Chapter Text
Serenes is almost offensively vibrant. Everything is sun-soaked green, with sprays of flowers perfuming the shrubbery, carpets of moss and lush grass soft underfoot. Dew-beaded spiderwebs drape glittering between branches. The spring breeze stirs the leaves, picks up the edges of the hanging mosses, carries whiffs of loam and pollen; choruses of birdsong echo through the canopy. Somewhere not too far off, wind chimes ring.
The adults have done their welcoming prayers and begun talking politics. Naesala, not quite adolescent, has meandered off to explore. He has not been to Serenes Forest, and he feels like a trespassing blot of black ink amidst so much richness and light. Compared to the jagged, wind-battered cliffs of Kilvas, this place feels like the other face of the world.
He sneezes.
Somewhere in the undergrowth, there is a bubble of laughter.
He pricks up his ears, and turns on the spot, peering between the branches. “Who’s there?”
A section of leaves jumps and rustles, as if someone has just turned tail. Naesala goes to investigate. When he parts the branches of the thicket, there is predictably nobody, except a pair of chipmunks. They stare up at him with good-natured puzzlement, utterly unafraid.
Everyone says there is no danger in Serenes Forest, Naesala remembers. He’s not sure whether to believe it.
The musical laugh comes again - from behind him this time. Naesala whirls around in time to catch a flash of white, disappearing around a tree trunk. He pursues it, again reaches the other side to find nothing. He pauses a moment, casting around, before the giggle sounds above him. He looks up.
Crouching in a fork of branches is the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. Her wings are as white as the sun; light seems to trail from her in dew-bright sparks. The breeze plays with her hair, which is long and loose and golden, and she smiles, and the corners of her eyes crinkle.
No sooner has he glimpsed her than she disappears again. He blinks, feeling somewhat flash-blinded. “Hey,” he says.
He rounds the tree, looking high and low; backs away into the clearing, still scanning the upper branches.
“Are you a raven?”
He whips around. The girl is standing barefoot in the grass, smiling at him. Naesala stops and stares. She is a good deal smaller than him, perhaps younger, although it’s hard to tell. She wears a white tunic edged in crimson. Her hair spills between her white wings and over her shoulders, reaches almost to her knees. Her eyes are as green as the forest.
“Well?” she says.
She has addressed him in her own tongue: her voice is clear as crystal. Some of the older ravens speak Ancient with Naesala sometimes, so he can definitely speak it, even if he’s fumbling to speak at all right now. He gets a grip. “I should hope I’m a raven,” he says. “Otherwise something’s gone very wrong.”
“I have never met a raven before,” she says, undeterred by his sarcasm. She dips her head as though shy, but takes a step closer, peeking at him from under her silvery lashes. “Your voice is strange. My father says other bird folk speak harshly.”
“Caw, caw,” he says.
She giggles. “You’re funny.”
He’s saved further trouble by the arrival of three more herons, for that must be what these creatures are: they come winging through the trees as long-necked white birds, and alight in the clearing, where they transform down into three more children. There is a boy and a girl who both look to be a few decades older than Naesala, and a third girl, slightly younger than her fellows. All three are blond and white-clad and beautiful, just like the first. And all four have the same white wings - the royal family.
Naesala takes a step back. He’s heard much about how gentle herons are, and he’s not afraid of them, exactly. Only he feels like it must be dangerous to look at them for too long, just like it’s dangerous to stare at the sun.
“You must be the raven prince,” says the lone boy. He smiles a warm, unassuming smile. “Allow me to apologize. We were meant to do formal introductions, but my little sister got to you first.”
“It’s - well - I don’t mind,” Naesala says, losing his tongue again. He has never been one to feel flustered, but even heron children speak like the finest poets. He is embarrassed to speak his tenuous Ancient, in his songless voice.
“I am Prince Rafiel, first of Serenes,” says the boy, nobly ignoring Naesala’s clumsiness. “These are my sisters, the Princesses Lillia and Rowan, and our youngest, Princess Leanne - and then...”
He trails off, casting around with a question in his emerald eyes. Lillia looks over her shoulder. “We’ve lost Reyson,” she says. “I can go back and get him.”
“He’ll catch up,” Rafiel says, rallying. “That’s our brother - he gets distracted.”
This is correct, it turns out. As Naesala follows the four heron siblings through the trees on a meandering tour of Serenes Forest, it takes some time before he encounters the other prince. He hears him before he sees him - a soft treble, undulating with the birdsong overhead. Then, when Naesala glimpses him at last, he almost thinks it’s a trick of the light: Prince Reyson is standing in a low mist shot through with sunbeams, curiously still, dreamlike. He seems to shimmer.
Naesala’s steps slow. The other herons draw on ahead of him.
The prince turns a slow circle, singing. Naesala has not properly heard heron song: it has a lot in common with the rest of the birdsong around them, the piping cardinals, the warbling thrushes - and yet it has a pathos that he has not yet heard in nature. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard. A white moth dips toward the heron, who raises a hand to it.
Naesala steps on a twig. Reyson’s head snaps to; the song cuts off. They make a split second of eye contact.
Then, in a flurry of feathers, the prince takes bird form and flashes away into the undergrowth. He is gone so quickly that for a moment Naesala feels he imagined him.
He pauses, and then moves on. When he catches up with the others, he remarks on this to Rafiel.
“Yes,” Rafiel says pensively. “That’s Reyson. He is… sensitive.”
“I thought all herons were sensitive,” Naesala says.
“We are, yes,” Rafiel says. “But he is especially so. You will meet him properly soon, I imagine.”
Naesala isn’t entirely sure what ‘sensitive’ means in this context. But he figures there’s no great urgency here: the more he sees of the forest, the more he believes that no danger or trouble ever encroaches on it, so fittingly-serene are its inhabitants. So he shrugs his shoulders and goes along with them. Princess Leanne keeps darting about, peering at him from this angle and that, inspecting his black clothing with apparent delight. He makes a face at her. She laughs.
The forest rings with song. Naesala has never known such harmony. It’s surprisingly easy to trust it.