MAKE YOURSELF RIGHT AT HOME | o; joining

[Grey]

The stars look nice today. Calm, bright, shiny. They must be smiling at her, blinking from galaxies away. For a few nights in a row, the girl has been wandering aimlessly, following the sky-lights with a twinkling gaze. It is a feeling that has possessed her, a wanderlust that has consumed all sense of reason. She's been lonely for a while now. The circulating air seemed to breathe her body instead because there was no one else for Tintallë to share her breaths with with, no one else for Tintallë to share her thoughts to. Her feet walk her like clouds, pressing gently atop grass that folds and squashes beneath her. Not too long ago, she finished talking to the moon. It spoke to her in whisper, like the whoosh of the wind. She asked the moon: "What is my horoscope for today?" Her cheeks felt cold from the gentle breeze that went by, her eyes felt as if they could frost over at that very instant. The moon had asked her a question back, if she was happy dawdling the earth with only the guidance of the stars. 'Stars are mischievous things.' She had let the words dwindle on in her mind, repeating back and forth in various tones, morphing into different words. She finds that the longer she continues to let words echo through the passages of her brain, the more convoluted the original meaning becomes. It gets to the point that the memories become fabricated, a creation of what she would have wished had happened. The moon, after all, was as silent as the trees. The only sounds the moon would ever make were the sounds that she gave it, a trick of her haunting loneliness.

'Are you being honest about how happy you are?'

For some odd reason, however, the words feel too real. It is as if the speaker, the owner of those words, had been forgotten - replaced by the figure of the moon and brought to life in a new light. As the vampiric child walks, her gaze is almost planted to the ground like a seed. A seed that refuses to rise, thwarted by an angry world. But, latched by the persistence of the moment, her eyes catch a sheet of white. Her breath materialises in front of her, escaping the girl's lips as her body freezes. Then a phantom takes over and Tintallë begins to run, paws colliding against the soil and kicking clouds of dirt behind her. She tells the inanimate object: "Wait!", but the paper vanishes like ghost. All that she sees is the glint of a string and a few shimmering beads, reflective of the moonlight. She rolls one of the sphere's over, noticing the etching of a symbol and blinking at the sign she recognises to be the crab, a zodiac sign. She can feel her blood pulsating through the veins in her neck as she slowly pieces everything together, finally looking back at the moon she thought had betrayed her. A smile forms on her lips but they quiver because she understands. "I asked you to help me forget, didn't I?" But there is no reply, only silence. "A horrible memory."

Of course, to any passerby it would look like a child talking to the moon, playing at some kind of game. But to Tintallë it was far more than a simple game of her imagination. She knew that she must have made some kind of deal to the moon, begged it to take away something she no longer remembered. Little did the small fox know that she had reached the border of The Ascendants, the very place the stars had led her to.

[Nero]

Nero didn't know much about horoscopes. He did like the stars and the moon though, the lights in the sky that the animals in the Ascendants seemed to stumble over each other to study. He saw them a lot nowadays. Back when he was living with his mother and father, the only stars he saw were in picture books and videos - honestly, there was no comparing them to the real thing. Now that he could, Nero would often sit outside and stare upwards, taking in the atmosphere as if making up for all the time he had lost over the span of his childhood. He would have liked to see the sun as well, but the light of day hurt his eyes and burned his sensitive skin, so the pictures would have to do. He wasn't sure how much of his issue had to do with being a vampire and how much had to do with not leaving his home in months, but he didn't care much for the reasoning behind it. All he cared about was the fact that it hurt, and he didn't like pain. Pain was foreign and uncomfortable and somewhat frighting, so Nero would stick to venturing outside the observatory solely during the night.

In this way he and Tintallë were similar. The stars and the cool of night was a welcome protection from the harsher things in life. Nero licked his lips, tearing his gaze from the night to stare in the direction of the border. His eyes glinted in the silvery light as he blinked and stood, called forwards by an unfamiliar scent. He could be wrong, learning a bunch of new scents at once was rather confusing after all, but he was pretty sure that this one was new. Nero shook out his pale fur and made his way towards the border, the softness of the grass welcome against his still-tired paws. Tintallë was easy to spot against the rest of the hills; her fur was just as white as his, causing her to stand juxtaposed to the darkness of the environment that enveloped her. "What're you doing here? Do you live here?" Nero asked as he reached her, squinting slightly at the unfamiliar face. Had she been saying something? He hadn't heard her, but he supposed that it didn't matter. What really mattered was her business in his new home. Perhaps she was like him, new and looking for shelter, or maybe she was just a member he hadn't met yet. She didn't smell like the rest of the Ascendants, leaving Nero to believe the former more. No matter; he'd find out soon enough.