"Could you dscribe the night sky to me?"
Random Inbox Shenanigans || @noctisoma || always accepting!
▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥 || Hanzo does not answer immediately. He lets the silence between them breathe first - lets it settle like incense smoke into the spaces where words have not yet been.
His dark obsidian eyes lift to the horizon, and something in him that is ordinarily locked behind iron and ceremony loosens, the way a fist uncurls in water. He has been asked many things in his years. To lead. To avenge. To endure. To bleed and to command bleeding.
He has never been asked to see on behalf of another.
The weight of it is not lost on him.
"The dusk," he begins, the gravel of his his voice low and unhurried - the voice he uses not for armies, but for temples - "does not die. It surrenders. There is a difference."
He watches the last pale wound of the sun drag itself beneath the earth's edge, and his words follow it like a rite of passage.
"The sky first becomes a bruise - not from violence, but from pressure. The pressure of the day finally releasing its grip. Amber gives way to a deep and battered tangerine, the color of an ember just before it forgets it was ever fire. Then peach. Then the particular, aching rose that has no name in any language I have found worthy of it — something between longing and relief. Something your mother might have worn, perhaps, had grief permitted softness."
He does not look at her when he says this. He is looking at the sky. He is giving her the sky.
"Then comes the violet."
His jaw tightens almost imperceptibly - not in sorrow, but in reverence.
"It does not creep in. It pours. From the east it comes first, always from the east, as though the night is patient and knows precisely from which direction it is most beautiful. A deep, regal violet - the kind that ancient dye was made from, the kind that only kings once wore, before the world grew cheap with color. It floods the upper atmosphere and drowns the rose, and for one terrible and perfect moment, the sky is split - fire on one side, abyss on the other - and the world holds its breath between two masters."
His sleeve shifts as he gestures, one scarred hand tracing nothing and everything above them.
"The first stars do not appear. They are revealed. As though they were always there, waiting behind the theater of daylight, and now at last the curtain is taken down. They are faint at first - hesitant, like children told they may now speak. A silver pinprick here. Another there. You would not notice them if you were not watching. I am always watching."
The night deepens around them both. It is a living thing now.
"The blue that follows is not the blue of water or of cloth or of any earthly thing," Hanzo continues, and his voice drops lower still, as though the sky has asked for quiet, and he obliges. "It is the blue of depth itself. Of distance. A blue so dark it is nearly an insult to call it blue at all - it is the suggestion of blue, the memory of it, the idea of what color becomes when light has nearly finished its argument with darkness and lost."
He is still. His hands rest against the cool ceramic of the rooftile, and he can feel the stored warmth of the day bleeding out of it beneath his palms.
"By full dark, the stars are - ferocious."
The word comes out almost surprised, as though he is encountering them anew simply by the act of describing them.
"They do not twinkle, that is a soft word for what they do. They burn. They shudder with their own intensity, with the violence of distances so profound the mind folds trying to contain them. Some are white - pristine, cold, ancient light that left its source before your bloodline and mine were even a dream in the marrow of the world. Some are faintly gold. Some - and these I favor - carry just the ghost of blue in them. Ice made luminous. Old things, burning still."
He pauses.
Below them, the compound sleeps. A moth circles something distant and invisible. The night wind moves through the garden's old pines and makes of them a sound like the sea remembering itself.
"After midnight," he says, and the words come differently now - slower, more intimate, the way one speaks of something private - "is when the sky becomes entirely honest."
"The moon, if she walks tonight, has long since crossed her apex and begun her descent - heavy with her own pale labor, dragging silver across the rooftiles, across your hands, across these old stones. The stars have wheeled. They are not where they were at dusk - the whole vast architecture of them has rotated as though on a spindle, as though the world beneath us is the thing that moves and they are fixed and eternal and we are only passengers briefly permitted to look upward."
He finally turns his head slightly toward her - not to look at her face, but in the way of a man acknowledging the presence of something that has altered something in him.
"There is a river of them. Across the center of all that black - not a river, that is too gentle - a wound of light. Stars so numerous and so far that they bleed together into a pale, luminous smear across the heavens. Ancient peoples thought it was milk. They thought it was a road. I think," and here he is quiet for a breath, "it is what forever looks like when it is not trying to frighten you."
"This is my hour," Hanzo says, and his voice is simply, plainly true. "Not because it is peaceful. It is not peaceful. It is immense. But I find I do better with the immense than with the quiet pretense that the world is smaller than it is."
The wind moves again.
The stars burn on, indifferent and extraordinary.
"You asked me to describe the night sky." He looks upward once more, as though verifying it is still there, as though ensuring he has done it justice. "I have described only what the eyes receive. What it is - that, Vespera Nihil, I suspect you may already know better than I." ▬▬ι═══════ﺤ 🔥 ||
