06-12-2022, 10:59 PM
GOLDY
Image by Lark.Bliss
He hears her, but Blackwell is sure she does not mean to call him. Wrong number, Sweetheart he thinks loudly in her direction, with a careless flick of his sun-bleached tail, and from beneath two crooked halos that ring and whine when their edges clash together, he peers into the red sky. She is there, just in view, her edges fading into the clouds that surround her. What she looks at he cannot tell, hidden by distance and his angle within the Forest's gnarled avenues. The Cloud Fairy herself is, in fact, only noticeable in brief glimpses between the break in the canopy, hidden and revealed in turns by the shivering leaves.
But there it is again, that sense, that tug, a call to action that begs not to be ignored. There is just enough of his father's father in him that he sets back, reluctant at first to go, to get involved. Let the Fairies and the Magicians and the gods sort out their own affairs, what has it to do with him? But the reluctance wars against righteousness, and a fair amount of vanity. If the woman in the sky with all her softly curling edges wishes to see him so badly, then who is he, after all, to deny her? So at last he shakes off the slumber and the cool shadows that remind him of his missing mother, burning them away with a lick of fire that spreads out from the flickering gold upon his face until it engulfs him completely in an aura of flame. Between one step and the next, he is upon the Mountain's side and the sky has turned heavy and threatening.
Come, she beckons, and wings of sunlight unfurl at his shoulders, stretching out, yearning for flight. The alpine plants at his feet bend hungrily to that golden light, stretching their heads after the sparks that are left in his wake when he leaps, emboldened against his better judgment by curiosity and the promise of a pretty face. Those bright wings carry him to her side.
Go, she tells him.
"So soon?" Comes his reply, his voice is roguish and light, but he looks where she silently gestures to the unnatural thundercloud hovering over the mountains, and now his grin evaporates like morning mist under Pangea's unforgiving sun.
"I should have known," his scoundrel's head shakes, scoffing. Pretty girls are always more trouble than they're worth.
All it will cost him is a nightmare. Blackwell has only one of those, though it is not truly his. They are bones, all of them. Him, Iska, his mother, his father, the stags in the wood, they are all of them dead and they don't even know it. They go through all the motions of life in the golden meadow of his youth, but it is a lie.
We are dead, we are dead, his bones are singing, but the shadows string them up like puppets.
He enters the storm cloud with the sound of Cassian's falling bones clattering in his ears.
But there it is again, that sense, that tug, a call to action that begs not to be ignored. There is just enough of his father's father in him that he sets back, reluctant at first to go, to get involved. Let the Fairies and the Magicians and the gods sort out their own affairs, what has it to do with him? But the reluctance wars against righteousness, and a fair amount of vanity. If the woman in the sky with all her softly curling edges wishes to see him so badly, then who is he, after all, to deny her? So at last he shakes off the slumber and the cool shadows that remind him of his missing mother, burning them away with a lick of fire that spreads out from the flickering gold upon his face until it engulfs him completely in an aura of flame. Between one step and the next, he is upon the Mountain's side and the sky has turned heavy and threatening.
Come, she beckons, and wings of sunlight unfurl at his shoulders, stretching out, yearning for flight. The alpine plants at his feet bend hungrily to that golden light, stretching their heads after the sparks that are left in his wake when he leaps, emboldened against his better judgment by curiosity and the promise of a pretty face. Those bright wings carry him to her side.
Go, she tells him.
"So soon?" Comes his reply, his voice is roguish and light, but he looks where she silently gestures to the unnatural thundercloud hovering over the mountains, and now his grin evaporates like morning mist under Pangea's unforgiving sun.
"I should have known," his scoundrel's head shakes, scoffing. Pretty girls are always more trouble than they're worth.
All it will cost him is a nightmare. Blackwell has only one of those, though it is not truly his. They are bones, all of them. Him, Iska, his mother, his father, the stags in the wood, they are all of them dead and they don't even know it. They go through all the motions of life in the golden meadow of his youth, but it is a lie.
We are dead, we are dead, his bones are singing, but the shadows string them up like puppets.
He enters the storm cloud with the sound of Cassian's falling bones clattering in his ears.