Andarin: The Mountains: do your best to stay gold

How could it have possibly been that three years had passed?

Star-child, star-child, star-child… the nickname comes rushing back to her with his embrace and she shivers at the warmth of his touch. The seemingly endless abyss between them was remedied with these simple movements, these simple words, and the absence of their former awkwardness. Nyota easily forgets her worries, her dreams, her wishes… and sees only the Aphotic, her forever-king.

“I know.” Her words are simple – as they always are. She knew he had duties elsewhere – that the timing then had been imperfect, and she had lived with that. She had not faulted him then, and she still could not fault him now; love tends to gouge out the Polestar’s eyes.

But would Requiem keep his vision, amidst the travesties she was about to confess?

Perhaps a lesser mare would lie; swear allegiance, swear that nothing had changed and she was still his and she had waited all that time on the hope that he would return. Alas, the Polestar could only be herself. Nyota shook the fear from her shoulders, unsure of exactly where to start, but knowing that she would deliver nothing less than the truth.

“Well, you have a son,” she said with a wide grin, dipping her nose into the place where his neck and shoulder met to transfer a random collection of images of their Anatole upon him. She quivered again, and wondered briefly if this would be the last. But the images flowed freely - there was Anatole as a foal, basking in the warm, summer sun that Wolfrange provided; Anatole now, as a warrior, a scar to match hers on his shoulder where Betrayal had cut them. So then, came the images of Betrayal and the wordless story of what had unfolded in Desreal over the years. “He is older, Requiem, much older than the three years allow for. He is quite like you, in many ways.”

There were many things that got lost in the fray and mess of it all – flashes of her Quest to become Seer, of her short time as Queen, of her various imprisonments at Solira, of her friendship with Kivuli, her time spent watching Anatole fight… it was all so convoluted that he would most likely understand only bits of it. Perhaps, if he stayed, she would tell him the stories properly – as the Oracle she had grown to be.

“And then, there is something that you are not going to like at all…” her voice withers into hesitation as she divulges images of Choke and their two children, and the love affair that had unfolded between the two. She had not seen him since she returned from the tree, and even before Requiem’s arrival she had wondered what that meant.

I’m sorry… she says to him quietly, so that only he can hear. Silent, her lips hover over his shoulder even though the images have stopped. I thought that our story had finished.