Andarin: The Mountains: stormcrow; --

“ I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ”

-- Yeats

There are times – and I don’t know whether you have ever felt this – when change seems so momentous you can almost taste it.

This was one of those times.

The blood was cold and sticky between us, staining me red and black and she, red and white – like a perfect pair of contradictions joined by blood.

And how perfectly apt that imagery was.

Because that’s exactly what we were like.

What we are like.

“Shh,” she urged, a soft, almost inaudible sound. “Shh.”

Alkonost was heavy and warm. At that moment, it was all she needed, all she cared for, her sister caught against her chest, the sweat and elements pooling and cackling between them – but it wasn’t the elements that mattered, not the shard embedded in flesh and not the voice of Andürien urging her away. It didn’t matter even that her sight slip and jarred out of focus.

“I love you too,” she said frankly, sweetly as is her wont, brushing her twin’s forelock away from the wide, horrified eyes. Yellow, the color of brimstone. Jörmungandr liked that; she liked the bone-white’s contrast to brimstone-yellow of irises and the pinprick of black.

Even the betrayal she still felt, rotting, festering inside, wasn’t as important as soothing her twin’s mind.

Which, all things considered, wasn’t that hard; she had the elements in her favor, after all.

“It doesn’t matter,” she mused – because it didn’t and she knew it – “he can’t harm me. He can’t harm you, either. I won’t let him.”

In her mind, she did not, obviously, think of it as father, but as Necromancer – the dark stallion the presence in her mind, now shut firmly behind the red bars of its own fire, hated.

She snorted, Jörmungandr, because she knew how silly an emotion – one she didn’t know how to name – was. No one would make her feel that strange emotion of prickling needles and incandescent rage over her sister.

No one.

“Hush, hush,” she urged, touching, caressing – kissing even, the way horses do, with nips and licks and other small ineffective gesture that work as well as more flamboyant human ones. “It’s alright. I was surprised, just that. Andürien doesn’t like him.”

She shrugged; she couldn’t care less about Andürien’s millenia-old opinions right now.

This was Alkonost, her twin.

She might not be perfect, no, but she was very damn near it.

“D’you have targets?” she asked then, because she understood about shards as much as Andürien did – an unfair transfer of knowledge from millenia-old ghost to mare-child, but there you have it. “You’ll need to feed him. I can help you.”

Andürien shrieked at that in a rather uncharacteristic manner; but Jörmungandr only smiled, and cuddled up closer to her sister.

After all, she knows where her ultimate loyalty lies.

jörmungandr
of night and light and half-light