[she doesn't know that the world is turning just for her]

tagging: Archon

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Euphemia’s mind was a buzz with all the happenings. It sometimes felt as if she were adrift in a dream, only that she was experiencing it as a very life-like. Sensations still felt as they always did; but still the maiden could not trust if what her eyes saw and her ears heard was true. She believed in God, she believed in many Gods, just as she also believed in no god. In a universe where she felt the pull to answer calls about which she knew nothing, Euphemia now recognized that anything could be perceived as the truth.

She was a woman of the sciences. It was all she had studied since she had been a cub. She liked it when things were cut and dry, black and white – and she appreciated having the agency in order to root out such information, when she found things to be shades of grey. She moved about the world in an inquisitive way, a way that asked, a way that begged for answers. But in caves that transported her places, in purple snow fields, her learning process left her wanting and hungering for a truth that never existed.

Even at home, she felt strange. Supplanted in a way she couldn’t explain, couldn’t rationalize to her sisters. She felt as though, if she were to disappear, no one would mourn her. They would simply wait in limbo for her to reappear, only she might never come back, and she would be left ungrieved by the only souls who knew her well enough to grieve her.

The maiden huffed indignantly as she walked, daring to explore more of the lands that bordered Dawnbreak. Leaving Frostfang used to instill her with fear, but now she welcomed it. The world outside might be scary in its limitless potential, but this was also its power.

Euphemia closed her eyes, and she drank from the cool river.

---

Archon was in a weird place in his life, but honestly speaking, it felt like he had always been in his weird sort of limbo. Like he didn’t know where he was, or what he was meant to do; his attempt to make a pack was not because he had been driven by the grand purpose to lead, or to protect others, like his father - or whatever purpose it took grand leaders to lead.

Archon had dreamt up Avon simply because he had nothing else going on in his life, and thought a pack would fix his problems. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t - and Archon’s heart was no fuller from leading. Would he lead again? The circumstances with his children changed everything, because he could not protect and provide for them by himself, and making a pack seemed easier than joining one.

Step one was to secure a land, but he lingered over the Meadows that he once called home - pondering, wondering, if more of his children under fable’s embrace would try to escape, - it was likely the only way he’d get to be part of their lives, if they did.

Another bust, at least for the moment, he was about ready to turn around and scope out some actual land when - was that his sister? He had moved the family this close to Dawnbreak to see them, but in all this time, they never came down to see him; just usually ignored him - so why now?

Why was she here now? Who died this time?

Here, it’s dangerous to go alone: take this. He picked up a pretty leaf and sat down next to her with a grin and wag of his tail.

He paused, and then -

Hey, you. It’s been awhile. Everything okay?

[she doesn't know that the world is turning just for her]

skill: [none]

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The lands below and beside Frostfang had always been heavily populated, so it was eventual that she come across another. Hearing a being approach her, Euphemia lifted her head as she drank the cool waters, and barely had time to wipe her maw of the shoreline that dampened her lips and fell from them in crystalline, glistening drops. She turned her head, and saw her brother.

Archon! The words burst from the very mouth that was drinking moments prior, and then split into a grin so large it threatened to throw her off balance. It was so rare that she saw her brother, that sometimes it was easy to go many, many weeks and realize she hadn’t thought about him. No one spoke of him, at least not to her. Once he had decided to leave Dawnbreak, it was as if he had been struck from the family.

– and though Euphemia was sympathetic towards all of the underdogs of the world, she too had been guilty of not ensuring the bridge between she and her brother remained unbroken. It had not fractured, however; instead, it had withered away. The last she had heard, he had found a woman to fall in love with. They dreamed of starting a family, a pack, together.

Things that seemed so distant and inconceivable to Euphemia, who felt like a child in comparison.

She turned to face him, ears turned forward to better receive his every word. Everything is great, she lied, still smiling cheerily. The next part was the truth.

I can’t believe I’m seeing you. How long had he been just outside Dawnbreak’s doorstep? Big family man, she chuffed, rocking her head back and forth as she enunciated each word, almost in a teasing manner. But inside, Euphemia easily felt the pain of having no idea what that could possibly feel like. Just another way she was outside of her siblings; left behind, in all things.

---

His darling little sister screamed his name so loud and proud, it blew a dozen of the ice crystallines that fable had deliberately planted on his heart straight up from the root and into the sky, making him feel more free than he had in a lifetime.

His eyes settled on her with his own grin; his tail beating against the ground. Hi, he chuckled, looking her up and down, making sure that she was quite alright.

The last he saw her, she was defending his ass in front of Gheghis, and now they were here - and it felt like the time in between those two memories were far, far too great.

That’s - that’s great, I-I’m so happy for you. He said to her, his voice cracking, with no real clue as to how she was feeling, or thinking - or even what caused her to finally be out here, but he could pick up on the teasing jabs of her words.

Am I still considered a family man when my wife’s gone and left me? Sure, he might be the only sibling - if they could call him that, anymore, with kids, but in retrospect fable had never been worth it.

[she doesn't know that the world is turning just for her]

skill: [none]

---

It was shocking to see Archon. Like, no, really – all four sisters had remained within Frostfang Vale, but her brothers? They were scattered to the winds. Some dead, some disappeared, some living as anonymous neighbors. The maiden wondered what mothers would think of that, but then Euphemia remembered she herself was living amongst another universe during the time of their mother’s death, and she stopped wondering almost immediately.

Still, even with relationships layered and made deep over the years with the many joys and slights and tragedies that befell the likes to family, it made her happy to see someone with whom she had that sort of blood (or, something akin to blood) relations with. Something that ran bone-deep; and those were the only relationships that ever truly mattered to the silvered maiden.

She found it hard to forge connections with those random souls who walked on the planet, seeking meaning. Euphemia didn’t know how her sisters did it, feeling a romantic pull towards others that had only just met (in relative terms, in comparison,) and welcoming others with no allegiances to Olive or Tiberius or Genghis or even Kuhn… those who didn’t even know the name Archon…

The past was the past, Euphemia always came back to that conclusion. And many of those family members weren’t entirely innocent of harming those around them.  Euphemia found meaning in family, she found meaning in those she was born knowing – and she figured it took a brief stint in another universe for her to really understand and cement her priorities in this one, singular lifetime. So Euphemia smiled over her pain, and attempted to smile over Archon’s own pain,

but he could not hide himself from her, and at the slightest posit of his happy pairing, became undone.

oh, really? oh no... Euphemia’s voice fell, immediately saddened at Archon’s truth. In some places and times, when her brother had crossed her mind, she imagined him happy with his wife – though she could not remember her name, Archon had left Dawnbreak for her and did not return. She had always assumed that meant he was happy and satisfied with his choices.

Perhaps the choices were not what he questioned, for it seemed that two souls in love would go to any lengths to be with one another, even if the outcome was not the one intended. That’s what all the stories tended to say, wasn’t it? That the journey was what it was all for in the end, and that pain in the price we pay for love?

Archon, oh, i’m so sorry… she sighed, deflated. What happened? I mean, can I ask that? After all, she was inexperienced in love, and curious about this part of it. What issues could have been so great that they, at long last, drove the world’s great couples apart? Euphemia thought of mother and father, and Archon and his mystery wife, and she frowned.

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