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Around them, arctic air frosting their faces even as their breaths freeze whitely in front of them, the snowy landscape seems somehow out of focus. Above them: clear stars, crystalline and fine, but unfamiliar.
"Those…aren’t right," John notes, and each word hangs in the space between them before dissipating.
"Hmm?" Sherlock asks, his eyes caught on the horizon. "Aren’t they?" And John can feel the huff of a chuckle caught in his throat.
"All this time traveling, and you still can’t be bothered with stars?"
Sherlock snorts. “All this time by my side, and you still can’t be bothered to observe.” He nods forward, into the distance. “Look, John.”
John tears his eyes from the wrong stars and looks, really looks, and sees:
It’s not that the world is out of focus, and it’s not that the faraway white ice cliffs are blurred by distance. No. Instead, a city carved in white stone and bathed in a haze of hot air shimmers near the horizon. It feels as if John could reach out and touch it, as if, perhaps, he could fall into the gravity of another world.
His breath catches in his throat. “How?” he asks at last, and it’s barely a puff of white between them.
"I don’t know," Sherlock admits after a moment. His eyes glow and gleam in light reflected from ivory towers, his pale face echoing the architecture that lies before them, elegant and untouchable yet tantalizingly close.
He looks up then, lifts his arm just as Nara swoops to land. “This is one of your worst ideas,” she notes, settling russet feathers and fanning her tail for emphasis. Nevertheless, her claws dig into the thick wool of Sherlock’s coat, her message as clear as it is expected, as it is, no doubt, welcome: where he goes, she goes.
John can sympathize, and the quick glance she throws his way says quite plainly that it does not go unnoticed.
In the next instant, Sherlock starts forward across and down the icy slope, arms out for balance. Nara side-steps up to his shoulder to avoid being flung off.
"Hazal," John calls, shaking his head as he watches them go, and his daemon trots up to be by his side from where she’d been keeping watch at the rear. She looks up, ash fur wind-whipped, her eyes tracking first the stars and then the city.
"This is one of his worst ideas to date," she says, and her deerhound smile echoes a wolf’s - predatory, anticipatory. She nuzzles John’s palm where it hangs, hard enough that he can feel the edges of her teeth through his gloves. We’re one, that gesture says, reminds, promises. Her quick glance at Nara and Sherlock as they make their slow progress adds, They need us.
John’s palm twitches, and he squeezes Hazal’s thick ruff. We need them, goes unsaid.
They follow.
Up ahead, the city waits.