Dragoncrest Cliffs you are my deepening skies — give me your stars to hold.

Setting Return journey & reunion, late morning.
Time Dated to 1/27, hours before the conception.
Participants Aure & @Vonn
Anyone tagged is just for reference (esp. if they’ve helped reunite them!)

Regardless of @Stigmata’s tellings and her reunion with @Wintersbane — and regardless still at her relief of returning in the nick of time before her tell-tale heat — disappointment still weighed heavy on Aure’s delicate shoulders. Her sylphlike legs hauled both emotion and herself up the familiar rise of Drageda’s moor; and once she crested the frost-limned swell of heather, she let herself waver there. Waver, and let the red of the sequoias encompass her listless gaze.

As her spirit arced throughout the ancient, unending labyrinth of roseate hinters, seeking nothing in particular, her mind wandered back to what the sotherra had told her. Both northern lords had told her that her brother still yet lived — that he meant to fulfill a life-debt, and that he lingered along the coast. But the porcelain skayona couldn’t help but feel some sort of envy for this. For the face that both kings (and more, no doubt) had seen, spoken to Vonnaruil, whereas she had been kept from him for several months.

But... without them, she supposed she’d gone on charting and healing and traversing her whole life having never heard a word of him. Still, she couldn’t rid herself of this muted prejudice, and despite the prospect of rejoining with her Ĕrĕmelda, it settled within the pit of her belly with a weary grumble. 

It was on the verge of overwhelming her despairing heart, when she spied a fleck of feathery ivory from the winter gloam of the redwoods. And when her eyes alit on what might be the skeins of ruby hurts, a far-away feeling of devastated her, and her heart stuttered into an impasse of irresolution.

In the days that Vonn had been tolerated enough to stay, he had busied himself with repaying @Blixen’s hospitality with hunting and spending the rest of his leisure with the dark corsair, @Vercingetorix. Ever the suave mingler, it was altogether rare to see the unchaste Crow so... pensive. He had dressed himself in the wistful veils that usually adorned his sister, who wore them like the wilting bride of an endless, waning wedlock.

But there was an impending sense of providence as the days melded into one another; it was the knowledge that his sister returned ever-closer to her settlement of the cliffs. Said sense had made him quiet, oddly solemn, and so, on the premise of her that murmured to him, he’d wisped his way to the threshold of sequoias in the winter morning.

All the laughter and lecherousness so ordinary on his scarred façade had receded into a shivering enigma; his eyes heavy with lethargic, surreal expectancy. 

And then she arrived: as beautiful and as terrible as the dawn, as wrathful as an army with banners. Even from here, with her wilting, fragile person so far form him, he could feel a rage colder than any eve in the Icefields flutter across her divine face. But Vonn knew that it was not at him, never at him. He knew from the anguish in her eyes, even from here, that her wrath was solely on herself, for losing him. For forgetting him.

Vonn was gasping, a plea for permission to proceed from no higher-one in particular, in a heavy, panting inquiry, “Oh—“ It was the only warning he gave, before all pretense fell as he streaked towards Aurëwen Aurëwen Aurëwen like some half-made star.