Swiftcurrent Creek Promise in the dark you'll be my nightlight

The gilded bird was him in these hours of waking day. Soaring ever eastward, on and on, and long disappeared, but he could feel it’s wingbeats churning the air before him, behind him, all around him, as though it’s movement moved him along, spurred onwards, all the more, by that now gentle voice which had roared in his dreams and echoed into daylight and pushed him forward, forward, by strength not his own: Go! I am sending you.

Everett couldn’t see the gilded feathers anymore, but he noticed the place around him now. Unfamiliar — though weren’t all places these days? Unfamiliar, until that familiar flutter of wings strummed up again, and the bird burst from the tree line.

And more than that.

Ophelia.

He didn’t say her name out loud, but when she fell into him, he collapsed against her. The weight lifting once again from his shoulders. The fear of having left them — Tybault, Evander, even — melting into far memory that didn’t seem as consequential in the light of his sister’s embrace.

You found me, he said — and a strange noise danced from his throat. Untrained, and like the land, quiet and wholly unfamiliar.

A laugh.

And here in that laughter and the warmth of his sister against him — broken, as he was, healing, as he was — he might have stayed there forever.