astralsunshine

Beneath a Stolen Sky - a Wolfstar medieval fantasy - first snippet!

Ok, fine, you guys have convinced me (all I really needed was just one like in reality 😂). Here is the first snippet of my new medieval fantasy that I started building the world for, and this snippet will serve as the prologue once I'm ready to actually start writing more of the fic, which will probably be a while. But I'm having a lot of fun creating the world itself, and will probably share some snippets from that in the coming months, so here is the first one!

Thank you for enabling me @lifeisabitch-butimcute @shunstanpike @moonysfavoritedog, and anyone let me know if you would like to be tagged in future posts like this! ❤️

Summary (I promise it's a happy ending!!!!)

In a kingdom where magic is outlawed and punished by death, Crown Prince Sirius Black, cast out by his royal family for manifesting the very power they've spent generations suppressing, is captured and awaiting execution. In the cell beside his, through a wall he can't see through, he meets and falls in love with another prisoner, Remus Lupin. What Sirius doesn't know is that Remus is no prisoner. He's a guard, assigned to extract names of other magical people from Sirius before he dies. What Remus doesn't know is what it will cost him to walk Sirius to the pyre.

Prologue - When Two Stars Fell to Earth (or: A history of Helindra)

Once upon a time, before the age of iron and the age of stone, before kingdoms drew their borders across the faces of the Earth, there was only sky.

The sky, in those days, was not merely what it is now—a distant ceiling beyond which nothing answers. It was alive; it breathed. Its stars were not fixed points of cold light but living things, restless and brilliant, burning with a warmth that had no name because it had never needed one. They watched the young world below them the way the old watch children: with patience, tenderness, gentleness, and an occasional sorrow they could not quite explain.

It was two such stars who first felt the pull of the Earth.

They had watched it for longer than mortal years could measure—watched the greenery push through dark soil, watched the rivers carve their slow passage through stone, watched the first tentative fires of the first tentative people flicker against the dark. They watched those people look up to the sky, as all people do, even today, and reach toward something they had no words for yet.

They came down as slow, gentle light. Ash-Shi’rā came first, blazing and warm-confident and already looking around with great curiosity at everything. Al-Sab’ came second, quieter, taking it all in with patient and careful attention that would become, across thousands of years of memory and story, his most recognisable gift.

Where Ash-Shi’rā landed, the Earth warmed beneath him. Where al-Sab’ stood still and considered the world, things grew, as all things grow when they are understood.

Together, they chose a valley.

It was not a remarkable valley by any measure available to those who had not seen what it would become—a wide green place cupped between hills, with a river running clear through its heart and a forest to the east so ancient that its oldest trees had no name for themselves in any language. Ash-Shi’rā looked at it and said: here, with certainty. Al-Sab’ walked its perimeter in silence, returned, and sat down in the long grass by the river.

Which meant: yes, here.

And so here is where Helindra was born.

The first thing Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab’ built was a hearth. A great hearth of pale river stone at the centre of the valley, and into it they poured the last of the light they had carried down from the sky—not all of it, for they kept some for themselves, to carry in their blood and pass to their children—but enough. Enough to make the flame that burned there permanent, protected, the warmest thing on Earth.

The Heartfire, people would later call it.

Around the Heartfire, the valley changed. Starblooms opened in the meadows: their petals the silver of a winter sky, their centres burning gold even in the deepest dark. Lumiveldt grass spread along the riverbanks, soft and luminous, so that the river seemed always lit from below. In the ancient forest to the east, crystalmoss crept across the oldest stones, glowing faintly blue in the evenings, and deep among the roots, the thornfox made their dens—small silver creatures with bright eyes who could speak human language when they chose to, which was rarely so, and who kept themselves. The hills grew ardenvine, whose leaves shifted colour with the magic near them—warm gold when Ash-Shi’rā passed by, deep green in al-Sab’s quiet, and a hundred other shades for a hundred other people, once the people came.

And the people came.

They came in ones and twos at first, then in families, then in whole villages, from places where the word magic was whispered, where those who held it were outcast and made to leave or disappear. They came having heard a rumour, the way rumour always travels, even today: in pieces, changed by each mouth that carried it. A valley, somewhere. A valley where the gifts they had been born with were not cause for fear.

What they found was not what they had expected, those who had spent their lives apologising for what they were.

A child who set her curtains alight was not punished but sat down with and listened to, her magic understood as something true. A man whose grief manifested as a storm above his head was not feared but sheltered, brought under a neighbour’s roof and fed until the weather of him passed. A girl who could not stop transforming—fox, hedgehog, then bird, then herself again, helpless with the changing—was taken gently by the hand by al-Sab’ and shown that the changing was a form of language, and that language could be learned by others, too.

Magic in Helindra was ordinary; it was the texture of life. It was not extraordinary any more than breathing was extraordinary, and it was treated accordingly.

The aurebirds nested in the towers of the first great hall—copper-winged, their song threaded with warmth that eased old pain from bones and old sorrow from hearts—and for years, those who were newly arrived would stop in the courtyard and simply listen. Some of them wept without knowing why. Ash-Shi’rā, who understood everything and explained nothing, would watch from the doorway with an expression al-Sab’ knew well.

The expression that meant: they had forgotten what it felt like to be allowed to exist.

Selkindra grazed in the eastern meadows at dawn—deer in shape but lit from within, their antlers branching and crystalline, refracting the early light in rainbows of bright colour across the wet grass. The lumenwing butterflies moved through the market streets in slow drifting clouds, their stained-glass wings carrying the warmth of the Heartfire, and children chased them and the world was good.

For thousands of years, longer than the word thousands is meant to be understood, Helindra endured.

Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab’ grew old together, as stars-made-flesh must, and when the time came for them to return to the sky, they did not die as ordinary things die. They went gently, softening until they became part of the light of Helindra. They left behind children, and grandchildren, and all their many-greated grandchildren, and in each of them a thread of the original starlight.

The descendants of Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab’ ruled Helindra, and they were beloved. The Council of Elders governed beside them—the Seers and the Mages and the Wise Men of the old order, the fauna-folk who carried the knowledge of the living world, the Weavers of the ancient spells—and the kingdom was not a place of rulers and ruled but of tending. Everyone tended something. The royals tended the kingdom and the kingdom tended the people and the people tended each other, and if this was not a perfect arrangement, for nothing is, it was honest, and it held.

The Heartfire never went out, and the descendants of Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab’ were beloved, and they were beloved, and they were beloved.

Until they weren’t.

Their names were Morrion and Malvurga. They were both descended, as all the ruling line was descended, from Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab’, and the light in them was real. It had simply been turned, over long years of wanting, toward a direction for which Helindra had no map.

What they wanted—what had curdled in them, slow as spoiled milk—was not magic itself but what magic might be made to mean. In Helindra it meant nothing more than what anyone was. It was equal and it was ordinary, and there was no power in ordinary things. Morrion looked at the aurebirds and the lumenwing clouds and the selkindra in the meadows and saw abundance, and abundance had never moved him. What moved him was rarity, and you could not make a thing rare while it belonged to everyone.

Malvurga was more patient than her husband and far more dangerous for it. She understood that what they wanted could not be seized outright. It had to be built—slowly, from beneath, like the crystalmoss, spreading by degrees in the dark before anyone thought to look.

They began with small things; a whisper about a neighbour whose magic had caused some misfortune. A suggestion, made gently, in passing, that perhaps certain uses of magic were less wholesome than others. A look across the Council chamber that said nothing and yet, meant everything. In the private hours of the night, they studied the dark arts—magic that takes where it should give—and the ardenvine nearest the palace began to lose its colour, leaf by leaf, the way things nearest a sickness do.

The thornfox left the palace grounds first, then came the catastrophes. Storms without season. Harvests rotting in the field overnight. A lake in the southern reach that turned dark between one dawn and the next and would not be turned back. The Council of Elders assembled in emergency in Starfall Hall—the Seers and the Mages, the ancient fauna-folk, the Weavers of the old spells—and in the chairs of Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab’ sat Morrion and Malvurga, their faces arranged in expressions of grave concern.

It was a High Seer named Coranthiel who found them out. She was very old, older than she appeared, and she had a habit of looking at people slightly to the left of their faces, as though what she needed to see was just beside them, just past the edge. She had looked at Morrion and Malvurga this way for years without being certain of what she saw there. Then one evening, sitting in the Council chamber while Morrion spoke at length about the storms and what might be done, she looked, and she knew.

She said nothing that night. She waited three days, which was all the time she needed, and brought before the Council the evidence she had gathered. The council deliberated, and Morrion and Malvurga presented their defence. The assembly of all Helindrans listened to them.

The verdict was given not long after: banishment.

Morrion and Malvurga and all their children and all who had chosen to stand with them were cast out from Helindra in the greyest hour before dawn. The border sealed behind them, and by sunrise, the thornfox had returned to the palace grounds.

What Helindra did not know, because it could not follow where the banished went, was what became of them after.

Morrion led his family across unfamiliar land with a fury that had been with him his whole life and now, finally, had somewhere to go. They crossed mountains. They crossed dead rivers. They came at last to a wide, flat, unpromising plain, and Malvurga stopped walking and said: here—an echo, though she did not know it, of a word spoken in a valley long ago.

On this plain, they built Aethernum. It was a kingdom founded on a story, as all kingdoms are. But the story Morrion and Malvurga told was fabricated: that they had sought a new life in new land, free from the dangerous unknowns of the world they had left. That they offered honest work and honest protection. That any who joined them would be safe.

They were very convincing, and so the honest folk who came to them found, in the early years, that Aethernum delivered on its promises. There was order. There was safety that felt, to those who had never known it, enough to sustain them. And there was, above all, the reassurance of a kingdom that had rules.

And then the magic began to appear.

It always does, as it cannot be suppressed in a bloodline without surfacing eventually, in moments of great fear or great joy or grief too large for the body to hold. A child who levitated in her sleep. A farmhand whose touch made crops grow double. A young couple whose wedding morning was marked by an unaccountable shower of light that lasted precisely as long as their vows and no longer.

Malvurga, who would be titled in all the histories Aethernum as the Mad Queen, which was the kindest name for what she became, had turned her own magic inward in the years since banishment, into the dark, so much so that it had ceased to resemble the original gift at all. The sight of it loose and careless in her kingdom, used for joy, most of it all, was intolerable.

So she had it extinguished, wherever she found it.

The extinguishing took many forms and none of them were merciful, and Morrion did not stop her, and the people around them believed what they were told: that magic destroys and corrupts. They had never known Helindra, they had only what they were told in Aethernum, and what they were told, for long enough, becomes indistinguishable from the truth.

Aethernum grew and darkened. The plain it occupied did not welcome it—the soil was thin, the sky above it held a permanent grey cast that no season fully lifted, the wind off the mountains arrived cold and left cold—but it grew. The castle Morrion built was enormous, and it was always cold inside.

In her last years, Malvurga made the enchanted box herself. Northern blackwood, sealed with an enchantment that could only be broken by the reigning king and queen. Inside it, she placed the full record of what they truly were and where they had come from—the ancestry of Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab’, the history of Helindra, the nature of the original gift—because she could not bring herself to destroy it entirely. Some part of her, buried deep under everything she had become, would not let her. She had it placed in the northernmost tower, and did not speak of it again.

Morrion outlived her by eleven years. He spent them ruling in grief and cruelty. He died in winter, in the cold great castle, and his last request was that his window be left open. The servants who kept watch through that last night said he kept looking up, past the curtain’s edge, toward the sky.

Nobody knew what he was looking for.

Back in Helindra, the thousand-year peace held, and the Heartfire burned.

The aurebirds nested in the towers and the lumenwing butterflies drifted through the market streets and the selkindra came at dawn to the eastern meadows. The Council of Elders governed, and the high seats of Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab’, the oldest chairs in the world, stood empty.

The High Seer of each age passed the same knowledge to her successor: the seat is not unclaimed. It is waiting. For what, the younger Seers would ask. And the old ones would say: for who.

In the deep library of the Council, where the records of every age were kept on bark-paper and bone-parchment, there was a page added in the age of Coranthiel. It was read every generation, by each new High Seer, and each new High Seer read it the same way: first with attention, then with a stillness that meant she understood.

Fire shall take the Bright One and not keep him. The Hermit guards the light but cannot see him. The hand that chains shall be the hand that frees, The voice through stone shall bring him to his knees.

Nor crowned, nor blazing, lost without a name, Two fugitives who do not know their claim. The thornfox will descend, the starblooms wake, The stars do not forget. They only wait.

And so the years passed, hundreds and then thousands, and somewhere in the cold grey kingdom of Aethernum, two people lived who did not know what they were.

One had been cast out of everything he had ever known; the other had spent his whole life making sure no one would ever cast him out.

They had not met. They did not know each other’s name. And neither of them knew that somewhere, beyond the borders of the only world they had ever been shown, the thornox had come out of hiding, and the Heartfire was watching and waiting. Helindra knew the prophecy was finally being filled, and the return of Ash-Shi’rā and al-Sab was close.

All that aside though, I’m actually so excited about this idea I’ve had for this fic and I’m thinking of sharing the prologue I wrote here as a teaser, and maybe some other bits about the world I’ve been creating… would my lovely moots be interested?

The fever comes on fast, the way it always does after a bad one.

Remus knows it’s bad before he’s fully himself again, knows it the way he knows everything in those first grey hours, dimly and from a distance, through a body that feels borrowed and poorly fitted. He’s hot. He’s so hot he’s cold with it, shivering uncontrollably, and Sirius is there, has always been there, crouched beside him on the bathroom floor, saying his name in a low, even voice.

“Moons. Hey. Look at me.”

Remus looks at him; it takes a moment to make his eyes cooperate.

“There you are,” Sirius says, and something in his face does a complicated thing. “We need to get your temperature down, love. Okay?”

🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊🧊

He really doesn’t want to get in.

He says so, several times, with great conviction and very little coherence. The water is already running and he can hear it and he’s so cold, he tells Sirius so; he’s absolutely freezing, which he knows is the fever talking but knowing doesn’t help, and his muscles are screaming in that extremely specific way they do after a transformation, the kind of ache that lives in the bone rather than the flesh, and the last thing he wants is—

“I know,” Sirius says. “I know. Come on.”

He helps Remus up, and Remus leans on him more than he means to.

As soon as the cold of the icy water hits, Remus makes a sound he’d be embarrassed about if he had the capacity for embarrassment right now, and tries to get out, and Sirius holds him gently and says I know, I know, just a minute, just stay—and then takes his clothes off and swings his legs over the side and gets in too, and settles behind Remus so his back is against Sirius’s chest, Sirius’s arms coming around him, and Remus goes still.

“There,” Sirius says, quietly.

The water is awful. Remus is shaking. Sirius presses his lips to the top of his head and keeps them there for a long moment, and Remus closes his eyes.

It helps, is the thing. It always helps, having Sirius’s arms around him—it has helped for longer than either of them was willing to admit, back when they were still pretending they were just friends. Now Sirius rubs slow circles into his arm and says nothing, and the shaking starts to ease, increment by increment, almost imperceptibly.

“You’re going to be alright,” Sirius tells the top of his head.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“I am.”

“But you didn’t have to, just because of me...”

“Remus.”

“You’ll catch a cold.”

“I genuinely couldn’t care less about catching a cold right now.” A pause. Another kiss, pressed carefully to his hair. “Just let me have this.”

Remus doesn’t know how long they stay like that.

Long enough that the worst of it starts to lift; the delirium thinning out, the edges of things coming back into focus. Sirius’s heartbeat is steady against his back. The water is still cold, but he’s stopped fighting it, gone heavy and loose in Sirius’s arms, and Sirius keeps kissing his hair, his temple, the side of his head, soft and unhurried, like he has nowhere else to be and nothing else to do.

He probably does. He always does, after a full moon—there are things to clean up, things to sort out, he must be exhausted. He always is. He never says so.

“Sirius,” Remus says.

“Mm.”

“You really don’t have to stay in here with me.”

Sirius’s arms tighten, fractionally. “I know.”

Remus looks down at the water. “I hate when it’s bad.”

“I know,” Sirius says, and his voice is steady, and Remus has learned, over time, to hear what lives underneath the steadiness: the thing Sirius tucks away so Remus doesn’t have to carry that too. “I know you do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be silly. Don’t do that.”

Remus is quiet for a moment.

“I love you,” he says. It comes out plainly, the way true things do when you’re too tired to arrange them into anything more.

Sirius is quiet for a beat, then he presses his mouth to Remus’s hair again and holds it there for a long moment.

“I love you,” he says, into the crown of his head. “So much. You have no idea.”

The water is cold. Sirius is warm at his back.

It’s a thing Sirius does, apparently.

Has always done, presumably, though Remus only has data from the eight months they’ve shared the flat. He showers and then he just…exists, afterwards, drifting through the kitchen or the hallway or the sitting room with a towel around his hips and his hair dripping onto his shoulders, looking for his phone or the remote or something to eat or drink, completely unbothered. Like it doesn’t occur to him that this might be difficult for anyone.

Remus has gotten very good at looking at other things.

🫧🫧🫧🫧🫧🫧

There’s a Tuesday where Sirius leans across him to reach the coffee, and Remus stares at the wall behind the kettle and tries to think of awful things for as long as it takes Sirius to find a mug and leave. He can’t very well risk getting a stiffy near his best friend!

Then there’s a Thursday where Remus is halfway through a chapter of a book, and Sirius wanders in to ask something about the gas bill, and Remus answers without looking up, which he’s proud of, and then ruins it by glancing over the moment Sirius turns to go.

Sirius catches him that time. He doesn’t say anything, just smirks, and goes back to his room.

Remus reads the same paragraph until the letters blur together, forming something completely unreadable.

🫧🫧🫧🫧🫧🫧

It becomes a sort of game, though Remus would never call it that. He gets better at the looking-away. Sirius, he suspects, gets better at engineering reasons to be in whatever room Remus is in after he’s had a shower. It’s hard to prove, but Remus suspects Sirius might be doing it on purpose. He’s not going to bring it up, though. So he makes his tea and keeps his eyes on the mugs, keeps his eyes on his book, keeps his eyes on the middle distance while Sirius stands in the hallway going through the post, water still tracking down his spine, taking up more space than one person strictly needs to. Not just physically, but in Remus’s mind, too.

It’s fine.

It’s completely fine.

🫧🫧🫧🫧🫧🫧

It’s a Sunday evening when it stops being fine.

Sirius has been to the gym. He showers; he emerges. He drops onto the other end of the sofa with the towel still on and picks up the remote, scrolling through channels with total serenity while Remus sits very still beside him and looks at his book. The words are shapes; the shapes mean nothing. There’s a drop of water moving down the side of Sirius’s neck, and Remus watches it without noticing, and then Sirius turns his head and catches him, and this time Remus doesn’t look away fast enough, and the smile starts at the corner of Sirius’s mouth—

Remus puts the book down.

He stands up, crosses the small, stupid distance between them, takes Sirius’s face in both hands, and kisses him. Sirius goes still for one second—and after one long, suspended second, makes a sound low in his throat and kisses back, his hands coming up to grip Remus’s shirt, pulling him closer down with a desperation. His mouth is warm, and his lips are soft, and he kisses the way he does everything, completely committed to the bit, like there’s nothing else in the world worth doing.

When they pull apart, Sirius is staring up at him with wide eyes. The infuriating smirk is finally gone, replaced with something much more meaningful.

Remus holds his gaze.

Read here on AO3

Here is what he knows, which is this:

That Sirius Black is capable of extraordinary cruelty. And that he is also capable of extraordinary tenderness. That Remus has spent the better part of his life unable to predict which one is coming, standing at the threshold of him like one stands at the threshold of a room where one cannot see the floor, where one suspects the floor might not be there at all, and choosing to step in anyway, every time. This is either a character flaw or the defining fact of him. He has never been able to decide which.

I've been having a lot of fun experimenting with stream of consciousness and unreliable narrators and non-linear narratives, mainly in some recent fics posted for other fandoms. I think this might just be the greatest thing I've ever written, and I'm so very proud of it. I hope you guys enjoy❤️

read the fourth fic on AO3:

Anything I Want