Andarin: The Mountains: love ; III

Somewhere far away, the storm of snow and ice rages and howls as the day glooms into afternoon, but there – in that sheltered copse of trees, circling a soil-and-stone sepulchre that creaked and groaned as the warming ground shifted beneath them, drawing its heat from the deep, liquid rocks that hibernated within the earth. Astarte opens her flashing green eyes, crouched on the ground with her knees thrust into the moist soil (and even this flashes into memory – of Lórien herself supplicated to the earth, folding her brimming green into a stone of power and strength, the Simurgh-phoenix burning), and from everywhere around her greenness flourishes: moss and soft, succulent creepers flow like water from the places where her skin touches the earth, and she feels it like she never has before: like fire, like lightning, like the wind that howled outside and the water that trembled into steam – a kaleidoscope of power, for truly all the Elements lived and breathed as one, as aspects of one and the same.

Astarte looks up, from the webbed explosion of life still expanding from her, and green eyes meet green eyes, for the first time since the day of Astarte’s secret birth; the Skysong, for that is who she was and is and will always be, herself is on the verge of weeping, with the love and shame commingled in her gaze. She doesn’t speak, not yet; both of them are silent to the throbbing between them, their mirrored poses connected by streams and trails of sprouting plants and the blossoms beginning to bloom, and the soft light glowing (the cool sun suffused through layers of white, whiplike cloud, themselves disintegrating into snow and shattered ice; catching the few escaped rays of sunlight, and casting them into disarray). Something shimmers, but not with sight; their minds open to each other, dancing as if afraid, and Lórien leans forward to touch her shapely white muzzle to that of her daughter’s, bright and copper and blazing with life; something sparks between them, through the passage of years and lifetimes, and in the space between their splayed and mossy knees, a small stone glowed, webbed and cracked with glowing green.

You abandoned me, Lórien. Arayh was a good mother, but she wasn’t you.

I know; I’m so sorry. I tried to protect you, where I could not protect my son. You were my hope, and Lumina’s heir. My heir.

Aznavour, my brother? I barely remember him - what did Alluette do to him?

She mutilated his mind, Daughter, to become like her. I don’t know what has become of him.

You loved us.

I still do, my Starweaver.

The stilted sunlight bends on their embrace, mother and daughter reunited at the end of a lifetime, at the beginning of it all: Lórien does not tell her that the land beneath their feet is Astarte’s by birthright, for she does not know that it is Lumina, regrown from the wreckage, unrecognisable after the scattering, after the fires and the fall (save oh, her oak, sprawled in the distant hills; she knows it lives still, and can feel it, alive and throbbing); that these stones, shrouding Astarte’s dead king, was itself once a throne. She knows Leviah lays, far distant, under some different name (and what of you, Pharaoh and Galahad, my loves – to what distant shores did you flee?) – and she cannot go there, to the desert that carved her into what she was now, to the desert that built her to oracle and queen betrayed; she knows it no longer, as Lumina itself was now a strange land, shifting beneath her. Their breaths mingle together, soft and warm alike, and finally does Lórien smile: she has seen it, in her daughter’s radiant eyes, so like her own and Mirage, and so unlike Alluette – she has seen it, and the comfort of it, the release, settles upon her like the sun’s forgotten warmth.

She shifts her weight to lie half-propped on her side, comfortable on the mossy carpet of their own making, the movement of her knees uncovering the warping green-and-grey stone – as jade-shot amphibole – to Astarte’s curious eyes, and all at once they are mother and daughter conversing in happy silence; at ease, and beloved, together again for the first (and last, Lórien knows, silently) time in their lives – in freedom. The Skysong, brilliant silver and beautiful, smiles herself at her daughter, her expression knowing of what grew tenderly within her; oh Galahad, I didn’t fail, and as their earths tremble and begin to thrash, she knows their time grows short, and more poignant for it.

“Astarte,” she says softly, aloud and urgent; “I have something for you, precious to me, for I love you.” You are my triumph, Daughter. She bends her shapely white head to the floor that stretched shortly between them, and, with her soft muzzle, pressed the warm green stone towards the red mare who looked at her with eyes filled with conflicting emotion – love, and confusion, and a kind of knowing desperation – she knows what it is, the Simurgh of her dreams, and through the buzzing in her head, the shifting of their Elements and the explosion of colour still pulsing within her like the loud beat of her heart, she reaches out with her own soft mouth, and takes it ever-so-gently between her teeth.

Something ignites in middle distance, between Astarte’s mind and reality; memory, and power both not her own, was into her like a frothing tsunami, the legacy of her heritage stolen from the landscape and distilled into the green of the stone, bitter and metallic like blood on her tongue. It is the oncoming storm, flooding her veins with it, and howling into her head like the snowstorm had shrieked through the trees and she cannot help but cry out; Lórien, the Skysong, her mother, falls dead before her, finally at peace. Astarte’s breath is stuttered and ragged in pain and dismay, at the cruel loss of what she had only just found, and the utter roaring chaos of the Simurgh, careening through her as Ixtab’s stripes bent and swayed upon her body: time speeds, and hours pass beneath the span of her mother’s arc that held the winter at bay, the moss and clover soft and blossoming as it pillowed and cradled Lórien’s body, beautiful and whole.

Much later, in the aftermath of the blizzard as the sky clears and the sun finally warms her true, Astarte sheds the atrifical sphere of warmth and comfort; she rises shakily to her legs, the Simurgh vanishing somewhere safe within her, and she feels, again, as if she had become an oracle once more, mantled with the charge of something rare and precious.

She buries Lórien as she had buried Kale long ago, folding her within a living crypt of soil and gleaming rock; their graves form twin sacred peaks as the honoured of Lumina and Andarin, and at the last she bends to her knees before them, her muzzle resting in the freshly turned soil and her breath exhuming the earth beneath it, and the Starweaver weeps helplessly and brokenly, brimming with the power of the Skysong and the heritage of Lumina, borne of love – tempered by sacrifice, and never forgotten.