[She is light enough--ghost-light, rag-light--she can be worn; he can advance, while her insubstantial form feathers and flows around him in bright streamers. The path ahead needs no guidance now that he has the knack of walking it, the hook-in-the-heart of the Throne's song guiding him surely. She can keep her eyes on his, watch his faces for signs of wavering, distress, deviation--
For red reflected stars in his eyes. Omen? he asks, and she cranes her too-long neck back to regard what comes for them in an inverted angle. She considers what she is seeing for almost too long, as it crests and foams and begins to break.
Then all around them is feather and mothscale and filament as her wings erupt, more than she should have, and she clutches him to her chest in an infolding gesture like closing a luminous cocoon.
A drowning wave of insects falls on them with both force and malice behind it. The pale thin aegis of feather protects against both crushing and submersion, buoying them up--but now the locusts begin to chew.]
no subject
For red reflected stars in his eyes. Omen? he asks, and she cranes her too-long neck back to regard what comes for them in an inverted angle. She considers what she is seeing for almost too long, as it crests and foams and begins to break.
Then all around them is feather and mothscale and filament as her wings erupt, more than she should have, and she clutches him to her chest in an infolding gesture like closing a luminous cocoon.
A drowning wave of insects falls on them with both force and malice behind it. The pale thin aegis of feather protects against both crushing and submersion, buoying them up--but now the locusts begin to chew.]