Andarin: The Mountains: listen to the warning, the seer he said --

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

- W. B. Yeats

“What is love, Nico?”

Her lips twined in his mane, because she was familiar like this and couldn’t possibly care if her actions were misunderstood or not. Before her eyes she saw Alkonost: snow-white, paler than anyone she’d ever seen, beautiful and slender as an unicorn of legends. Her sister’s strength, however, was not the innocence or purity of the unicorns – she would have snorted at such a thought – but something else altogether.

Wild.

Hers.

“Mother says it’s weakness,” and she would know, too, Fenrisulfr. Fenrisulfr who had suffered the world’s injustices perhaps more keenly than many. Fenrisulfr whose scars danced with the wind’s breath and who hated as wholeheartedly and shamelessly as she loved, wildly, fiercely, but not easily. Never easily. “That love corrupts.”

She thought of Wyvern then, and the mad spiral dance of loathing and self-hatred he felt, thought of Icarus and how they matched as perfectly as pieces in a jigsaw. Halves of a whole. But then, their was not love, but something deeper than it could ever be.

Funny that the mare who sowed tranquility with her every step would bear such a thing in her – pain, raw and naked, at the thought of her sister’s

(no, not sister. Twin.)

secrets. The ones they wove together, because they were born together.

“You probably know,” she continued, musing. The nervousness – the one so deep-burrowing in her mother’s skin – lived in her, as well, sparking as sunbursts behind her eyelids. Pain, raw and overwhelming. Electricity. Everyone’s hurt, everyone’s sensations. Everyone’s martyrdom. “You are old, after all,” she laughed then, speaking in jest – he is no older than she is, for all she cares, and time always behaved in odd ways around her – bumping her shoulder to his playfully.

***
jörmungandr
there is hope, but not for us