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rainbowfic2025-03-18 09:24 pm
thisbluespirit) wrote in rainbowfic2025-03-18 09:24 pm
Entry tags:
Warm Heart #27 [Starfall]
Name: Mirage
Story: Starfall
Colors: Warm Heart #27 (Pretence)
Supplies and Styles:
Word Count: 1306
Rating: PG
Warnings: None.
Notes: Portcallan, 1313; Leion Valerno/Viyony Eseray. Takes place immediately after the journey back from Kalna in Into the Depths
Summary: Viyony experiences three possible ends to her road trip with Leion.
Viyony breathed out in relief as she stepped down from the carriage outside Portcallan. Horse-drawn vehicles weren't allowed inside without a permit, so they had stopped at Lower Halt, next to a small inn with a large yard and a turning space close to the Lower Gate. Inside the city, people mostly walked or took the slow city carts that were a standing joke—standing being the operative word in most of the jokes. Viyony had got used to it over the past months, and she was particularly glad of it now—she had been itching to be free of the hired coach ever since they had left Kalna, hours ago.
Leion jumped lightly down behind her and then ambled across to thank the driver who had gone above and beyond what was required of him over the course of the journey. Whatever they said to each other, it turned into Leion hanging around there, laughing at some tale of the driver's. Viyony turned away and started to walk up towards the gate. She kept to the side of the road, mindful of the passing vehicles that had been allowed in or out of the city.
When she reached the archway under the wall, she twisted around to see if Leion had followed, but the scene in front of her wavered, as if in a heat haze. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, but she found herself looking at a phantom scene laid over the true one.
"Come on," said Leion, closer to her than he could possibly have been: he was a ghost Leion, grasping at a ghost Viyony. He smiled at her and took her hand in his. He looked mostly the same, only his hair dishevelled in a slightly different way and his shirt a little more askew. She seemed to be both Viyonys at once—one who observed and the other, the unreal Viyony, who wasn't surprised when this Leion tugged her on through the Lower Gate and then round a corner into the first dead end alley he could find. He faced her up against the high back wall of a brickworks, and gave her the warmest smile she'd ever had from him.
"Leion," the other-Viyony protested, laughing.
"We wasted too much time in that carriage," he said, and pulled her in closer. To the observing Viyony's shock, she was caught up in an inexplicable stolen kiss. She gripped the material of his shirt, robbed of her breath, but before she could make any sense of it, the mirage faded and she was left, unsteady and breathing hard against the sun-warmed wall. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. The sensation of the kiss remained even though the illusion itself had evaporated and her heart was thudding so fast she didn't trust herself to move.
The real Leion rounded the corner, his face clearing as soon as he saw her. "There you are! Couldn't you have waited for a few seconds?"
Viyony swallowed. She made herself straighten up and take a step towards him, but words wouldn't come.
His brow furrowed. "What were you doing? Are you all right?"
"Yes," she said, finding her voice. She shook herself, but before she could reach him, the world wavered around her a second time. A pale echo of herself strode past up Sea Road with her nose in the air and face like thunder, while a matching illusory Leion merely shrugged at her back, and turned to stalk off alongside the city wall, shoulders stiff.
The real world clarified, the noise of the street filtering through—and Viyony looked up with a gasp to find Leion standing over her.
"Viyony!" he said, and put out a hand to catch her as she swayed.
She clutched ineffectually at the wall. "I'm all right," she insisted, pulling herself up and out of his grasp.
Leion let his hand fall. "Of course you are. Perfectly natural, all of this!"
Viyony gave an unwilling laugh, and straightened. "I'm sorry. I just—saw something again."
"Another dream?" he asked. "I don't need to drag more bodies out of the river, do I?"
She shook her head. "Not a dream. I don't know what it was. Do you remember when we were at the Chamber Hall and I saw someone who wasn't really there?"
"Yes. Even given the number of odd things that have happened since I met you, that was a fairly memorable entry on the list." He watched her seriously, belying his light tone. "Are you sure you're all right?"
Viyony held out her hands. "I don't know. I've never seen things like this before I came to Portcallan and met you!"
"What, dare I ask, was it this time?"
Viyony caught her breath, Her fingers fluttered against her mouth, before she realised what she was doing. "N-nothing, really. Only us, here, today, but finishing this journey with a row in one case and, oh, getting along much better in the other."
"Hmm. Your father didn't poison you as well, did he?"
She turned her head and laughed as she caught the gleam in his eyes. "No!"
"I wasn't wearing a uniform in either of these scenarios, I hope?" he asked, his amusement gone, and with an odd edge to his voice.
Viyony shook her head. "No. You're not still worrying about that nightmare, are you?"
"I know, I know," he said. "Pure fever dreams. I just wondered for a moment."
"You were dressed exactly as you are now," she assured him. "It was very odd—pointless. The dreams always want to tell me something. I've no idea what this was. I only know I didn't imagine it."
"Well, let's get you home before anything else happens," he said. "It's been a long day."
Viyony put her hand on his arm, gently. "Yes. It has, and you were pretty sick yesterday. There's no need for you to walk all the way over to the other side of the river and back again. I'm fine now."
"Oh," said Leion. His brows closed together. "If you insist. You must be careful, though—remember our bargain."
Viyony walked out of the little alley way and back into the main road with him. "Of course. You, too. I'm sorry about the dreams—and being so mad at you earlier."
"Me, too," he said.
He accompanied her up Sea Road until they reached Star Cross, where he was due to turn off into Ossil Way. He took only a few steps down it, before he swung back, and said, "I can't shake the feeling that you're mad at me all over again. Those other Leions weren't being obnoxious to you, were they? Because if so, clearly not the real article, and you shouldn't pay any attention to them."
The temptation to tell him that, perhaps, in some other version of this day, they'd wound up kissing in the alley way burned in her mouth. Her foolish frame hummed with the hope of what this, very real, Leion might do if she did. But the remembrance that her father would be turning up again soon and how much her recklessness in pursuing Leion's friendship had already nearly cost kept her silent. Any other day but this, and she would have told him; she wouldn't have been able to resist.
"Don't be silly," Viyony said firmly. "We're friends again. There's nothing wrong."
She gave a bright smile and waved him on his way, before setting off up Temple Road towards the bridge. She breathed out in what she told herself sternly was relief and not disappointment as she left him behind. The memory of the kiss wouldn't be so easily banished, though, even if it wasn't truly hers. She couldn't be as sorry as she ought to be for that, either.
Story: Starfall
Colors: Warm Heart #27 (Pretence)
Supplies and Styles:
Word Count: 1306
Rating: PG
Warnings: None.
Notes: Portcallan, 1313; Leion Valerno/Viyony Eseray. Takes place immediately after the journey back from Kalna in Into the Depths
Summary: Viyony experiences three possible ends to her road trip with Leion.
Viyony breathed out in relief as she stepped down from the carriage outside Portcallan. Horse-drawn vehicles weren't allowed inside without a permit, so they had stopped at Lower Halt, next to a small inn with a large yard and a turning space close to the Lower Gate. Inside the city, people mostly walked or took the slow city carts that were a standing joke—standing being the operative word in most of the jokes. Viyony had got used to it over the past months, and she was particularly glad of it now—she had been itching to be free of the hired coach ever since they had left Kalna, hours ago.
Leion jumped lightly down behind her and then ambled across to thank the driver who had gone above and beyond what was required of him over the course of the journey. Whatever they said to each other, it turned into Leion hanging around there, laughing at some tale of the driver's. Viyony turned away and started to walk up towards the gate. She kept to the side of the road, mindful of the passing vehicles that had been allowed in or out of the city.
When she reached the archway under the wall, she twisted around to see if Leion had followed, but the scene in front of her wavered, as if in a heat haze. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, but she found herself looking at a phantom scene laid over the true one.
"Come on," said Leion, closer to her than he could possibly have been: he was a ghost Leion, grasping at a ghost Viyony. He smiled at her and took her hand in his. He looked mostly the same, only his hair dishevelled in a slightly different way and his shirt a little more askew. She seemed to be both Viyonys at once—one who observed and the other, the unreal Viyony, who wasn't surprised when this Leion tugged her on through the Lower Gate and then round a corner into the first dead end alley he could find. He faced her up against the high back wall of a brickworks, and gave her the warmest smile she'd ever had from him.
"Leion," the other-Viyony protested, laughing.
"We wasted too much time in that carriage," he said, and pulled her in closer. To the observing Viyony's shock, she was caught up in an inexplicable stolen kiss. She gripped the material of his shirt, robbed of her breath, but before she could make any sense of it, the mirage faded and she was left, unsteady and breathing hard against the sun-warmed wall. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. The sensation of the kiss remained even though the illusion itself had evaporated and her heart was thudding so fast she didn't trust herself to move.
The real Leion rounded the corner, his face clearing as soon as he saw her. "There you are! Couldn't you have waited for a few seconds?"
Viyony swallowed. She made herself straighten up and take a step towards him, but words wouldn't come.
His brow furrowed. "What were you doing? Are you all right?"
"Yes," she said, finding her voice. She shook herself, but before she could reach him, the world wavered around her a second time. A pale echo of herself strode past up Sea Road with her nose in the air and face like thunder, while a matching illusory Leion merely shrugged at her back, and turned to stalk off alongside the city wall, shoulders stiff.
The real world clarified, the noise of the street filtering through—and Viyony looked up with a gasp to find Leion standing over her.
"Viyony!" he said, and put out a hand to catch her as she swayed.
She clutched ineffectually at the wall. "I'm all right," she insisted, pulling herself up and out of his grasp.
Leion let his hand fall. "Of course you are. Perfectly natural, all of this!"
Viyony gave an unwilling laugh, and straightened. "I'm sorry. I just—saw something again."
"Another dream?" he asked. "I don't need to drag more bodies out of the river, do I?"
She shook her head. "Not a dream. I don't know what it was. Do you remember when we were at the Chamber Hall and I saw someone who wasn't really there?"
"Yes. Even given the number of odd things that have happened since I met you, that was a fairly memorable entry on the list." He watched her seriously, belying his light tone. "Are you sure you're all right?"
Viyony held out her hands. "I don't know. I've never seen things like this before I came to Portcallan and met you!"
"What, dare I ask, was it this time?"
Viyony caught her breath, Her fingers fluttered against her mouth, before she realised what she was doing. "N-nothing, really. Only us, here, today, but finishing this journey with a row in one case and, oh, getting along much better in the other."
"Hmm. Your father didn't poison you as well, did he?"
She turned her head and laughed as she caught the gleam in his eyes. "No!"
"I wasn't wearing a uniform in either of these scenarios, I hope?" he asked, his amusement gone, and with an odd edge to his voice.
Viyony shook her head. "No. You're not still worrying about that nightmare, are you?"
"I know, I know," he said. "Pure fever dreams. I just wondered for a moment."
"You were dressed exactly as you are now," she assured him. "It was very odd—pointless. The dreams always want to tell me something. I've no idea what this was. I only know I didn't imagine it."
"Well, let's get you home before anything else happens," he said. "It's been a long day."
Viyony put her hand on his arm, gently. "Yes. It has, and you were pretty sick yesterday. There's no need for you to walk all the way over to the other side of the river and back again. I'm fine now."
"Oh," said Leion. His brows closed together. "If you insist. You must be careful, though—remember our bargain."
Viyony walked out of the little alley way and back into the main road with him. "Of course. You, too. I'm sorry about the dreams—and being so mad at you earlier."
"Me, too," he said.
He accompanied her up Sea Road until they reached Star Cross, where he was due to turn off into Ossil Way. He took only a few steps down it, before he swung back, and said, "I can't shake the feeling that you're mad at me all over again. Those other Leions weren't being obnoxious to you, were they? Because if so, clearly not the real article, and you shouldn't pay any attention to them."
The temptation to tell him that, perhaps, in some other version of this day, they'd wound up kissing in the alley way burned in her mouth. Her foolish frame hummed with the hope of what this, very real, Leion might do if she did. But the remembrance that her father would be turning up again soon and how much her recklessness in pursuing Leion's friendship had already nearly cost kept her silent. Any other day but this, and she would have told him; she wouldn't have been able to resist.
"Don't be silly," Viyony said firmly. "We're friends again. There's nothing wrong."
She gave a bright smile and waved him on his way, before setting off up Temple Road towards the bridge. She breathed out in what she told herself sternly was relief and not disappointment as she left him behind. The memory of the kiss wouldn't be so easily banished, though, even if it wasn't truly hers. She couldn't be as sorry as she ought to be for that, either.
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Hmm, how does time work in this universe - it sounds like there are branching timelines? Which sort of raises the question of how prophetic dreams would work, since with branching timelines at least some of the time they would turn out to be incorrect (because they were about a timeline that you didn't actually wind up in), and it looks like she had two prophetic "dreams" here that both turned out to be incorrect for that reason, but I think her dreams have previously been discussed as if they can be relied upon.
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Ha, yes, this is an interesting question, so:
1. Viyony's odd branching timeline vision here, her sighting of someone who was probably Atino in another branching timeline, Leion's branching timeline dream, and the non-existent lightning strike of a tree that happened when Kadia and Leion first met, plus the book, are all connected and they are not normal events. Viyony is right that these weren't dreams and that they were different. This particular arc has an immediate overarching plot that should be resolved some time reasonably soon if I manage to keep writing, but then there will be an event that will link into a longer arc connecting them to the original twenty-years-later Starfall Manor setting. So there aren't usually significantly branching timelines like this, although the nature of timelines is always complicated because clearly also the future dreamt about by Viyony and others changes due to actions in the present - and eventually I will get to what is going on with this possibly unique incident going on here. ("Spoilers!" basically. XD)
2. People have different opinions about time and things like Viyony's dreams, so Eollan rates them as guidance to be taken so seriously he thinks governments should follow them. Viyony would baulk at that, she's wary, but because they started by her dreaming of an immediate-future event (someone's death) that happened when she wasn't able to prevent it, she also takes them very seriously, maybe even morbidly so. Leion would disagree with both of them (and has) - that clearly her dreams are important and unusual, but they are still dreams and future-dreams at that, and that the future is unknowable & dreams are unreliable. Also, that since actions Viyony and others take can alter what she sees and change the more distant, vaguer dreams altogether, everything should be taken with a pinch of salt. (I don't know if you want any more links, but I did a sequence with Viyony's backstory that includes the start of her dreams.) I always write in 3rd person limited, so basically all my narrators are unreliable??
3. What we know about time and dreams in this world so far for definite (that you won't have read) - that time travel is possible via the Boundary Paths to the north of Emoyra. The fabric of the universe in this part of the planet (mirrored by the rift above) is thin and can be passed through into a nowhere-liminal space (the Paths/the Rift) and you can get off anywhere in the world or in time. However, this is very hard to control and very dangerous, and usually only trained Pathwalkers (employed by Starfall Manor) are allowed to use the Paths, and a lot of their work is to safeguard them and help others who get lost on them. One of the reasons it isn't such a temptation apart from the uncontrollability of where you end up if you're not v well trained, is that if you wind up in the past, you can't remember much from any point in the future to that time, and the longer the stay, the more you lose of yourself. Travelling to the future should be easier, but you don't have a known point to travel to, which brings the whole uncontrollable aspect back into play. Also, once you travelled back to the present, it would be hard to retain any future information.
And most future-dreams or visions are super-vague/symbolic - Viyony's specific immediate-future dreams (which are the only ones that are that clear and accurate) are highly unusual. People can also have dreams/visions of the past. We haven't seen that yet, but funnily enough, the Atino-Leion backstory I'm writing includes someone who does that.
(Sorry for the long answer!)
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No, thanks for the long response, that was pretty interesting! It seems like this dream she had of the woman dying in the river was really similar to the circumstances of her first dream. And I like the whole idea that going back in time causes you to lose your memories. I think it's neat that you seem to be focusing more on alternate universe kinds of phenomena here, my story is mainly about stable time loops.
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Although, actually, one of the main threads of the arc still waiting for me to get back to it is also a stable time loop. I just needed to do some worldbuilding for the immediate past and after a point, the only way to do that was to write it out organically, which turned into this very long Portcallan arc.
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Ahh, neat! I guess I'll probably have to catch up on the other part of your story at that point, haha.
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You should; I miss its microexpressions.
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I just need to get this arc done first! But he's still wandering around in both time periods anyway. In all the time periods and settings we've been in for any length of time, in fact, lol. I spent the whole summer of 2023 making up a language so I could write what he was up to in the other country he's gone to. He's like an iceberg or something. He may not be appearing currently but he's always up to something somewhere.
(Actually the real iceberg is what I've written vs what's in my notebook, my two worldbuilding folders full of maps and family trees and scribbles and ofc my head.)
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I think that's fantastic and I look forward to meeting it.
He may not be appearing currently but he's always up to something somewhere.
I had noted his anchor-like quality, but I really like this description.
(Actually the real iceberg is what I've written vs what's in my notebook, my two worldbuilding folders full of maps and family trees and scribbles and ofc my head.)
(I love that this much of the world exists and in case it is not obvious, I am really enjoying this story emerging from it at whatever rate it takes.)
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Aw, thank you! <3
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I have to say that if you didn't set up the story for the reader to expect a future-jaunt, it has happened anyway.
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I'm a historian! I only go backwards! XD
I mean, sooner or later someone's going to do it, it's true, but not other than people into what is the future for them but not beyond the 'present' of 1337 or so for here. Oh, apart from the one person from the future who's hanging around that I still haven't even actually used in a story yet, I suppose.
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. . . I rest my case.
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Having it stated like that does make one wonder what would make Leion such a catalyst.
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And all I can say at this point is: that is an excellent way to frame the question. :-)
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XD XD XD But also, poor Viyony, her visions are A Lot!
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Excellent writing as always. I am dying.
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