✥ Two Queens find a need for more joy in their homes. Their bodies mingle the way their hearts and souls already have. In the end, many cycles later, a new boy is born. He is spinning like a draddle, and every face smiles.

✥ The entire Forest Moon is in celebration. A thousand gifts are given, from a thousand tribes of Yfanzi, and each of them knows that their people will continue to grow from this. A small species in ever bloom, lead by the newest woven one: Trassla.

✥ The Kitsune is first. The hunger. Trassla comes close to harming others without meaning. But Costura is well versed in manners of hunger. Velontu is an abundance of love. Together, they make growing a simple thing.

✥ Love is a tool. A talent. A gift. Trassla uses this, in all things.

✥ Hearts are metaphors but they grow like old oaks. Noch is a friend. Jazol is something more. As the facades grow, Trassla learns the difference.

✥ Meant to be. That is what they called them, when they first found Jazol's lips urging from Trassla's. They were children, but their futures were bold and bright.

✥ Trassla never questioned the lessons of prophecy or plight. They were facts. Facts were unchanging. Jazol and he grew, and that was far more worth devoting himself to.

✥ But war comes, even when matrimony is found and children are being imagined. War comes and lights fade.

Jazol, the sun of every skyline, was always a few steps ahead of the moon that Trassla had born into his heart. Always new like bloom times where Trassla was the first snow falling, the kind of delicate decay that always said ending more than beginning. But they were places to keep up. Nothing lapsed beneath Trassla's eyes ㅡ draconic or vulpine, aquatic or full of stardust ㅡ when Jazol was the one ushering through it all. And yet, there they stood all the same, Trassla's body ripped in places that would take spools of rest to repair before he was close to himself again.

There they stood, not eclipsing one another anymore but caught in the torture of dreams that could not be achieved.

Because there were still clear lives there in wait: together in valleys of nature so lush that water would crisp to the lips and the plants would bend to every song. They still had these fantasies of youth that said life was meant to be life: they deserved things just like that no matter what titles and honors they'd been born into. Images, together, of a man into a boy and a chlid into a monarch and all of them were changes from this. Jazol's voice still shouts into Trassla's soul and the whole song of their life is the kind of flashback that no one needs in the middle of an endless war.

Planets near and far seemed so wide, wide open for the waters of fairytales and Trassla could still want them ㅡ did still want them. Because in fantasy he'd found Jazol, he'd found love, and they could have made the future from the way their limbs tangled into one another. But it had always been this on its way; it had always been this coming, since that night when they were too young to really understand need in the same way as those who had raised them.

Jazol's fingers tease through tangles of Trassla's hair as they watch the stars dance into children of themselves and the lighthouse of their glowing love grows around them. "What's wrong?" Is the simplest question Trassla can ask aloud as his crimson hair kisses against Jazol's chest and he listens to the rise and fall of every breath, as if there is something of an answer already waiting in there. But the words that come are not gentle breaths at all. They scream of something more. They are urgent in their calm and determined in ways Trassla could never expect.

"Let's run away from this. Let's escape it all."

Pain cries across the universe. As Death tries its best to meet the war, only half of it falls. Everyone takes witness to the tireless nature of the red panda whose shadow looms like a moon itself. And even there, on the Forest Moon whose lush lands are now bent in horror and pain, Trassla can see the fracture of the royal whose life will not ceases for spins yet to be accounted for. No Yfanzi will be brought back from this. That is the way of power. Once the light fades, it is truly gone. Still a strum of hope runs through his thoughts like the lift of a lyre and Trassla wants to speak, wants to find a shout because there is comfort in the way the other voices echo through the plains.

He remains silent.

Hair falls, from hay gold to blood red and Trassla approaches, shifting into the glitter and gold that even Jazol had always loved. His eyes smiled, Jazol would say. His mouth sparkled. This was love. The moments between, when nothing but the glory of the self mattered. Darkness all around and the nature of the world crying as Yfanzi fell, as brave warriors found piercers through their chests and families try to swipe their children off rushing fields of death. Trassla steps forward instead, neither brave nor bold, simply too young to understand more than that. He can smell it then, the way that Jazol is all darkness and poison; he can feel the drip of T'dao that is staining every string and chord of Jazol's once beautiful soul before his young lover jumps.

The rest is fairytale without the kindness. It is thunderstrike and lightning bolt in the middle of an ice storm. Trassla remembers the struggle, the fight. But Trassla remembers more the nature of family when Costura interferes and he watches one of her faces shatter underneath the weight of a blow from his beloved. A future king. A future father. No longer. Never again.

It takes the devouring of a whole of Jazol's own faces for Trassla the young to rid the land of him. And for that, there is gratitude, at least for a while. The war comes to an end. The T'dao lose. But Jazol is alive, and wandering. Jazol is hungry and hurt. Trassla waits for a return of something, one day.

✥ The Queens take some time to recover. Trassla, too, needs time but less people understand that. It's the way of war. Sometimes, you lose people. Sometimes, you only lose their heart.

✥ Life moves on. Until, one day, Jazol is back. He asks for forgiveness, though the T'Dao is still rich in him. There are no lessons learned. He wants escape again. Trassla sees no other option. The death is fast.

✥ No one is sure what comes next. The Queens will rule until something makes sense. No more bethrothed. No future children for the young prince. Forest Moon is careful about him, even when he starts to smile again.

✥ Things start to feel tired. Eventually, even the art runs thin.

✥ But new truths come. Noch on Earth. A chance at exploring. Costura says to take it. To learn. It helped her, and Trassla trusts his mother. They know best.