Andarin: The Mountains: I ;

As motionless cars rust on driveways and curbs
You take off your raincoat and stretch out your arms
We both laugh out loud and surrender to it
The sheer force of sky and the cold magnet Earth

“Icarus,” she says to the wind;

It is cold, and the Earth is dead; that, or its power has been ripped from her – the Simurgh pulses within her still and indeed, though it she had felt the razing of Andarin, of Lumina, her home, and the burning of Ni’Srilan, of Leviah, her birthplace; she had felt it as knives, as spears, tipped with the poison of betrayal and of better days – as the Stone jealously stole back its wonders to its smouldering breast;

And bitterly, she thinks, as blood runs into the dead soil and denuded, dead trees and dead shattered rocks and dead life, and that bleakness desecrates the graves of Kale and the Skysong under the fettered, sundered sky, that there is nothing left here: a world slain, Andarin once again rended unto the ashes from which it had once healed; her earth is dead, and her Simurgh cannot heal it as it had once healed Lumina.

For Astarte, her son tucked eagerly into her chilled flanks, and her blood running freely from the bent knees she had thrust into the ruins of her home (in the eerie aftermath of it, as she had tried to bend the sway of the Element’s gnashing fangs as her mother had once done, had defied the snarl of the Stone and had failed), it was enough – enough that the trees burned, and the ground upheaved in a terrible cacophony of crushed stone and avalanched snow; her mountains, the seat of her blood-right throne, had crumbled like so much melted icebergs, and there was nothing left but falling sleet and austere desolation, and the swirl of sterile snow and the crushing despondency of dead leaves and slain earth –

And she, cinnamon-red as dried blood upon stone, her coat darker from the sleet-damp and warmed by the sweetness of Loki’s skin, does not weep for the end, for it had been written in the soil and stone and the sky since the dawn of its time; one does not dread nor mourn the inevitable, though she would know forever the grace of her land, toiling beneath her hooves, beautiful.

They go alone to the edge of their world, the limit of what she and her son had ever known, and they are not afraid; They will come in her wake, in a time of Their choosing, following their footprints left uncovered in the snow, into the pale sunset – she worries not, turning her face into the wind – and what had she but gained? Love, and family, and the blessing of her mother; it was not tied to land, but to self, and that was perhaps the greatest lesson she would learn – for that, she is grateful, she does not look back;

Never to return.

Something was bound to go right sometime today
All these broken pieces fit together to make a perfect picture of us
It got cold and then dark so suddenly and rained
It rained so hard the two of us were the only thing
That we could see for miles and miles