a falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes

(Gods and glass and things divine; social missteps and lost moments. Bruises, scars. Smoothing the hair back over where you just hit someone.)

It wasn't what he was the best at; once, it had been a skill well-honed, but a sword left to gather dust and rust becomes fragile and useless. He was a tool gone blunt, and in the whirlwind within he simply couldn't find anything to fix it with—or anyone to fix it for him.

They tried; some did, they really did, but he remained as he was.

Lost.

Being smart didn't help with it, either; what was intelligence without clarity? Wisdom without purpose, direction? What did it matter if he knew why the water fell from the leaves when the dew grew too heavy, or saw a fragment clearly but the whole was clouded..? “Hmm. I haven’t. I’ve never had magic before, I didn’t know there were other ways you could go about it.”

Mauja had been born wielding his spears of ice. From a young age he had been able to pull them from the ground—at first a gut reaction, instinct screaming along his nerves as his soul threw grasping hands at the chill earth and tore ice from them, where no ice should've been in such quantities. But with knowledge came power. With knowledge, he had honed his ability, learned to control it, eventually to do it in an almost careless fashion, something he could do in the back of his mind as he was focused on the enemy—

Back then, when his life had had a clearly defined purpose.

Protect your people. Fight an ancient war you cannot hope to win as you've been losing steadily for the past decades.

Old habits were dangerous. "There is never any harm in trying something new," he said, quietly, thinking about the sunlight on snow and the iron-like smell of blood spilled upon the churned battlefields. No more pristine snow, no more newly fallen white perfection to lay like a glittering carpet across a world frozen solid—just blood and guts and split skin and the whimpers of the dying as they became too weak to scream.

All that fear.

His heart stumbled in his chest.

Glass beads hung in the air, three of them and quite small, but as his eye honed in on them he saw no obvious jagged edges; nothing to make them dangerous to the touch of a soft muzzle. He moved; frosted hooves separated from the ground with an effort that felt monumental but looked lithe and he padded closer to get a better look at them. (And all the while his heart kept trying to leap out of rhythm, swelling and swelling and swelling until he thought it would choke him—)

"They look good," he said with quiet honesty, afraid that his voice would tremble and betray the sudden panic flashing through his veins if he put more force into it. "Do not be afraid to dream, Glasgow." His movements reversed, a flight which was so composed it seemed nothing of the sort, and he paused once he had put a yard or so between him and the beads again. "I will leave you to your glass-making," he offered awkwardly, pretending to be graceful and —something, as he spun elegantly on a hind foot and made to walk off.

He wanted to go somewhere where no one would hear him scream.

[ I'm willing to wrap this up, hence why I'm seizing his random panic as a means to get him out, as I'm trying to finish off all my old threads so I can eventually pick him out of the glacier again. And we don't have free crafting anymore so lmao idk xD @Glasgow ]

I screamed aloud, as it tore through them, and now it's left me blind