Ni'Srilan: The Desert: To you, Sterling. --

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper.

- T. S. Eliot

“Yes,” she says in the same cadence, the one that makes her sound older and more careworn than she is. “She would. Will.”

Alkonost’s face, the whiteness of her fur that was more like seafoam than moonlight, flits in her memory for a bright dazed moment, before the lights go out of the world, and the colors.

Change and becoming come as whirlwinds: they happen without cause, as abruptly as one can think, then fade away just as quickly. Her secret flows from her like a pulse, that calming, dangerously alluring haze she creates by simply standing and existing, the one that, sometimes, drove her delirious with knowing.

“A long time. No olden than me, she was. Even younger. Not the desert’s, she isn’t. Nor anywhere’s.”

The shadow – for shadow she is, for all the peacefulness she bears like a cloak upon her shoulders – is wary at the same time she is peaceful; the contradiction wars in her for a moment, deep within the sheet of fire that sparks into her mane unbidden, like tiny colored ribbons. Wary by instinct more than reason, the instinct ingrained in her genes as much as her sister’s, mother’s, aunt’s, grandparents’.

The face of her mother slips to the surface, slick and dark and with that spark of red in the pupils, of one too fargone into the darkness – not the ‘evil’ as they understand it, for Fenrisulfr is not evil, but the primal, chaotic, wild darkness.

“Stay here, why do you? Desolate, it is. Beautiful, but sad.”

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