you were like a creature who’d lived all its life among pearls & old bones

[narrow width=800]she had met night like kith and kin and bedfellow and now took her leave;
heading back to the hale arms of cloudrest's northron entrance, where she would be held in her mists and hidden away with what lostlings had found her and those who still followed her; away from how she had brushed herself against these stranger constellations and inscribed her make-believe names for them all on sheets of vellum within her head. argent eyes that have finally left the skies now roam over this great reach she treads homebound over: night-basked and edged in the early-dawn, laden all over with snow and the slow-rushing river she follows, caught in shifts of light and strokes of unrippled color.

icy clarity wreaths her wan face on a breath gilt with guilt. ragged and drawn and cold.

sleep nor solace comes easy to her and she does not suffer easily their absences and those of her remaining unrecoverable children, but  –  no. she only needs to remove herself from beneath this waking sky irritated by stars; only needs to return to her frore mountains and the ones who have chosen to make a home with her. and even if it is not at once as great as she would have liked to begun, they were ... hers, were they not? their own, but hers by plight and pledge.

weren't they?

there's the taste of charnel ash on her tongue, at that; the dark cut of her brow furrows and riannon feels ...uncertain. hers. turns the possession of it over in her mind like a miner poring over some jewel to do out with any false fragments. her steps heavy with her thoughts; sinking into snows at ankles and wrists as she crests a rising bend in her path and does not presently look where she is headed.

not at those stranger stars she's come to name;
or the waywandering and ivory @Olive, either.[/narrow]

the staff team luvs u

note: occurs towards the end of her trip to the tundra

---

Her time in the tundra would soon come to a close, and then she would return home. That was the plan, as far as Olive was concerned. Her keeper had found her, had fetched her back to The Hireath where he could keep a closer eye on her. In the process, she had perhaps hurt some feelings, but Olive could not say that is hadn't been worth it because it instilled some sense of adventure back into her life. Amongst the monotony of packhood, even the bleakness of the tundra stood out in grand relief.

She spent the last few of her hours here milling about, under the guise of prayer and skyreading. The cat @benry was somewhere nearby, perhaps hunting or sleeping, and Olive walked about, feeling the weak, nascent sunbeams trickle from the heavens and dot the snows and her own pelt, as if they were one. Looking out at the vastness, she saw another lone snowhare, traipsing through powder, fresh-fallen, with a face of consternation. Olive recognized her with ease. "Hail," the sylph greeted the other, realizing she was far closer than she had first appeared. "You are the one, from the mists." She stated without reason other than airing her own memory of it.

the staff team luvs u

[narrow width=800]"as were you,"  because, for a time, the willowisp had been one of those rare few who seemed to know  ( or, at least keenly perceive )  all that was below and above that made the roots of her silver mountains reach as far as they still did into the skies.  "...but you did not stay."  a nonaccusatory, simple statement. though there was no underlying ill-wish, her voice still withdrew itself from the sheath of her throat not unlike tikari — a dirk while something self-consuming that lingered about its edges like doubt. where their palantír and crow had gone, she did not know; and perhaps it is in the way she sees how this gyptian goes where she wishes without pretense, prepared to be of her own self and only ever of herself that has the nightingale's moonshed ruff twitching in mild disquiet.

had she not been so effervescent, once upon a time? two moons ago?

two winters?

her lips thin; neverminding if the other would follow in her pawprints or not as she intoned then:  "is it the cold that has called you back, or some other thing?"  for however far she has wandered, she cannot help but wonder if the nomad had returned to see the child they had both discovered in that witching hour, laden through with hauntcraft and what had once not needed words in order to be known.[/narrow]

the staff team luvs u

Olive had thought of this woman often, and the child she subsumed into her heart, hearth and home that day. She had offered all this and more to Olive as well, but much like when Olive had run encountered Meissa and learned of Little Haven, she had much work still to do. Not every opportunity was guided by divine timing, so the sylph had needed to make her own. However, that divine timing had seemed to take her farther and farther away from the misted veils of Cloudrest — she hadn't even been looking for it at this point in her path, but the road had risen up to meet her in a way that could not be ignored.

Olive turned her cheek to the side, glancing in the direction that the woman intuitively knew as east. back towards little haven.  "I owed a debt," she explained, letting her gaze then fall to the only thing that was within eyeshot: the snowfall. "I became... involved," one pale woman continued to the other, looking back at her familiar visage. Life became complicated quick, didn't it? With Meissa's pregnancy, her captor Benry, and the golden wraith from the watering hole, it had been clear that her place had been right there.

"I do not know what brought me back," Olive mused, although she did know one thing. Whatever it was, it was the same pull that had brought them together the first time.

the staff team luvs u

[narrow width=800]a dark arch of brow raises at the mention of a debt, of involvement; but it was the next statement, one which had no right or reason to be taken as anything but some listless, vague wondering that struck her clean through her stomach like ice, like iron and kuunhekku shudders against her own will. as she is wont to do, bids herself to do, she turns away from the what and the why of why those words elicited such a visceral show of thinly-veiled vulnerability; tugs herself away from the druid on stiff legs until whatever damnable thing it is that has bound them together strains taut, too taut  — 

—  and she snaps her fangs with a resounding, clacking shhk! by way of something to fill the thwarted stretched of silence and the way her spirit thrashes, frothing at godsbit; some fear for what the sibyl stood for fluttering and flitting in her belly like a lark. the why for either of their returns to another or elsewise did not matter  ( but, didn't it, though? )  and though she hopes to outpace her fellow witch riannon realizes how worn she is to the ends of herself. the spires of her shoulders heave, and with a harsh snort of cold air she tosses her pale head to the heavens and glowers and glowers as if to burn ahti on his very throne with her hateful silverflame eye.

he should have never brought her back;
gooseberry cubs and lostlove lilac or no.

and then, whirling to face the spellsinger:  "if you roam so far from your debtors, are you an outlander? or is that debt not yet fulfilled?"[/narrow]

the staff team luvs u

The lark stumbled away from her, upset by her holy reasoning. Olive could not guess as to what thoughts clouded the woman's mind, for a women who knew of spiritual obligation would also know they were naught but pawns in a larger game, and the gods had simply seen fit to throw them together again in this particular moment in time. Olive could not fight these forces with as much ease as she could submit to them. What Olive didn't know was that these two paths were not separate, but deeply intertwined. The two pale fae, troddening a circle of footsteps in the snow, looked unblinkingly at one another —

Until the other seemingly gave into their weight they carried, allowing her graceful stature to slump. Olive moved forward a step, leaning forward on her front legs in case she need to rush to the woman's side, but it was instead she who whirled around to meet her own gaze. Olive bit her tongue, feeling it unfair for her to be questioned so, on unclaimed ground. "I consider the matter concluded," Olive bade her dolefully, lowering her head slightly, bunching the muscles at the junction of her neck and shoulders. Her unease was palpable. What did the Gods require of she, who looked into the mirror of life, and saw this other woman reflected back?

the staff team luvs u

[narrow width=800]it is an old thing, these half-barbed dealings in this small world of females.

something horrible inside of her wants to feast on the way good hope and humor falls from the spellsinger's face; wants to conjure a feral smile with all of her teeth at the faltering of it all. but the nightingale is not so cruel as to kneel to the nature of what cold bids her to do, for just as palpable in her is the sorrowing of her seething, the guardedness of her grief. knows that the one before her, inexorably drawn to her does not deserve the biting edge of her silver words  —  and yet she is here, and it is she whose soul has been strung up alongside hers but she is not blue. she is not hearthsmoke and, oh, ahti knows. knows, even when he'd had his pick of what had been woven to her a world away. a life away.

knew.

he knew.

and now her presence is a mockery;
one that finally breaks something in her.

"concluded?"  her voice a pale shadow; her face indrawn, faux tranquil and tucked away as tight as a secret.  "am i to take it that you now seek some matter in my mists?"  they two stood upon the great white of forever, not within that hollow, and whoever her shadowlove had been might not approve of how she savaged this stranger; but the space at her side is void, and her shoulder is phantom cold, and his voice isn't there to rise, to meet her in her long dark, and she has long since fallen mad and risen as her own malady.

and he is not here.

so the sotaherra presses forward in a sickle-path way; body like a brushstroke, long and lean and too bright. steps still stiff, still clawing, as she nears and peers with storms astir in her eyes at the one with her brow so bowed. this one who must have some use. something to tend to like a garden, and then let it  —  let her, rather —  grow wild.

wilder.[/narrow]

the staff team luvs u

Olive could feel how she was triggered, and how the mere presence of this woman resonated with some frequency buried so deep in her being that it hurt, like a wound, when brought to the surface and exposed. Why this woman made her feel this way was, Olive believed, lost to the ages; but she refused to ignore the pull. The druid leaned into the challenge, knowing this was the way towards growth.

"Would you believe that our meeting is the working of the divine? I had no hand in this," she said, not unkindly, but with an air of exasperation at how their path was woven. She had thought of the woman often, but she had not truly considered what the woman's misted mountain offered her.  She really didn't even consider it as a true possibility, during her time with Little Haven. It had seemed like a distant dream that was path-adjacent, but that narrative was begin to unweave itself. Olive was open to external influences, and the Gods seems to have much to say about what this nameless waif meant to her.

Olive was a statue, whereas the other wove around her, weaving an erratic energy. Through glowering jade eyes, Olive kept her attention trained. "...but as a servant to the Gods, it seems there is indeed something I seek amongst your hearth," she suggested, shrugging, unsure what that might be. She considered it a possibility that this woman, so like her in appearance, might be akin to her in trade as well. Perhaps there was healing to do.

the staff team luvs u