Andarin: The Mountains: wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight ;

His silver eyes study her with wide-open wonderment, his lips parted in an unspoken ‘oh!’ - for a second he has it in his mind to follow her off the edge. And he, Asher, young and thin-limbed and delicate as his father was, would not survive; he had no elements to cradle him at the bottom - only the peace and blissfulness that would have been the winds singing in his ears and the soft flurries of old snow forming intangible wings against his side. He envies the Queen her pain. He would take it from her if he could, not out of loyalty but of an unreasonable jealousy; he is his father’s son, and revels in the undoing.

It’s the soft lick of his sister’s flame that gives him pause, and even then –

He might have. They both know it. Ironically, it’s the reappearance of the wolf-queen that saves him.

Caught in the eternal silence that is his self (not one that binds him; rather, one that he revels in as he revels in her pain – a beautiful existence, his, to live without the tie of words), Asher lets Kairi do the speaking. Her flames spread up and around, dancing on the pivotal winds that whisk around; she doesn’t know that it is rude to let them dance, especially in the company of one with winds – even if she did know, she probably couldn’t stop it and she certainly wouldn’t care. Instead she levels her coal-black gaze to the mare (it’s striking, in the brief moment of silence where there is only them, how different she is – Asher is lanky and thin, but she is looming and thick and dark-eyed with mottled red fur; then, she is not of his blood, as she does not need to be).

“No,” she says simply, her voice nearly a purr of satisfaction as the fire licks around her face and ash blows around the mountain spires.

Kairi pauses, takes a deep breath - even her fire calms itself for that brief moment.

“Our father would have, though.”

She frowns, remembering Asher’s insistence that He had loved her. If He had, she didn’t know why; the Queen was certainly not beautiful, not carefree or joyous or fated as those He loved were. She didn’t notice that already her brother Milkman loved her, too, though of course he would never say he did.

Nonetheless she carried on the message. It was one of her final duties, along with caring for the brother she loved more than life.

“There was a time when he would have liked to join you to the bottom,” she tells the Queen softly, her fire raging around her in the loveless eventide.