Andarin: The Mountains: phoenix sunset ; icarus

astarte;

He finds her in the dark, and she wonders at that: remembers, in the shadows, the first night under the starts and her captivity in his writhing gaze, twisting and turning and writing his name upon her heart. She purrs with Ixtab’s voice, her summer coat slick and sleek and supple beneath the curve of his lips and the curling trace of his breath upon her, and she arches her neck beneath him, coy, longing, and strange.

She’s been gone, she knows, for too long drifting in the muck of her own mind – and how can you blame her, with the sick weight of the Skysong’s legacy (such as it was – of self-torture, such that Astarte had loosely inflicted upon herself, and never again: Icarus was her Galahad, and she had caught him, never to let go): it has been too long, and with her voice, whispered alike into the crescendo of crickets and fireflies and the onrush of his wind in her ears, she tells him so, with words of a strange tongue and laughter.

Slowly, the light fades until all there is to see by is the silvered stream of stars and the fire in the clack of his hooves, dancing against her red skin and flitting in his eyes like a crimson sparrow: she sees there, abruptly, the reflection of her own eyes, shuttered in the dark half-light and etched with something indescribable. “Icarus,” she says, her voice like a hesitant tip-toe of strings and piano chords, suddenly taken by what she saw, and read, and did not read: only with him could she cease the flow of emotion and thought that raged around her, clasped in the grasp of Andarin’s Oracle as of she held the threads to their sanity, woven into a tapestry of sense and purpose; and Icarus, if only he knew, held the threads to hers.

She purred again, smiling, and at the sudden gust of wind she laughed, and danced, and felt like parts of her were racing in every direction. Suddenly she knew, and the Starweaver was not so afraid anymore: those dreams, shared with shattered Snakecharmers that rested even now ever-by, of stones and her mother’s green, green eyes, sad and crackling with power she’d never wanted to have: imbued in that stone, and hidden, such that Astarte’s quest of mind and body had been searching her dreams for it –

- she didn’t need it anymore, not really, with Icarus’s breath on her cheek and her tigress’s coughing laugh rumbling in middle distance. “I love you,” she says, and she means it.

“…catch me now!” And she runs, her legs stroking the ground as if stoking a fire, not away from him, never away from him, but into the sheltering trees, away from probing eyes and other’s passions: leaving behind the Simurgh, if ever it had existed (and even then she knows it did: in her mother’s eyes, between her bloody knees, in her daughter’s fire, in Icarus’s touch), coiled in the grass behind her.