[Gift] FoS '25 | Love Birds
It was fitting that the Festival of Stars should take place in the Sparknest, where lights bloomed to life, shooting into the sky to flare and paint the smoke-darkened canvas of the sky with colorful sparks.
The Sparknest was a noisy place; the ground rumbled as magma moved beneath it, pushed by pressure towards the jagged peaks where it exploded into the sky, a rainbow array of color and light. The stone popped and cracked as it was suddenly broken, shifted, relieving the ever-heaving volcano under the dragons’ feet.
Between the sudden and frequent lights and sounds, it was not a place for the weak of heart.
Luckily dragonkind was full of those for whom love burned brighter than all the stars in the endless expanse of space. Stella sighed to herself; a dreamy, happy sort of sigh as she took in the pairs of dragons all across the Sparknest. How lovely it was, to see every shadow paired with a second, though some were so close they seemed to be one.
One such pair caught her eyes tonight.
The two wyverns sat thigh-to-thigh, perched on a jagged outcropping of rock. Even when the sky went temporarily dim, they were alight, the white flecks on Tsura’s wings glowing, casting glittering glimmers, small motes of light that danced around them then faded when they went too far.
One of these wings, painted in cool earth tones and dark watercolor smudges of magma marks, rested around Shraga’s body, careful of the hooks and bobbers attached to the nets that decorated his own wings. The webbing on his wings was replaced with waterfalls, spilling down to crash into foam at the bottom of his wings.
Four antennae and four tails reached back for Tsura, finding the mane that ran down her plated spine or the thick tuft of her less-agile tail, brushing through her velvet scales. Tsura lifted the leg to Shraga’s own, and placed her foot tenderly over his, her heraldic strands falling over his own ankle. He responded by tucking his head under her chin, the fins on the sides of his head contentedly fanning out.
Never had two birds in their nest looked lovelier.
A sudden spray of indigo light made Shraga jolt, pressing himself into Tsura’s side, and her wing’s grip around him tightened, pulled him closer to her embrace. She gave a shrill whistle, all four of her ears pinned back as she stared at the offending rain of color.
Shraga made a soft chittering sound that Stella could barely hear, and the two of them reluctantly unwound, separated, as if it were the most heart-achingly lonely thing in the entire Chronoscape.
Then Shraga was in the air, his wings fully unfurled, and Tsura’s light glanced off the water of his wings, making him seem to glow with her light, as full and glorious as any moon that ever reflected a sun. Tsura leaped into the air after him, a long, trilling note rolling over their part of the Sparknest, and Shraga only hummed.
The two took off side by side, cavorting through the sky. They dipped and dove around one another, half-chasing and half-running but never attempting to get away. All the while, Tsura cheerily sang a song that would’ve put the birds to shame, that gave Shraga’s ears something other than the booming cacophony of the Sparknest around them to focus on.
Stella watched the two of them, light and shadow dancing, and she wondered to herself if this was what love felt like on the inside: a playful circling, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.
