Notes: Ikaros through the years. Little timestamps of visions, from his first to his most recent, and how he understands them.
Mentions: @abelasx, @iskendcr, @faelortianyou, Titania, Yavanna, Oberon.
Timestamp: I was ten.
The sky was a mix of yellow and red. The light of the Laurelin was always bright, always mixing with what I could see.
“You were named after my grandmother,” Yavanna whispered in my ear, like it was some grand secret between the two of us. “Ikaria, she was called. Dark hair like yours, seemingly knowing everything and anything,” there was a lilt of amusement to her voice now, but still calming as the two of us sat within Mythal’s Glade.
I felt like there was a new piece to the puzzle of my history, to the idea that I could be named after a great queen of the past, someone I never would’ve met. “Was she a good queen?” I'm not sure why I wanted to know, it wasn't like I thought she possibly couldn't be, but my grandmother was always honest. I liked that.
Yavanna smiled down at me, “Yes, I like to think she was. She passed the crown to my father, her eldest.” The smile faded for a moment, and I wondered if I had said something wrong. I didn’t get to ask my other question, my father suddenly appearing and taking my short attention span away from my grandmother.
Oberon was tall, charming - the elvhen loved him. For what reason, I wouldn’t ask that question for decades. To me, he was larger than life. A brilliant warrior, one who held devotion to Titania, but there were flashes of imperfection, something I admired in secret. Things were done a certain way in Avalon, customs of the Elvhen, but I appreciated when things were messy. If only because it made me laugh.
It was that moment that Aravel appeared, and I was already moving to leave my grandmother’s lap. It was embarrassing, couldn't she see my friends were around? There was a group of children waiting, those who lived within Mythal’s Glade, “Can I go? Please? Aravel will start the game without me. He knows I hate it. He will-“ Yavanna’s hand stopped my complaints, but it didn’t stop my scowl.
“You may. But don’t be long,” it was her usual goodbye, though as she rose and she approached Oberon, the two falling in quiet conversation, she was the only one to glance back at me as I ran off with a wave.
“Ara!” I had to run to catch up, my best friend still slightly out of range. Everything looked wrong, however. One of the kids was towering, another looked unimpressed at Aravel. Only I was allowed to look at him like that. Aravel was weird, sure, but he was my only friend, taken into the palace two years ago when his father had died. It was a great sadness, to lose someone like that. I wasn't sure how to process it at first, but I'd tried my best to cheer up my friend.
Though time seemed to slow as I got closer. Like my legs were stuck in mud, and I couldn't move my arms. Panic would've overcome me if I could've felt my own emotions. I prayed for death to save me from the embarrassment of falling over, but the gods must've been busy because Aravel was talking to me. I couldn't hear him because everything felt red. Hot, red, red, red. "I was talking about you." Rage, an undercurrent of grey, of fear. A fist coming towards my face, and I was landing face first in the mud from the hit. Laughter. It was red, red, red. It was like an out of body experience, consuming me from the inside. I was watching, standing by, and then all of the sudden, it faded.
“What’s wrong with him?” Someone spoke, and I was pulled from my vision, Aravel holding on to my wrist like it would keep me from falling over. And it did, I was a scrawny thing anyway, that's what my father had said. Lanky, like one of those elk Aravel had mentioned once. Too big for my legs. Once I gathered myself, Aravel spoke.
“There are Owlbears we can talk to, Ikaros. It’s fine,” Aravel was the weird kid, and I loved him for it. I was about to answer him, but the words were dying on my tongue as the older kid that I'd just seen in my head stepped forward.
“Freak. Run home to mummy, she’ll fix it all.”
The tug from Aravel did nothing to stop me from turning back, some fierce streak of protectiveness running through me, “Don’t call him that.”
“I was talking about you.” The features on the other child’s face twisted, and in hindsight, it was all very dramatic for a few ten year olds. I knew it was coming, moving to watch as the older boy’s fist missed me and he slipped face first into the mud.
Laughter bubbled up from behind me, and I turned to see Aravel cover his mouth with his hand. His laugh was important to me, it had been so for two years now, though I stepped over the boy on the ground to follow my friend without a glance back. I was desperate to tell my mother, but for now, there were Owlbears to meet.
They'd hunted and brought us rabbits and gophers.
Aravel and I cooked the rabbits for them.
They were pleased.
We said we wouldn't touch the gophers.
They were less pleased.
It was only when it was time for me to sleep that I found my words again, my mother standing a few feet away. I didn't want to get in trouble, but what was the worse that could happen? The kid had tried to hit me, and I wasn't stupid. So I puffed out my chest, everything coming out at once as I continued my story. “I felt…red. Like it’s all I saw. And a little bit of pink. And grey, like I was mad and angry at the same time. And then he threw a punch and it hit me but then when he actually did it, it didn’t hit me. I moved. I was so good, you should’ve seen me. Aravel was there. He’d tell you the truth. He said I stared off like a cat-sith when they’re hunting. I don’t know what that means but it sounds pretty cool.”
Titania hushed me, and my chest deflated when she took my hands, only the two of us in her room. I idly wondered where my father was, but it was a distant thought as my mother met my gaze, “You’re upset with me," I couldn't tell what her expression was, and I was seconds from blaming the other kid. "Am I weird for seeing it?"
“I’m not, Ikaros. But what you’re seeing…it’s your gift.”
Timestamp: I was two hundred and fifty five.
It was blue. Of course it was. The ocean always was. It was vast and filled so deeply with melancholy that I thought I would choke on it.
That’s all I felt in my chest as a woman reached for my hand, the Moongate just a few steps away. She was Silver Elvhen, desperate to know what had happened to her child. I had told her it wasn’t like that, that I didn’t know what would come if I looked. Contact had almost come repulsive to me, and it had taken a while to understand what could possibly bring on a vision. It wasn't anything to do with objects, sometimes I could see something in the middle of the night, other times, I could attempt it with a little bit of contact. Maybe it was desperation, or something else, but she grabbed my hand to ask once again and it did exactly what I was hoping to avoid – it triggered me.
Blue, blue, blue.
Midnight blue.
The stars felt like ice along my skin, so deep was the ocean of her grief, like the expanse of dark midnight sky.
There was a body being lifted, a young man who looked no older than twenty, from the back of a horse. I saw the woman scream, her grief all encompassing as it passed through me. So blue. Always blue. Every vision was blue. Death and devastation, it was always Iskaldrik. Always taking from the Silverlands, all while the High Elvhen stayed hidden behind the Moongate offering support from behind a glass mirror. I wasn't a fool, but I also wasn't the King.
Our contact was broken, I felt a shudder run through me until I felt a strong hand on my chest. Grounding, always grounding – Tianyou. It steadied me, but I felt depressed and angry all at once. There was the beginning of a migraine, I could feel it, and I wasn't going to escape it this time. “He’s dead,” that was all I could get out, unable to really sugarcoat it like I would at another time. Her wail of grief followed me through the Moongate.
Echoing, blue, blue, blue.
Timestamp: I was almost four hundred.
It was yellow. It was orange. It was laughter, happiness, sunshine and grass and leaves.
It was love. It was what I felt, and I was sure that I hated it.
Not really, but it was close enough. I had to explain once that I wasn’t an empath, there were those that understood emotions way better than I did. They could manipulate them, understand them. For myself, the visions consumed me. I was never just a third party watching a scene play out, if anything, I wished I was. It was all encompassing. I could feel the anger in the air, red and red, or the sorrow of midnight blue. Or perhaps laughter, orange and yellow and sunshine. Other times, there was the blinding white light of peace.
This was different.
I was awake, for one, the Silver Elvhen laughing in front of me. For the longest time, I didn’t want to be touched. I didn’t think it would work out if I saw something in the future, immediate or not. But I could explain it to Abelas later, if I could even find my brother later. He was always off adventuring, and Deniz was unlike any I'd met. But there was always a catch. I'd come to expect that.
I'd also come to accept that some people, no matter how good their heart was, or how much love they had to give, they would always be alone. That was how I'd felt for so long. Some twisted isolation that was my fault, my prerogative, and I'd changed it to know Deniz. My mother had told me, not too soon after Oberon had been banished, that sometimes, you were able to choose the life you wanted. "And if you're lucky, sometimes that life chooses you back," she'd finished, and I'd only understood that she'd meant me. The rest would sting, but there was life to be lived, and she would continue on.
But all things ended, even myself and Deniz. My first great love, the one where I could put my hand on his and I could feel my own emotions. Deniz was that moment before a storm. Where the sky was grey and cloudy, where the electricity in the air made you shiver. All encompassing, and I was ready to wait it out.
Yet it was a horrible thing, to see the future and know that no matter what I did, what Deniz did, that I couldn't fix it no matter how much I wanted to. He'd said it before, how there wouldn't be a forever. Nothing lasted like that, I'd remind him, but there was that midnight blue sorrow I would feel. It would mix with the yellow and green of sunshine and grass, of rain and the sound the leaves made when the wind passed through them. But it wasn't enough.
I was like the sun, and he was the moon: always chasing.
Timestamp: Present Day
We all had monsters in our dreams. Some of us had just lived with them longer.
My head was pounding. I felt like I'd belonged at the bottom of one of those filthy gutters that I'd seen in Eterna, somewhere around the tower. The Tower itself was always pristine, as was Arvandoril, so it wasn't like it didn't feel more at home than usual.
I'd come a few days prior, Tianyou not far behind me, waiting for the healers of Ceres to once again give me something. It was magic, it was the mind, they'd remind me of that often.
One of the witches had looked at me the day before, saying it would be a shame if an oracle was to be lost. It'd taken me a moment to understand how far through the mud she was dragging me.
"I'm not depressed."
They'd looked me up and down, "You aren't? Why on earth not?"
That'd been the end of that conversatoin. I'd stormed off in a gloriously dramatic fashion, Tian laughing at me as I'd made it outside the door.
"I hate it here," I'd growled out, sounding more like my cat-sith every day. I'd even been accused of purring once, but when Saleba purred, it indicated devious plotting involving nefarious deeds. I didn't trust that cat, but I loved him. So there was that.
"You wanted to visit," Tianyou pointed out the obvious, and I had to refrain from being grouchy once more.
That was yesterday, and today, I'd only managed to drag myself out of bed after taking the herbs recommended to me. Magic couldn't fix everything. There were days where I felt lighter, this was not one of those days. It'd be nice if I could be paint on a wall, blending into the background, but I was always present. I had so many questions. To be a High Elvhen was to never be alone, but to see the future? It felt isolating. And time, it never stopped, but it often felt elastic.
I could feel another vision, edging at the back of my conscious. This one was dark again, relating to no one near me. My only contact was the desk I'd balanced myself against. Fear. Black, all consuming, darkness. A roar echoed in my head, but I was there. I could see it. Creatures of the blight, another blighted hand reaching forward. Was it mine? Flashes of yellow – deceit. I gasped as I was brought out of it by a banging on the door. A wave of desperation overtook me. I had to see more. I had to go back. But it never worked. Was it the future? Was it the current? It'd be someone I'd met before, had to be, but as I stumbled to the door, looking less like a prince with every stumbling step I took, I had little time to pull it open before I was looking into the eyes of one of the Queen's Court.
"Iskaldrik has fallen."
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