bones, eat steadily away at the meat of the heart. He will likely never know love, Isakov. Even if he is precious little more than an empty vessel built around it.

He does not know much about the stars but he understands that they are not like them. How could they be? But he does not say this out loud. He lets Tarian speak, explain himself. It seems almost cathartic for the older stallion and the boy does not question it. He will be whatever the older stallion needs him to be, the same way he had been the quiet for Sleaze.

He is just a boy who knows nothing of gravity. He does not the way it, too, can destroy. But Tarian hardens again and the boy does not cower. He does not shrink, he just goes on watching.

His expression does not change until Tarian admits why he’s come. You looked like her.

“What do you mean I looked like her?” he asks, tilting his fine, star-strewn head. He had said looked instead of look and the boy knows enough to know that this revelation is troubling.

isakov

@[Tarian]

[Tarian]

Tarian and Isakov are alike in that regard.

There is not much that Tarian trusts. He has long learned that his eyes can betray him, as they clearly have with the colt. He knows that Magic can misconstrue an image. He knows that a true wielder of it can easily alter reality. It takes the tangible and leaves room for interpretations that have always left him uncomfortable.

Tarian has always enjoyed the certainties.
It is why if asked who he is, he says ‘I am Tarian. First son of Malachi and Kalina, of Legado’s line.’ That couldn’t be changed. There was no amount of Magic that could strip him of his ancestry. Nothing could change where he had been born or the places he had traveled or the things he had done.

(Or so he assumed. To wander down this trail of thought could be an endless and dangerous path.)

In that past was where Orani lived. She wasn’t in this future - she didn’t exist in Beqanna - and that had been the source of his anger. What Isakov had done was take something concrete and suddenly make it imaginable. What would he have done, if it really was her? It even tempted him to think about what a life might have looked like with her if she hadn’t chosen to go back to the heavens that she had been created from.

The older stallion tries to warn the boy about gravity. He tries to give Isakov some warning about the stars. Even if the boy only carries them on his star-strewn pelt, it is better that he knows they can take shapes and walk amongst them. They exude their own sense of gravity and if a horse is merely mortal, it is easy to get caught in their pull.

But Isakov might be more than merely mortal. Tarian suspects that there is more to him than just the galaxies that color his hide. When the pegasus shares this with the yearling, Isakov’s expression changes. The boy looks troubled and it makes Tarian raise his own head, drawing up and away to better study the shadows that dance across the angles of the colt’s youthful face.

"What are you?” he asks again, "do you not know?”

He can’t presume to know but Isakov knows that he looked like someone else. How he knew to look like Orani is still beyond Tarian. It was Magic, he now knows. His facade is serious and his eyes darken as they glance down at the boy. "You took a shape that was not your own,” and struggles to keep his anger from emerging again as it clips his words. "Before you were Isakov, you were someone else.”

Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength
which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.

image credit to footybandit

[isakov]

throw me in the water, don’t think about the splash i will create
leave me at the altar, knowing all the things you just escaped

There, the question again. What are you? But Isakov does not feel whatever glimmer of irritation he’d felt the first time Tarian had asked it. Instead, he feels on the precipice of something. He feels like there is something he must learn about himself and this will be where he learns it. He blinks up at the older stallion but does not respond. He feels no overwhelming urge to admit there is some part of himself with which he is not well-acquainted. Even if he would be forgiven for it on the basis of his youth.

He draws in a long breath and listens and cannot help but be troubled by what the winged stallion tells him. He had taken a shape not his own. The boy does not know what this means and it strikes a deep chord of fear in him to think that there is some magic that belongs to him that he does not know how to control. That he does not even know how to identify.

He has never been anyone else, he wants to argue, he has always been Isakov. But he thinks, too, of the shimmer. The thing he has always thought to be the soul. The thing he has always been able to see in others, even if he has never known what to do with it.

He takes another troubled breath and looks from Tarian’s face to his chest, the place where the shimmer lives. Tucked away in the meat of the heart. Invisible to almost everyone. He concentrates hard, trying to call upon it on purpose for the first time. He sees it there in the older stallion and the magic responds to it without Isakov having to ask it to.

He had surrounded Sleaze with the illusion of quiet that day in the river. And now. Now he projects, again, the illusion of the winged stallion’s star. Nothing about the boy changes but the air shifts around them. It is merely an illusion. She is not here and he has not changed but there she is, blinking back at Tarian. And the boy can see her in the older stallion’s chest, his star, the beautiful thing that Tarian sees standing before him.

isakov

@[Tarian]

[Tarian]

He expects an answer.

What he doesn't expect is that @[isakov] might show him that answer instead of stringing along the words to explain how a boy could conjure a star. The star-marked yearling takes a deep breath like he might speak that answer that Tarian is waiting for. But instead, the boy looks to the broad silver of his chest and the older stallion can feel the crease above his brow.

Tarian looks down, as if there might be an answer where Isakov stares. His neck flexes with the motion and the pegasus tilts his head to the side to better study where the yearling concentrates. (He tries to keep one eye trained on the boy; Tarian can't bring himself to trust a stranger, even if that stranger is just a child.) It's an odd angle but even at that tilted disadvantage, the older stallion knows the moment that his world changes. Where it had been Isakov standing there a moment before, instead stands Orani. Slowly, Tarian raises his head and looks to the illusion. There is still a rational part of his mind that knows it isn't her. It couldn't be.

Orani was his past. She stayed behind in Liridon. She had wanted to return home to the stars. She wanted to rejoin her mother and father and brother. She had wanted to take Jacob and ascend (because what place is there for a star but the heavens?).

There was no place for Tarian in her sky.

And yet this illusion is so like her. (It lacks some of her vivacity but Tarian thinks that not even a Magician could capture starlight and replicate the way it shines.) The breath hitches in his throat and the gray stallion takes a step forward. He knows it's not her and yet when he says her name, it comes from the parched lips of a man who has been thirsting for her in the eons that they have spent apart. "Orani," he says.

But the moment her name is wretched from him, the disbelief in his fierce gaze turns to accusation. It is like the shock from saying her name out loud brings him back to this moment, to the present. That reminds him that this is not Orani but Isakov. And where he struggled with her name, he is forceful in his threat to the yearling. "You will return her to where she belongs," comes the shockingly low voice (Tarian can perhaps forgive the sin of accidental Magic; to have Orani so blatantly used by another is another crime entirely). "Or you might not have the opportunity to conjure again."

Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength
which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.

image credit to footybandit