[open] you and i both know that the ghost is me [any]

[magnus]

you and I both know that the house is haunted
and you and I both know that the ghost is me

It had felt like death, but it had been anything but. His life had become an orb of erupting colors. Brilliant shades of joy from his time with Minette and their budding life. Fog of an unrelenting angst and guilt—memories like an anchor pulling him down. Furious flames of anger washing up his throat as he prepared for war. They had collided in his chest, melting into a catalyst of emotions that he had struggled to swallow. They had driven him to work every day; rarely sleeping, wandering amongst the bodies of Heaven’s inhabitants with a feverish desire to watch over them and protect them all from the coming despair.

He had been foolish. So foolish.

He had thought he could protect them.

He had flung his past away from him and whispered the words he had told himself he would never utter again. He had told them he would protect them. He had promised them that he would. He had made pledges to them; he had made an oath. And then, when they needed him most, the ground beneath him had become a wide, gaping chasm that had swallowed him whole. He had fallen, fallen until the wings given to him from Heaven had disintegrated and dissolved—leaving him bare and scarred and alone. So alone.

Magnus wasn’t sure when the falling stopped, but eventually it did.

He had been suspended in the nothingness. The dark so tangible that he felt its weight, the abyss stretching onward and onward, lonely fingers crawling into the horizon. Over time, he felt shadows of others more than he saw them. Heartbeats pulsing around him before echoing into the distance. At first, he had tried to cry to them, screaming for someone to hear him, but they never responded.

Eventually, he gave up.

He didn't know why he was pulled. He didn’t know where he was. He could only assume that death had come to claim him once more, pulling him back into the salty, oceanic grave he had first crawled from. But this purgatory, this prison of silence, was not death. Whispers came. Whispers telling him of the danger he had been in—that their bloodline had been in. Whispers telling him of twins born into blood magic who needed the family to survive. Whispers telling him of a plot to protect the souls they could find.

Selfish, Magnus had thought. He had screamed it. He had pled with the voice to let him go—to let him return and fight and die if that was needed. But the whispers had not cared. They went from lethargic to annoyed. Magnus had been called unappreciative. He had been called petulant. Finally, he was called nothing. The whispers withdrew, leaving him to himself and his thoughts. Leaving him to his silence.

Then, it had ended as quickly as it had begun. He was spit out into the meadow, the whispers simply telling him the danger had passed. He was no longer needed; his life was no longer worth protecting.

So, here he stood. Untouched, unchanged for the time past except the lack of wings protruding from his shoulders. It felt odd to have lost the appendages, the lack of eagle-feathers leaving him as awkward and off-balance as they had made him when they first appeared. But their absence was not what caused the aching hole in his heart. It was the time stolen from him. It was the home he had once again let down. It was the love that he had almost found again only to have it ripped away once more. Grief and fury melded together and crashed down around him. What was there to do now but give into the regret?

MAGNUS

once general. once lord. once king.

[Fiero]

All things settle in time. All things return to the places they belong. When the war had ended and the blood had drained into the soil, Vineine had left again. She has always been a wanderer. Fiero could never make her stay. He wonders if he will ever see her again. But, this time, she has not left him so alone. This time his children are here.
They cannot stay in the Amazons, though it has kept them safe and warm. Without Vineine, the jungle is hollow, like the other side of the bed. Fang cannot understand, and Fiero hopes he never has to. He hopes his son never has to feel the heartache of loving someone who cannot stay. And maybe the fault is not hers, but his.
Why had he not followed?
What is left for him here?
He looks to his children and sees. They need her, but they have him. He cannot leave them.
Fang will be okay, but Longear… Fiero worries about her so. Since Vineine’s leaving his daughter has remained mostly in her rabbit form. Fiero does not know how to help his daughter. There is nothing he can say to bring her mother back, and how long it has been since he had helplessly tried to comfort his sister when their parent’s had gone.
----
The kingdoms have shifted since the war. Heaven’s Gates now sit beneath a darker power. Fiero has distanced himself from the politics of kingdom life for some time now, but he cannot help the pang in his chest when he thinks of his birth home. He tells Fang and Longear of their grandmother, Joelle, and their grandfather, Magnus. He tells Fang of how he first fell in love with Vineine and how she smelled of autumn honeysuckle and earth.
Fang chases bugs and gags when his dad talks about his mom.
He has never been outside of the Jungle, and the openness of the world is startling. It’s as if he is reduced to infancy, suddenly without the loving, secure arms of a mother. He wants to return into the Jungle heat, into the cover where he is safe, but his father tells him the Jungle is not their home. Fang does not question, only follows his sire into territories unfamiliar. In time the world will not be so daunting.
-----
The Meadow is the shore that all things eventually wash up on. Some come from far away kingdoms, others from herds. Fiero comes from heartbreak. Magnus comes from death.
He does not know what to say when his father comes into his line of sight. There is no surprise. There is no tearful reunion. His heart is too shattered for that. Wordlessly, he comes to stand beside his father with Fang and Longear in tow. How strange that Magnus appears younger than his son. Fiero’s youth has left him long ago. But there is an inkling of Fiero’s former self within his adolescent son.

[magnus]

you and I both know that the house is haunted
and you and I both know that the ghost is me

It is strange how young he looks when he feels lifetimes old.

Decades have passed since his birth, but he is mostly untouched by them. He carries scars (down his cheek, across his shoulders, ridged along his back), but his body still maintains its youth—the muscles thick and roping, the coat carrying that glint of health. He is handsome in the way of canyons and valleys and open fields: unchanging, stable, melted in the gold of sunshine and earth. It is a surface level handsomeness that belies the churning tides of his internal struggle. Few knew more than the easy, crooked smile that he gave; few knew that the wars he waged internally weighed heavier on him than any physical fight.

Today, though—today, he carries the struggle visibly. His muscles are hard and his posture stiff, gold-flecked eyes stormy as he watches the field before him with clashing bodies and conversations that ebbed and flowed. His focus so intense that he did not notice his son by his side before he was at a stop. When he tears his eyes way from the horizon, his chest tightens and words do not come. Not immediately.

Instead he simply reaches over, bumping the velvet of his nose against his son’s neck, eyes shifting toward the younger colt. The dusk of his coat was undeniable and something softens in Magnus as he looks upon what he can only assume is his grandson. “Fiero,” Magnus finally manages, wrestling the demons in his chest back away where they could not hurt—could not lash out. “I…” he imagines trying to explain where he went, the months suspended in darkness, this disembodied whispers telling him he had to be there, and he gives up. There was no way to explain that. “Who is this little guy?” he shifts, neck craning to see Fang.

“My name is Magnus.”

I hope that I will not disappoint you too.

MAGNUS

once general. once lord. once king.

[Longear]

“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, 
and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. 
But first they must catch you, 
digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. 
Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”

****

She is the spring after a conflagration. She is not innocent nor untouched – she is not the spring is the sense of being newborn but, reborn. Something different. Something from the singes of burns and the nutrients of blackened trees. Something that looks better and greener from some angles – but the price paid for this transformation, this rebirth and growth, had been dear.

Had been exacted so forcibly.

It had not just been the war – that hell of acrid smoke and fire; that fleet-footed panic – but all the ash that settled around after it. Mother had buried the boy in dirt and the longing to forget, and had never regained herself.

The girl had never loved or created, so it had been hard to grasp the enormity of it at the time. (It has only gotten marginally easier as a woman. She still has not loved or created.) She had let her father feel it. There was little more she could do. Now they rotate around each other – father, Fang and she; she is the loosest of them all, her rotation caries her farther away because Fang needs Fiero much more than she. Like three lost planets, held together by a strange kind of gravity. Strange, only because of her absence. Lacking in some essential molecular component. Weakened by its removal from their atmosphere. 

Years ago, she had gasped and sputtered, as if it did not agree with her lungs.

But over time, she adapted. 

Perhaps, just not in the way Fiero would have liked to see. Longear settled into the bones of that other body and kept to them more often than not. But she had found her voice there, and at night she cried small cries, her voice but diminutive – because she had not been held in a quiet, otherworldly, place but had fled fire, keeping pace with the race of her small heart – then, she let that other-voice ease her sentiment with the baseness of instinct. 

She takes lazy, loping steps. She tends to be less neurotic when father is nearby. (Too open…) It makes ignoring her other half easier, though she can feel the pressure of its agitation – neither likes being ignored. For a time she nibbles grass and loses track of how far she has wandered. Then she sits up on her hind end and cranes around to check. When sees that they are not alone this time, she pivots and watches with ever-alert ears, her nose in constant motion. They touch. And speak. With a smooth, quick readjustment of bones and skin, she shifts into her bigger body and moves to them with light, hesitant steps.

She had looked just like them once, but mother’s grey had blotted out the yellow. Her odd, cotton-tail shifts side to side as she falls still in front of them, some distance away. (Wariness lives in her like a heartbeat.) She catches the name, ‘Magnus’, and she knows it. She looks to her father, with wide, dark eyes and searches his face for the feeling she yearns for herself. “I’m Longear,” she speaks softly, it is the same voice – full of earth and lilac – that carried her mother’s bedtime songs.

@[Laura] Revived! Hope you don't mind. @[madie] and I figured it would make some sense to throw her in? Also, I've been considering her choice of home, and the Gates is a front runner, so why not meet now.