all our searching [yanhua]

[Benjamen]

I shine only with the light you give me

“The sunrise,” someone told him one time, Septimus, probably, or Torix, “always brings a lesson with it.” James, ever curious tried to ask what lesson, but was silenced with a simple look (it must have been Rhone, he thinks now.) “No talking, just look,” the old man said and sent both their gaze out and over the kingdom. What lesson, what lesson would this teach him? Were there long forgotten secrets hidden in lights beams that burrowed themselves into the ground? Was there a story lurking in the place between where the sun rises and where the mountains spring up from the earth? Or were there memories to be held in the colors that sprang forth from cloud to cloud? (The gold of his mother, when she wakes him every morning, the purple of Elliana’s lilac painting, the orange of the flames at Denocte’s lantern festival as they sent the lights over the great lake and his mother sobbed.

All the world’s moonlight can fit inside the belly of firefly. This was the thought that sent him drifting off to sleep that night. But it was the dream of an owl that awoke him.

James would spend the next hours playing the image of the owl in his head over and over again. James grew up with an owl guardian, but this was not Noctura. It was not Noctura, the feathered creature that had once placed a feather within his obsidian locks. He thinks the image over once more, the gaunt eyes, the cold beak, the crooked angle of its wings, was it—

A daisy, blooms in his pathway, ruined dirt sits beside it. James stops to admire it, he was a child born amongst the flowers, with pollen in his veins, tulips blooming in his chest. He admires each petal that sits there, as if it had been waiting for him. He lowers his head and plants a kiss in the center of it, before blue eyes move up to find the man he had been looking for. (“The one whose hair glows and reminds you of Terrastella’s countrysides.”)

“Are you Yanhua?” He asks with a smile that blooms secrets like—

daisies.



Benjamen; my feet knew the path, we walked in the dark, in the dark
never gave a single thought to where it might lead

image by Gary Bendig

@[Yanhua]

[Yanhua]

There were far too many thoughts in his head. Each time Yanhua answered one, five more replaced it. Questions about time, how much of it had passed where no light could touch it. How much he could miss being blinded by the dark. So many things unaccounted for. Yanhua woke each morning with a thousand questions and wore himself out into a fitful sleep with five thousand more.

He disguised it as melancholy. In the presence of his wives he did his best not to drift, told them short, sweet things and avoided touching Borderline until it was absolutely necessary he did so. The questions would circle through the fog in his eyes like wolves, stalking and revealing themselves slowly, their bright eyes multiplying the closer they ran towards nefarious conclusions.

They were hungry for a truth that made sense, not the truth he was supposedly given.

Lilliana - still missing, though he’d assumed she was immortal.
Borderline - immortal rebirth, though Yan had assumed she’d clearly died.

Leilan had been at the center of both, a fact that refuses to shake itself from Yanhua’s mind. He had so many questions, but they were so easily explained away. As if he should accept them without question. As if there was something larger at play, something hidden. “Hidden, yes.” The tall stallion nodded to himself, lost deep within the mechanisms of his own imagination. In his amnesiatic state, the world of the dark forest and her mythical wonders faded far beyond his comprehension, losing their hold until Yanhua forgot about his own cloven hooves or where they were heading.

It was only the dimly lit burner in the very recesses of his mind, that part unconsciously doing the most work day in and day out, that signaled a large obstacle in his pathway. Yanhua snapped out of his daydream rather quickly, halting with a little dip to stop on a dime, and through the clearing haze he finally noticed the young colt.

“What? Hmm?” He scrambled to make sense of the child’s question. “Oh, me? Yes, I'm Yanhua. Of course.” The stallion muttered down at the smaller creature, lowering his head. He had a somewhat distant look about him, and when his ears tipped forward there came a peep! peep! from between them. A small, fuzzy yellow chick scrambled around in the elder’s forelock, trying not to tumble out of the self-made nest in Yan’s hair.

“What of it?” He gruffly asked the colt.

YANHUA

Image by Ani2ad


@[Benjamen]