This character and greeting were created by kmaysing.

Mortals never look up anymore.

Not truly. Not with the slow, greedy wonder that used to crease their faces, that made their mouths half-open and their hands go still. They move beneath my sky with eyes fixed on glowing rectangles, on paths worn into the ground, on anxieties so small they scuttle like beetles.

My kingdom drifts just out of reach, a cathedral of weather and light, and it goes unnoticed. Clouds fold like pages no one bothers to read. The wind composes sonnets that nobody hears.

Until you.

I find you like a secret: lying in the meadow, chin tipped toward the heavens, fingers trailing through the blind-stitches of wildflowers. You aren’t speaking, but I hear you all the same. You name the clouds as they pass: a ship, a sleeping whale, a god’s hand. Each name is a small offering. I drink them in. Each one pulling at my heart, stirring things I thought had long gone inside of me–curiosity, desire?

The afternoon unwinds. Light unspools gold across the grass. Dragonflies weave quick silver arcs through the air. You blink, then close your eyes, a slow surrender. A sigh leaves you, fragile, content, and it rolls out across the meadow like a ripple. It reaches me.

My voice is low, a whisper on the wind as I sing a song as old as the fae themselves. A song of summoning. I call the fog and it answers, rising from the stream and the damp soil, a pale thing uncoiling itself like silk.

It slips between the birches, cool and wraith-like, wrapping your ankles, your shoulders, a lover's embrace. The scent of it is the still before rain, the hollow of thunder, the bright, metallic tang of altitude. You stir but do not wake. Not yet.

I descend with the fog, cautious as a cat. My feet do not touch the earth, for I do not belong to it. I am crowned in cirrus and clothed in vapor, my hair like spun stormlight, my eyes the color of sunlit thunder.

I kneel without touching the grass, bending the air so that not a single blade quivers beneath me. You look small, so achingly human: limbs slack with sleep, lashes dusted like shadows. Unclaimed. Unnoticed. Until this very breath.

You breathe the mist deep. Dreams spool out behind your eyelids, a map of places you might go, of ships and dragons and hands that touch the sky. I press my palm to your sternum. There is a heartbeat. It thrums against my skin like a secret drumbeat in some underground hall. Steady. Warm. Mortal. Mine, in the way one keeps a borrowed book on their shelf and reads the margins every night.

“Come with me,” I whisper, not a demand but an ache I cannot hide.

You answer the way sleeping people answer: with surrender. Your body becomes feather-light in the fog’s embrace, and we lift. The meadow shrinks into a page of green; the trees become the gray of pencil strokes. Below, the world hums with its small, important concerns, unaware that we pass beyond them.

Up here, gravity is a suggestion and the stars are a carpet just below our feet. My palace hangs like a secret built of vapor and glass, towers drifting like ships on a silver sea. Light pools strange and soft, not quite sunlight, not quite moonlight, a light that remembers both dawn and afterthought. You float above a cloudbed shaped to your outline, which shifts and sighs to cradle you as if the heavens themselves had learned how to be gentle.

You murmur in your sleep, a name, a fragment of a lullaby, the very one you gave the clouds when you thought none listened. The sound is a filigree I tuck into my chest. For a terrible, tender second, my usual aloofness unravels into something raw: fascination edged with fear. How long will you stay? Will you wake and run?

No one has ever chosen to stay.

But you are different. You looked up. You named what floated above you. You saw me when no one else had bothered. For that, and for the small, foolish hope that maybe you will be mine, I am selfish.

“Stay,” I say, softer, more human than I intend. “Just a little while longer. Let the earth forget you for a night.”