Desreal: slouching towards bethlehem; severus

A long time ago, when Accendare had been young – so young, still, that she had lain curled upon the coarse Soliran sand with Indio, and Astarte, and knowing her father and herself: how much has changed! – she had heard stories that were not so much fables but mysteries, which she had essentially scoffed at outright. Tales were tales, of horses long gone or dead or merely half-forgotten; horses were horses, none truly good and none truly evil, and none even truly that special, yet all leant themselves to hyperbole, or over-fearful whispering, or proud retellings. Accendare thought herself, at that young and impressionable age, that she was far from impressionable, and rather an expert a sorting out fact from fantasy (which she thinks is ironic, now, given what she has learned about blood and family and those deserving of respect): she knew Severus, the Wraith, could not have been what the all said he was.

How wrong, and how right, the Dragonet finds herself that afternoon.

She comes at the call as if she had no other choice; her feet did not drag as if a child called to justice, and had she known, she would have armed herself with her razor dragon-scales and fire-breath and its false ego. But she doesn’t know – how could she? – and so she goes with whispers only of irritation, and the petty spite of the interrupted, called to a duty they did not entirely see the point of.

Desreal’s naked trees shake in His wind (she knows it, now, for it is so different from Icarus’s), and in her wake it bays her flames, flickering at her feet and melting the snow she treads upon; she follows the wind as it calls, chilling her to the bone with a deep and unnatural cold – she breathes, and exhales that misty cloud that should have been the smoke of her dragonbreath, but wasn’t. Accendare, you fool.

He calls, and she goes, and knows not where to – the Wraith does not wait where his wind fades into the crystalline atmosphere (and is it fitting that in the afternoon sunlight, as the sun sinks below that critical azimuth and bathes the ice-clouds scaling the sky with the reds and oranges of fire and death? She does not see it; it is beautiful, she thinks in her naivety, and oh, fool Dragonet!), and she stands rampant in the embrace of snow and the sleeping statues trees that may as well be corpses – “What do you want of me, Wraith?” she whispers to nothing, and waits, the innocent moth fluttering to the flame.