Second Child, Restless Child

beginnings/eyrie
What is it like to fly?

A question always poised in every child, and one always dismissed. Perhaps that's why they were so worried about me. I never did grow out of it.

They say in the days of yore that sentient, speaking flying animals appeared in the Dawn of Time. They arrived from all over: the north, the south, the east, the west. The animals called Great Horned Owls settled and congregated within the sun-carved canyons of the Grand Ravine. The animals called Eagles populated the outbacks, defending the southern badlands from The First Threat. The animals called Flamingos came and filled all the oases and beaches they could find. The animals called Toucans flew through the thick, damp rainforests, penetrating the lack of contact with the outside world that the tribes within had.

And closest to my heart is the Falcon.

Nowadays you see them, the birds tittering away in the trees. Mira herself, the great Heron, is the most graceful, beautiful bird of our world and our cosmos. But the sentient winged animals that once filled our society are gone.

If I could ask them a question, I would not ask them why and how they left. I would ask them how to fly.

The Falcons were the loyalists, as legend professes. They looked to Mira for guidance in all their problems. That's another thing, perhaps, that made everyone around me so worried. How different I was in comparison to the animal I looked up to.

My older sister, Jade, was a warrior. She graduated top of her class in the schools she attended and led the feline army troops. She was always against their ideas of leaders of each species, but barely protested when they knighted her "alpha" of the feline branch.

My younger sister, Basil, was a dreamer. I worried about her often. They laughed at her, called her a little beetle, said why don't you burrow back into the earth where you came from, shrimp. I hurried her along, tried to tilt her head up away from the grass for a moment with my sore neck craned upwards and my toes stubbing against the twigs I tripped over in my haste. She wanted to be an author. She wanted to burrow. Jade and I were born in the same litter, but Basil was born alone.

I was born between them. My mother said she heard an unearthly noise from Mira's totem as she gave birth to me, the second, the restless. The gibbous moon shone unblinking upon the crow's feather, painted blue, resting lightly upon the altar. For all that quiet, she said she knew I was born wild.

They said my siblings and I were the interesting bunch. When we walked along the path to school Basil stared at the ground, stepping carefully over stones and then stumbling against me as I dragged her forwards. I pulled her by one arm, my eyes locked upon the sky, and Jade stared straight ahead as she strode along like a haughty child born royalty.

I got into trouble. I howled at the moon and I dirtied my dresses and I set off firecrackers in the dead of night and I broke my arm and my shoulder and my paw and my leg and probably everything at least once jumping, falling from trees, too distracted by a passing wren to focus on what was in front of me.

That's why they were worried. That's why they were so surprised, even in the wake of my friend's death driving my drunken wildness into a cold sober, when I took on that job. They were surprised when I married Talos Brightdale (a snow leopard like her settling down so fast, imagine, they whispered). They were surprised when I had a son. They were surprised when love numbed my ferocity. Then my perfect little world fell apart. They were surprised when I took the second job, the one they thought I wouldn't be able to stand.

They weren't so surprised when I told them my name in the Arctic Rookery School of Magical Training would be Mother Falcon.

What is it like to soar?

stars/a kettle of hawks
The sun finds my robes effectively sweeping the floor as I hurry down the cold hallway. The light this morning does not help much to dull the cold, and the winter sun sits blinding as ever as it rises above the mountains Beyond. My paws hurt, as I negated my slippers this morning expecting them to numb. If Mother Lizard was here, she would reprimand me. Of course the faster I run, the warmer my paws would be, regardless of the temperature. Common sense, really, Mother Falcon. Don't go hurrying off to the Observatory before you light the lamps, now.

I escape the light on my ascending path through the wide, winding staircase, lighting the torches somewhat distractedly as I go along. In the night, all the light in the staircase leading to the Observatory seems to extinguish itself. I believed it to be an odd sort of curse but I assume there's some sort of scientific explanation Betelgeuse is willing to lecture me with if I dare bring it up around him.

My own torch clatters to the floor when I step, panting, onto the highest section of the castle that is the Arctic Rookery School. Thoughts of Mother Lizard's potential scoldings drives a warmth to my face and drives my paws to swipe the torch back up, whereupon I hastily dash its flame against the ground, lean it gently against one of the two fire drums, and push myself through the behemoths of carved oak doors guarding the first floor of the Observatory.

My cautious pawsteps falter, as always, my eyes lift to the heavens and the great glass dome that makes up the roof of the Observatory. And as always my eyes stray towards the center of the vast room, where the Apparatus turns and spins ceaselessly. I was told it is enchanted and follows the movements of the sun and moon and stars, though as I study its many bright metallic parts from a distance once again, it never becomes clearer as to how exactly it operates.

"You're certainly early," a voice yawns. It is a slick, somewhat nasal voice, belonging to a fox, who has one paw clasping a small wooden box and the other rooting around inside for the beetles he's crunching away at as he side-eyes me from where he reclines on his nearby chair.

Now my gaze shifts to his section of the Interface, the long counter sectioned off into various areas of research. Its surface is entirely smothered by half-crumpled papers filled with hasty sketches of what appear to be celestial objects and diagrams captioned by an unreadable scrawl. "In what sense, Rigel?" It's always chilly in the Observatory. My paw reaches for the clasp around my cloak. "You did indeed refer to time as relative yesterday. Or perhaps the day before."

"In the outside sense." Rigel waves impatiently towards the dome above. The sky has dulled slowly into its usual grey-blue, cloud-smeared hue. "It's early, Mother Falcon. And Scuti said that, on the day you had that student hiding in the corner refusing to come out on account of how much she missed her family."

I feel a twinge of guilt, but ignore it. "Shouldn't you be working?"

"Lunch break."

"It is sunrise."

"As you said, time is relative."

I sigh in exasperation as I glance around the Observatory. It's relatively quiet, though I can see quite a few animals milling about. "Where's your brother and Scuti?"

"Betelgeuse? Who knows," Rigel replies dismissively. "Scuti and the others should be coming up for the morning shift any minute now."

I blink slowly. "Is that why there aren't so many around now?"

"Today's a slow day. Not much happening. In a week or two, though..." Rigel winks. "I should probably get on that, actually. Don't tell Eridani I slacked or she'll yell at me. Say, how's that thesis coming along?"

I take a shaky breath and smooth out my robes out of habit.

"...Fine."

Rigel picks up one of the papers and squints at it, though I know he can sense my expression just as well as if he was facing me.

"Don't worry about it too much. It's not a requirement."

One thing about Rigel: he is excellent at detecting others' emotions, sometimes almost frighteningly aware of them. Just as miraculously, he tends to actually respond to them terribly.

"I know. Of course I know. But I want to do it. I...need...I want to do it."

"Then do it."

"It's not that easy..."

Rigel yawns and sets the box of beetles down at the base of his chair. His paw reaches for a quill, the tip of which he taps idly against the side of his head. "Ever wonder if those sentient birds produced better quills? I hear falcon feathers are cursed, so when you dip them in ink it just disappears, or pushes it off, or something."

"Rigel..."

"You've studied plenty of forms. This one shouldn't be any different."

"It's just that I need to understand the principle of flight, and the mathematics, and the physics and everything as well as my spiritual bonding to that flight and that animal. Simple, really," I reply, smiling sardonically. "And you know I'm bad at math."

"Join the club." Rigel dips his quill into the inkwell beside him.

"You calculated the cycle of--"

"Well! Well, that's different."

I cannot help but shift from my anxiety or perhaps an exasperated impatience. I forget to never bring up such matters around Rigel, who in the advice-and-emotions department is about as dense as one of his "theorized planets."

The doors behind me rumble as they part.

"Ah, there's Scuti now," I tell Rigel hastily, who seems to ignore me. His head lifts, though, as the rhino enters.

"Mother Falcon!" Scuti grins down at me. His footsteps echo through the vast room as he steps towards me, astronomers' robes stretched in a rather comedic fashion across his bulky form. The tailors are ambitious and spiteful creatures who refuse to give up in the craft of any of their uniforms, no matter how difficult the customer in question may be (both due to their body shape and their generally stiflingly jovial personality). They are quite the cruel crones, I note. The uniform has always appeared horrifying to look at, though Scuti himself is as pleasant as ever. "Fancy seeing you here!"

He always says that, as if it's a surprise. As if I'm not obsessed.

"Hello, Scuti." I greet him with a tone I hope isn't too revealing of my recent anxiety. I glance towards the small black-and-white fox who peers at me from behind Scuti's leg. "There's Betelgeuse," I tell Rigel, who looks mildly displeased at his brother's entrance. "Hello, Betelgeuse."

"Hello, Mother Falcon," Betelgeuse replies, the hiss of his soft voice barely audible over the thumps of Scuti's feet as the rhino's head swings about with very little regard to anything around him. "How are your studies?"

"Fine," I lie. "Scuti, I think Eridani's by the telescope."

He blinks his great orange eyes, and Betelgeuse ducks as Scuti's horns swing about in the air towards the telescope. Scuti grins. "That she is! You're far more observant than I, Mother Falcon. Eyes like a hawk's. Rigel, you've got your papers ready?"

Rigel opens his mouth as he looks up at Scuti, but no words come out. His paws clench around the scraps of parchment he holds.

"...Our current status report is on the position of the object NB-091," Betelgeuse murmurs to me. "...It is supposed to be, anyway. If Rigel accomplished anything on his shift."

Scuti sighs. "Well, we'll gather up our combined data and present it to Eridani anyhow. Antares should have enough, but it was your responsibility."

Rigel scowls as he hops off of his chair. "You won't tell Eridani, right?" He glances at me, as if I'm the only one it's directed towards.

"Of course not... well..." Betelgeuse frowns in thought. "You know, Rigel, I understand your predicament, but in any field of science, there is no--"

"--room for slacking off. Yes. I know." Rigel stomps ahead of us, and I follow the others to the telescope with some uncertainty. Rigel is an interesting fellow with a certain nature of being quite easily distracted by the most minute things, even when he appears fixated on his equations.

Rigel told me once that he never liked math. His job as an astronomer was born from he and his brother's shared fascination with the sky. Different from my aspirations, however, the foxes are consumed by what lays far, far above.

"The calculations are where my fantasies die," he had informed me with a bitter edge to his sarcastic smirk.

That was the day I met Bootes, the nineteenth day. I have a phobia of the number nineteen.

"Ho, Antares," Scuti calls. A komodo dragon draped over a chair pauses his anxious back-and-forth of glancing up at his diagrams positioned and pinned with tack to the table and back down at the vellum he clutches to scribble down a few notes. It's a bizarre phenomenon, the communally poor handwriting of all of the astronomers. One might think they can read each others' scribblings more easily, but I know that Antares struggles to read his own handwriting after a while if he forgets what he's written down. I wonder if this significantly halts scientific progress.

Antares' pale red eyes dart quickly between Rigel, Scuti, Betelgeuse and I several times. "Off to Eridani?" His voice quavers and patches of his skin appear to twitch irregularly but quite frequently. I glance down at his white mug stained with several yellow and brown rings and take it he's drank too much of his usual "focusing-tea" again. "That time already?" His head darts up to the dome up above and back down. "Oh, yes, so it is." He laughs loudly and nervously before immediately continuing.

"Yes, on NB-091, I've gathered-gathered-gathered-gathered--" Antares coughs. "I've gathered enough information over the past few hours. If only there was a more efficient method, ha-ha-ha. I still haven't found much of a pattern in the past few weeks, either. Rigel?"

"What?" Rigel looks at him blankly.

"Never mind." Antares sighs and slips off of his chair. "Oh! Hello, Mother Falcon." The komodo seems to calm for just a moment. His head tilts towards me in a brief greeting before he turns around and follows after Rigel.

We reach the telescope, which takes up quite a lot of room on its side of the Observatory. At the foot of the structure holding it up, which is a bit like a tower, a stormy blue rabbit in a vest taps her foot impatiently as she watches our approach.

"Hello, Mother Falcon," Eridani greets me briskly before glancing back to Scuti, Antares, Betelgeuse and Rigel. "Well, it took you long enough. I was up there quite a while--" she gestures up towards the ladder leading up to where the telescope can be used (for all the space around it, it is quite a small, compact thing). "--and NB-091 is moving out of our range very quickly. Rigel?"

Rigel unceremoniously thrusts the few papers he has at Eridani, whose nose twitches with what appears to be concern. "That all?"

"No, Eridani," Antares interjects quickly, and hands over his own papers. As Eridani gathers the notes and stares down at them for what feels like minutes on end with an indecipherable gaze, Betelgeuse glances over at me and whispers, "You might want to take your leave. This could get ugly."

I nod slowly and cast a sympathetic glance towards Rigel, who stands frozen, staring at his meager research as if he's realized how little there is for the first time. "It's around time I tend to my duties," I tell Scuti, who nods wearily. "Thank you for visiting, Mother Falcon. You're right, don't want Mother Lizard on your back again, do you? I'll see you around. Perhaps come at lunch if you can."

Rigel offers a weak smile as I depart. I'm pushing open the heavy doors when the first bout of furious scolding reaches my ears.

eyes/a gulp of swallows
My sisters grew stranger as I got older.

Basil, a mess as jungly as her deep green eyes, dyed her fur a rather intriguing shade of chartreuse. It was quite odd back then but now I hear fur-dying is all the rage. Perhaps she was really ahead of the curve. In any case, my parents had to deal with quite a few startling metamorphoses in that time with their youngest daughter.

I nearly trip on my robes on the way down the stairs. Really, whose idea was it to force four-legged animals to wear such low-hanging things? It feels as if I've draped the drop cloth for the canvas of one of those humongous new avant-garde paintings over myself. Don't hurry so much then, Mother Falcon. Oh, shut up. I'm as good as late. I may hurry as much as I please, you nitwit.

Basil cut her fur into a horrendous patchy pattern when she was twelve. She sneaked into expensive theater concerts for "progressive orchestral" ensembles and hid from her chores in abandoned feral animals' burrows, watching the bugs she found and writing down their features and sizes and behavior.

Later she ditched descriptions in favor of two-voice insect poems. I found her journal once and read one of them.

(person 1)

i am

a butterfly

fluttering in the 

moonlight

fly with me

(person 2)

i most certainly will not

i am a worm who

detests the light, and 

anyhow

i cannot fly in the first place.

I'm not sure what else to say about it. Well, you read it. I think, in regards to her level of skill, it explains itself. Also, butterflies are diurnal.

My parents blamed me. They said I was a bad influence. I ignored them completely and jumped off of rooftops.

Basil didn't talk to me much. When she was younger, Jade was the role model, and I was scolded just as much as Basil was. I was too timid and too distracted to amount to anything.

Basil and I had an alliance. I stood up for her, and she never pestered me. Something changed when I was about fourteen. Wild forest blood coursed through my veins. I teased my younger sister and scraped my knees and forgot to write to Jade in the army. We grew distant. I grew distant to everyone around me, besides my friends, the people my parents called Bad Influences.

I ignored Basil. Maybe she was angry with me for a while. She never defended herself against my merciless harrying, never pried or reached to me when I tired of harassment and fell into a cold disregard. One day I read her bug poetry aloud to my friends and hot tears ran down her dirtied face. Her face was always smudged. My friends mocked her for it.

She never returned my dislike or my anger or my restlessness. We sat in a discontented quiet together when I was waiting in that hospital, waiting for the news. We stood together in the rain as I studied the sodden flowers on that grave. She looked at me, her dark green eyes as soft as the soil and as savage as the wilds. She saw me silent, at an impasse with myself, a queasy calm restless in its own right, but she saw me standing perfectly still for the first time in a long time, poised over my friend's grave like a hawk waiting to strike. She never broke her alliance.

We were close those few days. We grew distant again as I prepared to leave.

I hear she's down south somewhere. I hear she's a writer.

I can feel the eyes of the children upon me as I step into the small classroom. A slender deer in dark robes turns its head in one graceful movement towards my rather rumpled self, and I curse my lack of sense, once again. I could have straightened up. I suppose I got lost in thought. Same as always.

"Mother Falcon," Mother Lizard greets me smoothly. "How good of you to join us."

I shuffle towards the front of the room to stand by Mother Lizard, and in the silence I can feel the wide eyes of about nine uneasy children stuffed between cramped chairs and desks following my every step. Several others look barely conscious. Depending on the day, they appear either grateful for my arrival or irritated at my lateness. I'm always late.

"Now," Mother Lizard continues. "Yesterday, we read some of the chapter on the history of transformational magic. Who can tell me the earliest form that the first tribe of proto-Ballooshians took?"

I glance at the textbooks on the desks and the various illustrations and diagrams pinned up on the walls and then at Mother Lizard. I'm once again grateful that this class is so small, otherwise Mother Lizard might be even more disappointed in the frightened silence that followed. Mother Lizard is a stupid name for a deer. My eyes drift off towards a certain student, out of a twinge of paranoia.

She sighs and shakes her head. "Quiet today, aren't we? Really, I often ponder why you all selected this class. Such a lack of enthusiasm for your chosen craft. Shapeshifting, while granted naturally to many born magic users, is one of the rare abilities that actually be somewhat easily learned by animals outside the natural-born status, and with only a bit of extreme stress and fatigue in a few cases. It is wonderfully versatile, as it can naturally compliment nearly any other form of magic and almost never clashing and causing said fatigue. Really, really... disappointing. Mother Falcon, you're familiar with shapeshifting. Might you supply us with the correct answer?"

Her tone is honeyed enough to be considered mocking as she turns to me. I blink.

"Oh. The earliest... form? Period?"

"Of the first tribe of proto-Ballooshians, yes."

"So the earliest."

"One may argue that before them came--

"One may argue upon the specifics of any sort of useless history," I reply bluntly, "but for the sake of my simple restatement of the question, the proto-Ballooshians-- more formally referred to as the Rillians-- were the earliest known tribe to harness and share shapeshifting amongst their multi-species ranks. Commonly, it is agreed upon that the first form they took, displayed, and used practically was the form of the Anemoi, a beaked creature not found in Jamaa today."

Mother Lizard coughs and straightens her stature with a smile that looks forced. "There you have it. Best memorize that, yes? It's important."

I'm not sure if it is, but I don't put up any sort of rebuttal to Mother Lizard's words for the rest of the class. I'm all out of fight for today.

markings/a tiding of magpies
After the students begin to file out of the room after class, I flee before Mother Lizard can speak to me, but linger outside of the doorway.

"Mother Falcon?" An uncertain, familiar voice calls.

A snow white arctic fox in a student's uniform squeezes through the crowd of passing students as he comes towards me. Some of his fur bears a white paint matching the rest of his fur but I can still see the snowflake pattern beneath, perhaps because I've memorized its position.

My shoulders relax. He seems in a far better mood today, though I feel a twinge of concern knowing he's applied that paint again, against my urging. Reflexively, I break into a wide smile. "Hello, Boreas. How are you this fine morning?"

"Tired," Boreas mumbles. He raises a paw and lowers his head to scratch behind his ear. "Can I come to your study at lunchtime?"

"Of course." I suppose I can address his painted-over markings then, but now I have chores to attend to. "How has Shapeshifting been?"

"Fine, I guess." He shrugs. "Though, I'd like to get into the shapeshifting part. What's the point of the history bit?"

I sigh. "Take that up with Mother Lizard. She made the lesson plan." The students have begun to dissipate, and I'm going to be late again in a moment. "Boreas, I'll see you again at lunchtime."

"Goodbye, Mother Falcon," Boreas replies brightly. He turns down the hallway and hurries towards his next class. I stand there smiling until he leaves my sight, at which point I turn my heel and make a mad dash for the stairs. I miss Mother Lizard's emergence from the room just in time. Another day, another pointless, contemptuous conversation avoided.

I'm not sure why she dislikes me so much.

The Arctic Rookery School prides itself in being not just a school but a host to many points of research. For all its prestige and size, being the largest military-training magic users' school in Jamaa, not many new students past the age of five arrive every year. Of course, not many inhabitants come to the school entirely willingly, given the army's tactics of snatching away infants for the army as soon as they show a spark of magic, but the enrollment rate is so low because the Arctic Rookery also prides itself in being exceptionally picky. Only the best of the best, and the rest are exiled to some hovel in Kimbara.

It's also difficult to transport students all the way up here. The trip can be physically taxing for the drafts, and many animals risk injury from the frigid cold of the mountain range. The Arctic Rookery is the only sanctuary for miles around out here.

Not that I mind. It's one of the best places I've been, and I've been all over.

My brief stint as a medic in the army transported me from Crystal Fields all the way to the Wildlands on the southern front, where the phantoms concentrated their attack. I lived in Jamaa Township for a while after that until I was offered a job at the Arctic Rookery, and the trip dragged me through treacherous mountains and hours spent with complaining animals less accustomed to the cold weather.

As I sweep the floors of an empty classroom, I smile to myself. The trip wasn't so bad, but only because I met my first friend.

I realize something, and smack my forehead for being so careless. I'd made plans with Mother Squirrel too, hadn't I? And now I was meeting with Boreas for lunch. I hope the Observatory and Squirrel won't be too disappointed when I flake on both of them. I'll apologize later.

The School has an Observatory. It has a Bestiary, and a Greenhouse, and a Library, and of course a Rookery.

I would very much like to go to the Rookery. I don't have clearance yet.

At lunchtime, I avoid the clattering of the end of classes and students funneling towards the Dining Hall on an admittedly more winding but out-of-the-way route to my study. I pass by a familiar goat on my path. Her soft brown eyes wander through the stony, quiet hall, carrying the distant echoes of the usual lunchtime sounds.

Normally I would be pleased to see her, but today I pale. "Hello, Mother Squirrel," I greet her, smiling uneasily. "I'm sorry, I know we made plans yesterday, but--"

"Boreas?" Mother Squirrel interjects. She appears relatively indifferent. "Well, it's fine. I'm sure he has far more important things to tell you. I will inform you of my theory later tonight instead."

I blink slowly. Today, if I recall, I won't have many chores to attend to in the evening. "Can we go to the balcony, then?"

She nods. "I don't have much to do anyhow. I'll see you." With that, she trails off down the hallway past me.

Mother Squirrel is an eccentric botanist who cares for the plants of the Greenhouse. I met her on the trip to the Rookery. She is an odd one, blunt and simple in her speech half the time and the other half of the time spending a good thirty minutes speaking to me first about various amusing things that happened to her during the day and second another one of her theories. Mother Squirrel is notorious for barely opening up to anyone, but even with that she's somehow succeeded in making herself easily liked.

I open the door to my study and step inside, welcoming the lingering scent of pine and wood shavings in the air. From the moment I was so generously granted my own private study several months ago, I grew enamored with the smell of incense in the air at all times. Various members from a group of merchants who live in the mountains occasionally make the commute to the School, knowing we pay well, and it's the only time I can purchase any sort of luxury for myself nowadays. I make sure to buy a different sort of incense every time, and lots of different sorts, for I never am really certain when they will return, and I fear I may tire of one scent after a time.

The study is a round room with a rather tall ceiling and a small dome of a glass roof, so it's like I'm in my own small Observatory, minus Rigel's beetle-crunching and the telescope. Paper models of passerine birds in flight hang from a fixture in the ceiling (they were a gift from Betelgeuse), and books lay in haphazard piles by my small and very unorganized library. I'm certain I have more than a few books overdue from the School library, because less than half are ones I brought with me and ones that were bought or gifted to me. None of the Scholars have sent me any irate notes about them yet, though. I'll return them later.

It is a rather large room for a simple study. The head of the school, who gave it to me, seems to favor me greatly, because it is quite a bit more spacious than several of the other studies I've observed. Perhaps that's why Mother Lizard dislikes me. Mother Lizard is a really very foolish name for a deer.

There's a soft knock on the door a few minutes later. "Come in," I call, and Boreas enters. He is very clearly hiding someone behind him, or perhaps that someone is cowering away from me by choice.

"Hello, Boreas." I smile and my head tilts to the side. Before I can ask him anything, Boreas' ears flatten against his head. "Hello, Mother Falcon. I should have asked you first, but I have someone with me today. I can... have him leave if you want." Boreas coughs. "He's not in the Shapeshifting class, but his interests are similar."

"That's fine, Boreas." I try to keep my tone bright, but there's a nagging sense of worry in my chest. I've always been that way towards new things and people, and it makes unfamiliar situations harrowing.

Boreas glances over his shoulder and scowls. "Come out, Notos," he orders.

A brown crocodile peers out at me with wide, swampy green eyes, and slowly shuffles forward. "Hello, Mother...Falcon, right?" He mumbles. "My name is... Notos. I-I'm not in any of your classes, but I've seen you before. At the Observatory."

My cheeks flush. I wonder if anyone really ponders how often I visit. "Are you training under the Astronomers?"

"Yes... I just started out this year. A month or so ago, when school began."

"Are you thinking of doing a thesis before you graduate?"

Notos appears very interested in the floor, but his voice grows slightly more certain. "Well, it'll be a while, right? Seventeen? That's a few years. I should probably do one. I haven't thought of anything yet."

Boreas smiles and while some of me is glad he's happy and has at least one friend now (and quite the interesting friend at that, my personal bias towards Astronomers marvels), most of me is terrified that Boreas with his renewed white paint has begun another spiral. "Perhaps we can all brainstorm together. I'm not so sure of mine either, and Mother Falcon's still working on her own project. Can we eat by the shelves, Mother Falcon?"

worries/a spiral of treecreepers
"Boreas, you might enjoy this one." I lean over from where I sit perched on an ottoman and slide the dusty tome over towards Boreas and Notos on the floor. I'm pretending to be interested in my meager lunch, but my stomach feels more and more overturned by the minute and all I can bring myself to swallow are the roasted pumpkin seeds. At least they're enjoying their food. I hear the Dining Hall meals are decent, but I haven't had a full course there in some time, as similar to the other caretakers I began to amass a steady stockpile of my own food from merchants and other sources.

Boreas doesn't have any paint in his fur now, and I can see the grey snowflakes quite clearly. Perhaps I was imagining it when I saw him this morning, but it leads me to my own spiral of concerns.

I shouldn't be worried, but I can't feel at ease until I ask him about it. I can't do it with Notos around, though, as I doubt Boreas would appreciate it. Was that why he brought his friend here? To avoid my prying?

I met Boreas when I came here at the beginning of the school year last year. Last autumn-- was it really a year ago? I've been here for a whole year. Boreas had been around since he was ten years old and he seemed an ordinary student when I first saw him in an ordinary class. He looked very normal: an arctic fox with a fluffy white coat. Mother Squirrel was only slightly more familiar with him and said he was top of his class in multiple subjects, and a generally tediously law-abiding sort. She complained of his magic and how much there was, something about it posing a threat to her plants. He had to wear gloves. Too much ice, Mother Squirrel remarked.

She said he once accidentally froze a specimen over, left odd markings on the floor that faded five minutes after he excused himself and fled to the bathroom. The boy should learn to control his powers, she remarked.

One day while on my cleaning rounds I went into the bathroom of one of the dorms at an hour in which they were typically empty and I saw him. He was in front of the mirror with a dripping paintbrush, smearing white paint over his fur. There was a blank expression on his face and in his soft blue eyes, and when he whipped around to face me droplets splattered on the walls. I looked at him for a moment, only a moment, but then he burst into tears and sank to the floor.

He began to visit me whenever he could in the evenings. When I didn't have a study, he scoured the empty rooms until he happened upon me dusting or sweeping or cleaning up a mess of some sort and he spoke to me. He seemed happy then, briefly.

Over that year I learned that Boreas was not really all right. He had been faltering, and faltering, and faltering still until I arrived and even my meeting of him only slightly hindered the collapse. I told him, I ordered him, I begged him to stop painting over the pale grey snowflakes on his fur, but it only hindered it, and in the spring he spiraled and he broke. He almost died, but I saved him.

In that summer, I taught him, desperately, not to despise his markings and his power so much.

I thought I stopped him. I wanted him to stop hating his own gods-given gift, one that most other animals would kill for. I wanted him to stop that feeling of wanting to escape his own body. I thought I did, and yet here we are.

Perhaps the spiral never ended. Perhaps I only hindered it once again. It makes me nauseous enough to feel like throwing up my pumpkin seeds.

Maybe we can come to an agreement. If he's most comfortable hiding his markings, against my advice, as long as he stops everything else...

Has he begun those other things too, which I thought he stopped?

Body. Hatred. Escape.

"Mother Falcon?"

I snap out of my thoughts and curse myself for trapping myself in such terrors. "Yes, Boreas?"

"If you are, don't worry about me."

I blink slowly. Notos looks up from the book he's reading, but only gives the slightest somber glance of acknowledgement.

My insides churn furiously. "Of course, Boreas."

Boreas sighs as he glances towards the door and the distant chiming of bells. "We didn't have much time to have a real discussion today, did we? We must be off to class. But thank you, Mother Falcon."

I smile weakly. "Of...course. Notos can come along any time. Next time, I'll be sure to update you on everything."

After they leave, I lay in a chair for some time and ignore my lateness to the next chore, desperately trying to quell my nausea.

theories/a mewing of catbirds
"Existence is a sphere."

"What?"

"Think about it. If time is infinite and non-linear, time must not be a line but a web. It encompasses everything. If there are alternative timelines, then we are living in multiple realities at once." Mother Squirrel grows increasingly animated as she goes on. "The web encompasses everything, and of course the universe must be rounded somewhere, right? If everything is a sphere, and time is a sphere, and we are living in a sphere, existence is a sphere."

I tug at the mantle draped over my shoulders and raise my paws to warm them with a cloud of hot breath. The balcony by the caretakers' quarters is high enough to be quite cold even with all my layers and my natural coat. I hear that some features of animals have gradually faltered in their effectiveness ever since we abandoned fighting alone in the wild and came together as a society. Others say the same thing, but cite the reason as Mira and Zios' disappearance. "I suppose so," I say, though Mother Squirrel's theories are always nonsensical. About a week ago, she spoke to me on how life was funny because it's not funny, or something like that.

"Anyway, how's your thesis going?"

"How's your philosophy.. thing?"

Mother Squirrel eyes the pan of water resting precariously on the railing of the balcony. "Don't dodge a question with a question."

"Look, I have time."

"Well, just know it will run out. Better sooner than later. At least try to make progress."

"I know. I am." A lie.

"How's your magic faring? I keep telling myself to practice my magic. You know, even with natural magic, you can get rusty if you don't practice. And people just overflowing with it can suffer serious harm from bottling it up for too long, which is why the army scours homes for Masques. Even so, I often can't bring myself to do so..." Mother Squirrel raises a hoof and the central point of the water begins to gradually rise into a raised mound before spiraling upward and slinking lazily through the air in a thin coil. "...despite it being so trivially easy."

My ears flatten. "I haven't had the time."

"You'll always have the time, won't you? You spend half your waking hours doing the same chores over and over. Take a break once in a while and practice for once, Mother Falcon." Mother Squirrel yawns. "Go on, do it."

I take a deep breath. My paws tremble as I lean forward and thrust them out into the air, and from my palms rises a gentle swirling gust of wind. The breeze churns and circles my arms, and I begin to clench my paws as I prepare to let go of it before remembering something they always told me in school: don't clench, relax, you really must learn to relax.

As it builds up and the sleeves to my robes lift away from my arms, I loosen my shoulders (which I didn't realize were stiffened in the first place), take another breath, and release.

The wind rips through my fur as it bursts upwards and past a protruding corner of the second balcony nearby, petering out a moment afterward. It hurts my ears.

I squint to look at the clean split in the stone separating the corner from the rest of the balcony. A second later, it peels away with a barely audible crack and falls away spinning to the ground far below.

"Well, there you go." I turn to Mother Squirrel, whose jaws are agape as she attempts to maneuver several strands of water up through the air into her mouth instead of lifting up the dish.

I sigh in exasperation. "This is why I don't do it. Especially around you."

Mother Squirrel stops and yawns slowly when she turns to face me. "Are you afraid of using your magic?"

"What?"

"Do you have a particular aversion to practicing your magic-- pardon-- given your history?" Mother Squirrel tilts her head to one side, eyes blank besides her typical mild curiosity. I scowl. If she tried pulling this with anyone else, I know no one would bother talking to her. I guess it works. "Maybe."

"Is it the law? The fact that you're participating in the thing that perpetuates it and you feel helpless?"

I draw back my arms. My claws unsheathe and dig into the railing. Mother Squirrel is rephrasing and sending a past grief-filled rant of mine back at me, but it feels like she's pinned it perfectly without really knowing anything. "I don't want children to die."

"You took the job."

"I have my reasons."

"You lost... your son and your friends to the law, right?" Mother Squirrel draws back quickly as my head swings around to glare daggers into her ridiculously emotionally inept skull. Apparently it worked, because she seems to have stepped back over the invisible conversation topic boundary. I really need a wider range of friends.

Mother Squirrel coughs. "You're still training Boreas on the side, right?"

My gaze casts back towards the pine forest and the icy river separating us from the beyond. "Yes. There's another student there now, too." The more I thought about it today, the more I like Notos. He gives me a certain feeling that makes me want to trust him the way I trust Boreas, and it's a feeling that tells me he has just as much of the sort of potential I'm looking for. It got me thinking about something else. "It takes my mind off things. And I want to help them."

The goat glances back at her pan of water with sudden disinterest. "If you're open to it, might I make a student recommendation?"

butterflies / a charm of goldfinches
"Red, orange, yellow, blue, white, brown, black. There's a star for every color of the rainbow."

Scuti's uproarious laugh echoes through the Observatory and I dodge to avoid his hoof, which is coming down to slap me on the back hard enough to break my spine. Tonight's another slow night. Betelgeuse stares dubiously at the bottles that Rigel has mysteriously obtained.

"Antares," I begin slowly, "those aren't all the colors of the rainbow."

Antares blinks. Scuti seems to laugh even harder than before. "Well, perhaps there's a green star out there," Rigel drawls, then pauses to sip from the dark green glass bottle in his paw. I could use a drink, but I don't care for applepon (a sparkling cider that's some kind of weird concoction between an apple and an exotic magical berry I'm sure I've heard about from Mother Squirrel). "We'll call it, ah, Rigel. Rigel-Betelgeuse-123a4b."

The komodo scowls. "And why is it named after you and your brother?"

"Because I'll discover it," Betelgeuse supplies in a weary tone, "and Rigel will demand some sort of recognition for all the work he didn't do."

I smile. It does seem like something Rigel (who is giving Betelgeuse a very sheepish look) would do. My claws grip the crate I'm sitting on as I veer to the right to avoid Scuti's absolutely elated hoof. "Is a green star even possible?"

"Imagine that," Rigel remarks. "Zios has gifted you a place and a right to a life on some realm, and you look up into that fine blessed sky and your damn sun is neon green." Laughs all around. I'm surprised Eridani hasn't come down from the telescope to tell us to be quiet yet. She's been up there quite a while in the dark compartment allowing one to look through the lens, and I can't make out her shape from where she is.

"My father was lookin' through his telescope once," Scuti chortles, still recovering, "and he thought he saw a green star. Said, 'Come lookit this, boy,' and I went running and looked through and it really was a green star... well, turns out it was just a regular old yellow-orange star, but I hear those real big red stars make stuff around it look green. Maybe Zios'll come around and make us one sometime, though."

My ears swivel towards a muted thump above, and the door to the telescope compartment opens. Out bursts Eridani, clutching a stack of rumpled papers in one paw and another tucked into her other arm, and her natural expression of a perpetual forceful impatience is amplified by the firm determination in her dark blue eyes. The rabbit storms down the winding stairs and marches towards us. Antares coughs and straightens himself up from where he is on the floor, and likewise the other Astronomers appear to stiffen very slightly.

"Everyone, shut up," Eridani shouts. She raises her paw and waves the papers in the air frantically. "So, breakthrough time. Since Mr. Rigel and Mr. Antares were unable to gather enough information, I went looking again, and found that our little object here is closer than before. Despite the massive amount of power and distance in our telescope, for some silly little reason we were previously unable to realize how close this thing is."

I lean forward, holding my breath. No one utters a word as we stare in anxious anticipation.

Eridani breaks into a wide grin so jarring that I realize I've never actually seen her smile. "It's an asteroid," she chokes out, as if holding back laughter. "It's a goddamn asteroid-- and I'm fairly certain it's some sort of god-sent object."

The Astronomers pause.

"What?" Betelgeuse gasps. "An asteroid? NB-091 is an asteroid?" His head whips around to stare at an incredulous Rigel.

"Rigel, did you have any idea--"

"Nope," Rigel mutters. He shakes his head and a weak smile slowly spreads across his face. "No idea."

wop