YaneUra

A kiss, wet, muzzle, a clouded eye.

The library became their world, and the world became the pages they read from. Words no longer sat still, they would spill out, spread thin like ink in water, splurge. Soaking into the air between them. Twilight would arrive in the morning from her temporary housing in the town's empty saloon. Her mane damp with salt, breath cold and clouds form from her mouthed exhales. And Celestia would already be waiting, a stack of books before her, spines cracked, as the cliffs.

They read aloud at first, the sound of their voices wrapping through the aisles of the shelves like a weaving sown, each phrase looped and bonded into the other. Celestia's voice was steady, measured, the cadence of the accustomed to command but softened by the exile. And Twilight was quick, restless, her words skipping ahead like they couldn't bear to be contained. They would pause to argue over a line, a meaning in it. Twilight was always certain that she saw the heart of the thing. But Celestia, insisting there was much more beneath the surface, something that Twilight was missing in her venture.

Ethereal salt, hermetically sealed up.

A wideness opening and closing
To keep the darkness sealed within

Has absence ever sounded so eloquent.

Little mare.

"You're too quick," Celestis said one day, her tone edged with amusement as she pointed to a diagram of interlocking circles, their centers marked with glyphs that defied translation. "Alchemy doesn't reveal itself to the impatient Twilight"

Twilight scoffed, leaning over the table, the very tip of her hoof tracing the curves of the symbols, heir mane falling loose on the parchment. "And you're... too slow," she countered. "If you wait too long then the answer will pay by, and you'll never catch it."

Their laughter echoed softly in the vast silence of the library, a sound that felt out of place and yet entirely right, like a light streaming through a crack in a wall, everything in its right place.

In the evenings, when the cold crept in and the oil lamps cast flickering halos, they would stop reading and start speaking. Twilight would press her hooves to the desk, imagining it passing right through the wood, her voice low and alive with wonder as she would describe what she had glimpsed in her sleep, that river, winding through the dark underground cave to the salty waves in the opening. Her reflection cast cross it, then dissolving.

One.

As the grossness of spring lolls its head against the window, there's a song in the air. Splendor of gold in the desert, pale meadows of stranded pyramids. Paralysed street, dipping into the street. Puddle beneath the cork.

I love you too with all my heart and soul.

Celestia listened, her chin resting on her hoof, her gaze warm and steady. the star[mess pf her royal phenotype softened in the glow of the lamplight. And when they grew quiet as they often did, they would read again but not the words in the books. They would read each other. The sparkle of Twilight's eyes as she studied Celestia's hooves, their pale elegance, the way they lingered, as if reluctant to turn the page. The tilt of Celestia's head as she watched Twilight, the way her smile grew faint but real with emotion, like a secret she couldn't keep hidden.

One night, Twilight found a book tucked away in the farthest corner of the library, its cover worn rough, the ink on the pages turned the color of dried blood. She brought it to Celestia, sitting it down with a quiet reference, and they opened it together. The text was dense, spiraling, language fractured into shards of meaning, but Celestia deciphered it with the patience of a sculptor chipping away at stone. Twilight watched her, her gaze flickering between the words and the mare reading them, the curve of her lips as she spoke, the faint furrow of the brow as she wrestled the verse.

"You love this," Twilight said suddenly.

Celestia looked up with a surprised reaction. "What?"

"This. The search."

Celestia smiled then, a small, private smile. "Yes," she said simply, and then softer. "And I think I love that you do too,"

They didn't touch, not yet, but the space was thinner, lighter, the air itself was leaning in, drawing the magnets closer. The books hummed, a shifting of blurs imperceptibly out of line, rearranging of the silent. Inanimate.

Voices intimate.
Words.
Movements.
The cadence.

Library held them.
Books their witness.
Boundary between teacher and apprentice.
Reader and listener.
Dissolve.

One.

Only the river, winding.

Hail the rain.

One by one.

Are you with me or not?

I don't know.