[Wild Roses] second war
Title: any time tomorrow
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Évariste
Prompt: 06A "harmony"
Word Count: 466
Notes: dormouse_in_tea asked for him. It's kind of becoming a yearly tradition; last year she and I and Phoebe were the only ones who lit candles for him.
This is near the end of the second war.
Ordinarily he was at his strongest in mist and shadow, the lines between one place, one animal, and the next blurred as their outlines, blurred as what he remembered with the clarity of steel and stone and what was only shallow muddy water. He barely noticed the things he walked through, the things he shooed out of his path or chivvyed before him.
Not tonight. Tonight the ground was frozen, solid beneath his feet, and he had to spare a wish, a brush of his attention to keep himself from shivering, before he pulled a coat out of the air and shrugged into it, over the threadbare remains of the last.
Somewhere, wolves were singing, ringing clear and high over the frozen ground.
Tonight, he felt the patterns around him as more than cobwebs and frost-ice, strong enough to hold him close, secure in his place as the ground beneath his feet.
He reached, aware, for the moment, of what he was looking for.
There was nothing, where his brother should have been. Not blocked, or hiding, or fled, but absence, nothing but a taste of dust in his mouth and a barely-remembered sting of salt in his eyes. When he pressed, tried to feel out the title his brother had stolen from him, he found himself blocked by fire, someone too young for him to have ever met in better days standing between him and whoever wore the title King now.
Too young to know the salute he gave, before he backed off. Tomorrow he might not know it, but he couldn't afford to dwell on that, not now, when he was looking for his other brother, while he knew the man's name and the way he'd spun patterns in younger days, the way their patterns had interacted, once, strengthened each other--
Found. He stepped forward.
A rifle bullet stopped in the air when he looked at it, all the kinetic energy sucked out into the web he tightened around it midflight, tiny spark at the edge of his attention as he looked up at the dark shadow of a stone building. He could remember the place, a little, sun on his shoulders and a roar of thrown stones. The rest of the memory was soft around the edges, conversations with ghosts he'd never met when they were alive, a fight with a gray wolf that became a woman with iron-gray hair braided back out of her eyes, who'd driven him away, once.
But he knew where his brother stood, and there were no ghosts tonight.
He lit the memory of a moon above his own head, lifted his head to let the light fall on his shoulders, on his face.
---
"Oh, devouring dark, that's--"
"No, no it's not," said a soft, grim voice. "That's worse."
'Verse/characters: Wild Roses; Évariste
Prompt: 06A "harmony"
Word Count: 466
Notes: dormouse_in_tea asked for him. It's kind of becoming a yearly tradition; last year she and I and Phoebe were the only ones who lit candles for him.
This is near the end of the second war.
Ordinarily he was at his strongest in mist and shadow, the lines between one place, one animal, and the next blurred as their outlines, blurred as what he remembered with the clarity of steel and stone and what was only shallow muddy water. He barely noticed the things he walked through, the things he shooed out of his path or chivvyed before him.
Not tonight. Tonight the ground was frozen, solid beneath his feet, and he had to spare a wish, a brush of his attention to keep himself from shivering, before he pulled a coat out of the air and shrugged into it, over the threadbare remains of the last.
Somewhere, wolves were singing, ringing clear and high over the frozen ground.
Tonight, he felt the patterns around him as more than cobwebs and frost-ice, strong enough to hold him close, secure in his place as the ground beneath his feet.
He reached, aware, for the moment, of what he was looking for.
There was nothing, where his brother should have been. Not blocked, or hiding, or fled, but absence, nothing but a taste of dust in his mouth and a barely-remembered sting of salt in his eyes. When he pressed, tried to feel out the title his brother had stolen from him, he found himself blocked by fire, someone too young for him to have ever met in better days standing between him and whoever wore the title King now.
Too young to know the salute he gave, before he backed off. Tomorrow he might not know it, but he couldn't afford to dwell on that, not now, when he was looking for his other brother, while he knew the man's name and the way he'd spun patterns in younger days, the way their patterns had interacted, once, strengthened each other--
Found. He stepped forward.
A rifle bullet stopped in the air when he looked at it, all the kinetic energy sucked out into the web he tightened around it midflight, tiny spark at the edge of his attention as he looked up at the dark shadow of a stone building. He could remember the place, a little, sun on his shoulders and a roar of thrown stones. The rest of the memory was soft around the edges, conversations with ghosts he'd never met when they were alive, a fight with a gray wolf that became a woman with iron-gray hair braided back out of her eyes, who'd driven him away, once.
But he knew where his brother stood, and there were no ghosts tonight.
He lit the memory of a moon above his own head, lifted his head to let the light fall on his shoulders, on his face.
---
"Oh, devouring dark, that's--"
"No, no it's not," said a soft, grim voice. "That's worse."