Andarin: The Mountains: michabou ;

He breaks that stillness, his body stiff and heavy with sleep as, nevertheless, he shifts with subtle grace beneath the moonlight, closing the ever-changing distance between their bodies until his shoulder and his hip both press warmly against her skin – it amazes him how quickly he longed for it, as she had tested him with her touch. And so he finds himself touched – by her skin, by her scent, and by her head, curled ever so suddenly and ever so gently around the curve of his neck; he wonders if she can feel the beat of his heard, shuddering and speeding in the veins below her own. It is too brief, and as his heart had sped in her presence, it stopped as her warmth left him;

He responds quietly in kind, tentatively touching the very quivering tip of his soft nose to the smooth expanse of her lower jaw, and still he does not speak, for a bank of clouds has shrouded the moon and Fehazathant is struck by the way the starlight bathed on her closed eyelids and caught in the strands of her mane, shifting minutely in the breeze. It is fortunate that he has not experienced a night like this, for any other would have shifted his mind out of mesmerised and into memory – to her, and what used to be, and what never could be again. Foolish, he thinks, for he is and he always has been: a fool, stuck in a past and stuck in the future and forever drifting into the present, like a leaf half-floating on the wind.

He shakes his head, imperceptibly, feeling the fine hairs of their stomachs merge and brush against each other, strand for strand, as he inhales and she inhales and they exhale in the dance of breath and life; and she speaks, like an owl winging in the dark, muffled quiet and muted by shyness – and he knows, he knows, and he feels the same. He holds his breath for a moment, savouring it, and he risks the stillness once more to say his name, without prefix: “Fehazathant,” though he wonders without speaking, if she would stay to hear it.