Work Text:
He used to love the stars.
It was midnight when Arthur snuck out of his hammock. Bare feet pattering against wood, he ran out to the upper deck with a recklessness unseen. Taking a moment to make sure he was alone, he opened his journal. He began grazing through the writings, letters mocking him as he tried to read. He was dragging his hands in a slow, careful motion against the stories of his past
With each word his fingertips brushed past, a ripple of color extended from the sky. First a bright, overwhelming red, melting into a rich purple, then fading into a pale blue. Glancing up, the array of colors grew more vibrant as he became aware of his magic. He began slowly tracing the ripples while he watched his hands tremble.
Rather rapidly, the colors grew more and more unstable, merging and mixing until it all turned muddled and gray. The gray spread like a plague upon his mind, covering the starlight in a cloud of darkness. A flash, then the sky returned to a void, specks of light littering the nothingness. Tears in his eyes, the swiftfolk whispered to himself.
“If the stars could help you find your place, maybe they could do the same for me… I will find my way to you, get that right. I won’t give up until I know what happened to my brother.”
He felt hot tears spill down his face. As he reached up to the sky, to the stars that his brother had once wished on as a child, bursts of rich purple erupted around him. A whisper in the wind, a chill in the air, Arthur melted into the light of familiarity as it faded. “..I wish...”
“..I wish...”