Andarin: The Mountains: when the wind blows the water white and black

“Well then,” she says, to no one and to everyone - to him, her brother, ghost-pale and sullen amongst the trees, “it’s time.”

They exchange a look of solemnity and hopeful supplication, of pain and of excitement, in even proportions; together, they remember the stories He had woven them those long, long nights ago, when they had both sat beneath their respective boughs, silent and happy, and had listened - and how he had spun tales, then, of his friendships, and what he did not name but what they knew was love. (To Asher’s mother, he had given his mind but never, they knew, his heart; even as she died in the final throes of childbirth and he had gone to find another mare to suckle Asher, and she had, though not enough for him to ever fill out as he should have – neither of those mares had gotten his love, nor had they really deserved it. But the women in the stories were different; together the siblings watched his star-shine eyes alight as he spoke their names, and they knew. He loved them, even if he’d never say he did – he loved them, and would, until all he had were memories fabricated from want. But even that was love enough.)

“I found her,” she continues, because she knows he’s listening, even if he says nothing; “I found her, where he’d hoped she wouldn’t be - at the top, Ash. That’s where we must go.”

And, awakening from a feigned slumber, he nods with a child’s wonderment, places his muzzle on the slope beneath her wither, and walks to the ravaged peaks.

*

They find her where they knew they would: amid the slopes, surveying that which was hers, and that which shouldn’t have been.

(It was not difficult, not at all; they remembered His stories, the descriptions of this cratered slope and that overgrown trail, and followed the memories of his words until they led them to her.)

The colt pauses a moment, to rest his ashen muzzle at the broad mouth of the cave he had loved and known - but Kairi marched ever away, and so he followed.

“There,” she breathes, a nearly-wordless sound, and together they plunge on.

It’s when they’re nearly at her side - she, wolf Queen, hovering just at the brink, the span of the world alight in her yellow eyes – it’s when Asher hesitates in more wonderment and Kairi steps hesitatingly forward, that their eyes widen together and they witness her beautiful flight.

Daughter of Icarus, they remember solemnly and together, as if they are one – but she is not her father, for she is without waxen wings.

The dance of reality and hope sprawls, spread-eagled and flailing and falling, ever falling, across their eyes.

“Fly free,” Kairi calls, loudly; “fly, like you ought!” She takes a step forward as if to urge her words on, to push them down past the ledges of stone that they might catch the free-fall of the bulwarked mare, shoulders slung with flight anew;

But there before her, his head tilted askew, is Asher, and his bright silver eyes follow the speck of a Queen down, down, to the bottom of the earth.