Hushed Willows [festival] remember what you were made to be. remember your words.

@Olive!!

Noapte and hanar are those who keep her grounded; so Aure, ever-tethered, albeit reluctantly, spends most of her time caught within the stars. How long had she been kept from visiting them, save for a wistful glimpse or two when she could?

The skayona's feud with Sontés had been of lack of propriety where matrimony was concerned. And then there was the prospect of how concerned she "should be", that her children would remain bastardized without some moral union. The last thing she would ever expect of the minister -- who'd once preserved the dignity of her earlier years -- would be to hold her with prejudice, and judge her for a creation of life meant out of some sort of love. "Love," as he'd put so delicately, "would not bring such worth" to her children.

Needless to say, it hadn't ended in the most gracious of ways; from him, Aure had flown from the fevered gloam of Elysium's festivities, with a resentful head at the words that sounded so much like what the Blood Queen had damned her of.

Her and dragostea's souls had met as their lips had; and although he hadn't attended the celebration with her, she felt him here with her, as if he breathed at her crown, her hip. Since his christening their babes, she'd begun to notice how fervently he had begun to study her own soul. And it was that inquisitive devoutness of him that had begun to turn her love unending.

Was that not matrimony enough? This was what cast long and sleepy veils along her mind, into the little pivot in her back that'd come with maternity, as she found a copse of several willows, as young and alone as she; huddled and hunched and weeping, beckoning forth for company. She couldn't resist the invitation to that deep, dauntless dark even if she wished to.

So Aure, nesting down amidst the frost-limned ferns, curled herself about the rabbit-soft swell of her womb, and began to sing, hushed and sweet, to her children all she knew of that which Rhaesuial had bequeathed as Eä; and she sung of the Celestium in a way that was so achingly whimsical, so fey; uncharted and and borean and far-northern. Here, tucked away within this sacred space, nobody would be able to hear, to know what Aure had too-long refrained from partaking;

Hae ephadron
theri thaur
am na dhû
ias fir i ambar . . .


It awaits her, and she gives herself wholly to the Eä as Aurëwen, She the Undimming; ridding her far-northern soul of this masque for as long as her heart dared to beat here. Her heavens needed to see her as she was once again; her children needed to know in their tender, unmade marrow who held them -- worthy, or no.

She breathes, and Elysium leaves her like a lover who held a moment that was no longer there; she allows all anxiety and delight to tether her once more, and then... she is gone, silver eyes gleaming with the white forever of Eä.