The Empress of Magic

Chapter 121 : Remember Them not for how They died, but how They lived

, ... My back is killing me......' thought Celestia, not for the first time, as she silently played with one of the many flowers blooming around Regulus' bed, the soft pink petals floating around her gloved hand and teasingly moving away from her grasps whenever her fingers came too close to touching them.

Underneath her, Regulus' chest was moving up and down in a steady rhythm, hazed amethyst eyes studying each of her movements, while his arms held the silver-haired witch in place, refusing to let her move even the slightest inch away from himself as if he was a man perishing and she, his last piece of sound mind keeping him on earth.

She had resigned herself to being glued to his side for the foreseeable future after she had tried getting off the bed to take some of the many pins digging into her scalp out of her hair only to be stopped by an incredibly pale Regulus, who looked close to tears as vines wrapped around her legs to halt her movements.

Instead of saying anything to him, she had calmly returned to bed and gently guided him to lay back down before crawling on top of him, after his plants released her, and laying down herself, content to let him remove the pins for her if it meant he wouldn't have to suffer through yet another panic attack.

He had quickly returned to being docile, shaking fingertips weaving through her hair to unclip the pins keeping her silver curls from falling all over the place before placing them on the desk by his bedside one at a time.

If the simple act was enough to distract his mind from whatever he had gone through or if he was basking in the feeling of her own magic flowing from her hair to his fingertips she couldn't say, but she refused to tell him to stop, even if he ended up accidentally tugging at some strands of her hair from the clumsy way his fingers were trying move between them from time to time.

Aelius, inwardly greatly concerned yet outwardly trying to keep a face of optimism, had moved towards where Sirius had formerly sat by their bedside with Fenris in tow and hadn't muttered another word, while the Asgardian Wolf resumed his position on the mattress and surrounded the couple and had been watching them since, sometimes nudging Regulus with his nose to check if he was doing all right, and other times tugging at Aelius' sleeve to demand scratches behind his ear.

Had anyone walked into the room at this exact moment, they would have been none the wiser about the acts that had occurred to land them in such a position, to begin with, and simply thought of them to have fallen asleep together after a long day of hard work....

Celestia felt incredibly tired and would have preferred nothing more than to succumb to the inviting embrace of sleep to rid herself of all the pain and emotions this day had brought upon her, but each time her mind tried to ease itself into the false sense of a world still whole her mind shields hissed and screeched at her to keep awake, able to detect the shadows belonging to the children of Morpheus who were waiting just outside her barriers for the right moment to strike and force their way inside to take a peek at their newest addition.

They weren't bothering to hide from her, aware that she had noticed their presence long before they had tried to slyly track their way through her shields one at a time, but they remained steadfast in their approach at poking at her barriers, content to await the moment she would eventually give in to her exhaustion and fall unconscious so that they could browse through her mind and memories to their own entertainment......

, ... I'll have to go and dig through Esmeralda's journals once Regulus falls asleep.......' thought the witch, her eyes lazily flickering between a soft blue and a gentle gold. , .... She probably has written down some spells or rituals to prevent others from forcing themselves into one's own mind.........'

And if not? Celestia was willing to bet her newly informed distant relatives would go running for the hills once she found a way to trap a soul in the landscape of dreams for the rest of its miserable existence.