Forest for the Trees

[Lux]

25th Frost 4621
middle of the night

At some point, Lux had lost his shoes, and his toes were cold. They were hopefully back at his campsite, but now he wasn't sure. Not that it mattered, because now he was halfway up a tree in the middle of the night with only the moon and the stars as light to show for it. A bit of moonlight was enough to see, but he wanted to reach the top, and the evergreents had many short, thick branches all the way up. He paid no mind to the needles as he climbed his tail swaying for balance.

"You can climb trees, can't you? You're a cat!" He called to the magical cat below, though he could not quite see where he was in the dark. Perhaps he was ahead of him already. Branch by branch he pulled himself up, not caring much if the branch could actually carry his weight in that sheer excitement. The cat seemed to have an endless amount of star candy, and he hadn't had thoughts more rapidfire nor joyful in his life. He had not had candy like this before, either, but he paid little mind to the quantity of his consumption. Even if it stung a bit, even if it numbed his face.

Lux's tail wrapped around a branch to steady where he stood on an unsteady bough. He reached further and climbed higher. He hoped he would reach the top soon where the stars were waiting for him to join them, or maybe for him to pluck one out of the sky. Little pinpricks of light that hid themselves when the sun arrived, all his for the taking.

Rough bark scraped his hands and feet, but after the eternity of a second he had breached the canopy of smaller evergreens that surrounded his tower. Awestruck at the sight around him, with the forest awash in silver and the sky close enough to touch, he looked around for his friend. It was too easy to lose black cats in the dark.

"Cat! Do you see this?"

[Vesper]

While Lux might have believed it was indeed Star Candy, as Vesper had claimed, the cat had coyly swapped out said ‘Star Candy’ for the more inexpensive ‘dirt’ gathered from the soil beneath their feet. The Tether supplied that flux of joy, and the senses were in all likelihood too far gone to care.

Little paws curled around rougher-than-the-pad branches, pulling himself up and throwing a foot over. Hoisting. Pushing. Feline claws made short work of hanging on - Vesper really was a cat - and so he braced himself with comfort, not too worried about falling; the Mentalist was confident he could catch both of them in the Weave. Two blackened ears splayed to avoid the prickle of those needles as he kept on, his eyes looming from the depths like a waxing lantern growing ever closer.

Brushing pine needles from his fur, his head popped out of the canopy besides Lux. “Space,” he said, eyes peering upward at the boundless eternities of twinkling possibilities. “Far above us.” Ears flicking upwards, he wrapped a paw around the Moroi’s midriff, sliding up his clothing. Those gentle, warm pads traced metaphorical starlight through every nerve, the feline’s soft fur tickling with the encroaching advance. His nose pressed to the man, delicately scenting the alluring aroma of pine coming off of his clothes.

Puffy and long, the feline’s tail was curling around. It cradled and hooked the Moroi’s tufted donk-a-bonk in this subtly possessive manner. “Have you heard the music . . . in your thoughts?” Vesper asked in that soft, careful voice. “It is . . . the song . . . of the stars.” The cool breeze rippled around them, and for that moment they shared the only heat in this sonorous void of feeling and introspection. Another paw rose up from Lux’s shoulder, cradling his cheek. Just breathing in what Vesper was only teased and toyed at cravings ever more.

[Lux]

Cold breeze was nothing when there was a warm cat wrapped around you at the height of a tree. Lux's head was craned back as far as he could without releasing his grasp on the evergreen, and his lips moved as he counted the stars. He did not know the name of the constellations of Atharen still. It seemed most did not know their names, and he had yet to find an astronomer of this world. Still, he marked their positions with numbers and letters in his journal when he was cognizant — but right now, he was enthralled.

"Kornos has a hundred thousand more stars than this." He whispered, the breeze carrying his words with it. "The whole world. Crafted around the stars." He craned his head away from the sky to look down at the cat next to him. "I can hear the rustle of the trees. What do the stars sound like?"

He turned his head skyward again, to the moon this time, the white-silver disk bitten by the dark every night until it disappeared and grew again. Perhaps it was made of bread, and the encroaching space was hungry. Lux tentatively released a hand and held it up to the moon, as if he could hold the thing between his fingers and pluck it from the sky.

"You can't see the Outlands from here...these are not my stars." He frowned. "This is not my moon." His hand still free, he dug into his pocket for a shiny, loose coin, and held it close to his face so that it covered the thing. "I've got the moon in my pocket, but it's not as bright."

"I want to see my stars, and my moon, and my sun, but space has devoured them." Even as he said this, however, he was joyful. His free arm wrapped around the cat and squeezed him close. "But I will steal yours for my own!"

[Vesper]

Vesper had always wanted for the stars, even if he could not name them. It was who he was, a creature of desire and ambition. He craved to bend everything that could be perceived into the embrace of his own, two, paws. “Kornos still exists,” he told Lux, tracing his paw up the man’s face, cradling and squeezing against his brow. “In here…” His other paw moved beneath the shirt, grasping at the tap-tap-tapping heart beneath. “And in here.”

Whiskers like sensitive little barbs tickled over the Moroi’s face, Vesper mushing his soft features against him. He held his paw out above them, blotting out the moon. “If you have it in your dreams . . . then it still lives.” The joy through the Tethers he still held puppeteered Lux along like a one-string marionette. “We can craft that world . . . anew . . . through every story . . . every love . . . every heart and soul . . . you can imagine.”

Breathing in with a depth of fresh air, Vesper wondered for the answers to such questions. “The stars . . . they are the sound of ponderance, of hope, of life . . . a sound that cannot be heard with the ear, but rather the mind, through your eyes. Do you feel the sound, Lux?” The joy dimmed, Vesper cutting Lux off to suffuse him with desire. Paramour swam through the Moroi’s mind now. “I can give it to you . . . help you hear . . . if we slumber . . . beneath the stars.”

Taking Lux’s moon-yearning hand in a hold, Vesper hummed softly with an eerie tune, somehow complimenting the stars. He brought it down. “No . . . they are not your stars . . . they are our stars.” Those yellow eyes gleaming beneath the moonlight glanced down upon the little moon, following it. “We will see your stars . . . your moon.” His tail freed itself of Lux’s, and he trembled in that air-stifling squeeze around his soft and plush frame. “Mnnnhhh.”

Twisting, Vesper extended his sharp little tongue to deliver a rasping little drag of that shockingly warm curtain over the alien’s face; the cat pulled away, and started his way down the tree. “We should head back to the tent,” he told Lux. “I want to show you that these places still exist.”

[Lux]

Lux's eyes did not leave the sky, even as he blinked and his face was licked by the cat's rough tongue, nor earlier as the cat pawed his face and chest and said things that didn't make much sense. He spoke nonsense that Lux could feel more than understand. The stories of a world he had never seen could live forever in his chest. The tree he clung to felt like the top of the world, and as a man accustomed to high spaces and cool air, he wasn't so keen on leaving. But the cat had already begun to climb down, and he didn't want to leave him yet, either.

"There are no stars in my tent. I know, I checked. But I want to hear them," said Lux, even as he started climbing down the tree, tentatively, branch by flimsy branch. It was much slower than his ascension. "What else are your stories, dear cat? What have you heard? What do you tell?"

"I was always told," He began, pausing for a few breaths as he struggled to gain his footing on a branch, with a sigh of relief when he did. The alien Kornaan left his lips at first. "May the sun watch you. May the moon hold you. May the stars guide your way."

"May the sun watch you. May the moon hold you. May the stars guide your way." He repeated again, in Common. "A prayer for safe passage. For long journeys. For the expanse of space and time that stretches from here to there and beyond. And they say if you get lost, you just have to remind the sky of its purpose." His arduous climb down was almost complete, his balancing tail great assistance in the matter of wobbly boughs.

He jumped the last feet to the ground, and as he brushed pine needles and remnants of bark from his hands, he smiled and stepped barefoot through the forest towards where he had set up camp. "I will never lose my way if I know where I want to go."

[Vesper]

Vesper hung on a question, feet already clutching the bark with a clawed hold. “Do not believe your eyes, there are stars all around and inside you,” he told Lux, his voice distant. There was a clattering of claws as he slid a bit, the bark peeling back beneath his claws. “I will show you my stories. Soon . . . we shall get to the forest floor first.” Feet upon a branch, he stepped lower into the abyss. Those perky ears could hear Lux following suit, even without looking.

“Ehm.” He looked up. “Those are pretty words, Lux,” said the cat before he slid a bit more. He’d never heard Kornaan before. What a strange language. "May the sun watch you. May the moon hold you. May the stars guide your way,” he repeated in Kornaan following the integration of that memory into his thoughts. His inflection was oddly punctual for a first attempt at speaking the foreign language, even if his dialect was decidedly Daravain.

Pondering his thoughts as he wrapped his tail about the tree, Vesper finally saw the ground and pushed off, hitting a bed of leaves with a soft thud and a bit of a cronch. His knees bent slightly as he hit the ground, spreading out the force of his fall.

As Lux joined him, Vesper reached out with his paw, following the invisible Tether still spinning desire into the mural of that innocent Moroi. Reaching up with the other shortly after, he touched Lux upon the face, cradling his cheeks and bringing him lower until their foreheads touched. “I invite you to my world, Lux the Moroi,” said Vesper.

Pulling back, everything around them both began to swirl and change, a reality blended between their two Murals overlain with what was real. It was hard to distinguish truth from the beasts of their mind.

Feeding a stream of conscious between them, Vesper’s Mural - himself - loomed in a vast night sky, peering down with his massive paws floating far above, holding the world as if it were beneath him, warming him. His stark form blended with the stars, looming eyes each as large as the moon leering with pensive mirth. The apparition of his Mural stood far above the trees with such intensity that it could steal the breath away. The true Vesper had receded into the dark backdrop, hovering behind and to the side of the man.

Interspersed with that towering feline was Lux’s mural, waxing and waning and swirling with those starry wonders, painting over Vesper’s silhuoette with a thousand little white lights. When he next spoke, it was between their minds, voice clinging to the coattails of the very desire he fed Lux in this moment.

“The stars are yours, Lux. That is who you are . . . you are the hundred thousand stars of the Moroi. So long as you live, then so too does this place in your thoughts and dreams.”

“It is not that your stars are lost . . . it is that you haven’t peered within yourself.”

“Remember this.”