Title: Shortest night
Fandom: Magic Knight Rayearth
Rating: General
Length: 1200ish words
Content notes: None
Author notes: Post-canon nonsense, Clef, it’s the solstice so solstice in Cephiro thoughts because I apparently needed more of those?
Also posting again I guess! (New job, new computer, trying to stop sulking about having broken my streak…)
Summary: Wiping out the seasons wasn’t possible. Nor was it something Clef actually wanted to happen; the cycle of the year wasn’t an enemy to be fought off.


oOo

The shortest night of the year normally meant staying awake, for Clef, even when no one else was following the practise. In the years before he’d been Guru, it had been considered good practise to stay up and watch the horizon, bear witness to the turning of the world. Longest night meant staying up too, but with candles, chatter and bonfires and friendship, waiting with excitement for the sun to come up and the days to start lengthening towards spring and then summer, the months of warmth and new fruit appearing almost every day, when food and daylight were in abundance.

In comparison, shortest night was for quiet and watching, appreciating the dark, planning for the darker days ahead. It was the one night mages of nearly all disciplines were encouraged to hold vigil and think back on the past half year, decide what they wanted to change going forward for the next.

The Pillar before Emeraude had already started the stabilisation of Cephiro’s weather and climate; Emeraude took it further, the false-sky barrier she constructed to shield their world letting her control night and day, eradicate the seasons, through means even Clef had never quite managed to unpick. The barrier had seemed to store some of the light and energy that passed through it, letting her eek out the days to the same length year-round.

The breaking of that barrier had come as such a blow in part because it had been a false summer in Cephiro for centuries, but in reality – the reality they were so abruptly exposed to – it was close to mid-winter.

As Guru, he should have known that – should have kept the traditions going, at least on his own, but in truth he’d lost track of where they should have fallen; Emeraude renamed the months when their older names lost all meaning, and shifted the new year celebrations to mark when she’d established the new pattern.

He’d asked why, once. She’d just smiled, and demurred – and it hadn’t been like her at all. Not the arrogance in changing the months, nor the moving of the festival.

Now, after his own experience trying to keep hold of Cephiro, he wondered if it wasn’t that she’d needed the weight of other people’s celebrating the new order to keep it in place, if their belief had been an anchor for what she was trying to do.

Emeraude had worked so hard to protect Cephiro from everything, to control all she could – to perfect it, become the best Pillar she could. It broke his heart if he thought about why she had worked so hard.

Now, of course, there was no Pillar – or too many of them. The brilliant chaos of the new system hardly leant itself to any kind of artificial stability. It had taken them three years and establishing a new order of Priests to get actual physical stability, without villages and towns wandering all over the map according to whoever’s memories were strongest that day, waterfalls and lakes and forests appearing on day and vanishing the next.

Wiping out the seasons wasn’t possible. Nor was it something Clef actually wanted to happen; the cycle of the year wasn’t an enemy to be fought off.

They had adjusted to this, too. Last winter there had been bonfires and laughter in the dark again, hot drinks and music and dancing, people keeping warm through the long hours. And tonight was the shortest night of the year, and Clef was alone on the roof of the castle, keeping vigil as the sun went down.

From here he could see almost from one edge of Cephiro to the other – though that, too, was possibly going to change. The Council, starting to find its feet and think ahead rather than just dealing with whatever new emergency had arisen this month, was considering deliberately expanding Cephiro.

The only comprehensive maps that existed were from Emeraude’s time – no matter how they searched, they could not find any earlier ones, but there were references in the books to places that didn’t exist now. It was as though Emeraude had slowly shrunk Cephiro until it was a size she could control almost entirely, as well as removing the seasons and anything that really spoke of the passage of time.

Even the village Clef had distant, early memories of – not much more than a warm home, one giant tree in the centre of the green, a pond he vividly remembered falling into – it wasn’t on any of the maps, and he didn’t remember enough of it that it had been restored to Cephiro when she was reborn.

His memory for places was unfortunately more feelings and impressions than useful details, and he was in two minds about this plan of expansion, or rediscovery. On the one hand, bringing back the wilder edges of the land made sense for many reasons – on the other, they had barely managed to stabilise what they had, were they really ready to try to reclaim more?

The night came slowly, sky shifting towards darkness so gradually that he had to watch carefully to catch the moment when the sun dropped below the horizon, and lit his candle a few moments before he possibly needed to – better too early than too late.

No one else was up on this roof, where he’d created a flat barren space for a landing stage or place to tether for some of their visitors whose ships would not easily land in the meadows beyond the castle. There was no garden here, no decoration, and the view from the surrounding towers was a little higher and better still – but closed in. Here he had the night air around him, the breeze touching his face, and the solitude he wanted.

A few stars had appeared even before the sun went down; as the pale blue deepened into navy and beyond more and more pinpricks of clear light appeared until the sky above him was alive with more shimmering jewels than any fancy robes could ever withstand.

Clef tilted his head back to watch them, feeling himself small and insignificant and awed by the scope of the universe, all the while his candle shone as a tiny answer to those distant lights. Lowering his sight, looking out across Cephiro, there were lights out there too – tiny glimmers where others were sat awake into the night, the same as he was.

Slowly, so slowly, the worry and the anxiety he felt about – everything, Cephiro’s future, his role in it – it settled down until he could take a clear breath and not feel the pressure to be doing something right now to fix it all. Instead, as the night wore on, he felt a sense of… possibility.

Those stars above were so far away, and yet he had friends he could name who lived among them. And those lights here below – there were people here to share the work that needed doing. His task had to be to do what he could – not to do everything.

Emeraude had tried that, and he understood – he really did. That anxious urge to mend and fix and arrange things for people, for everyone - but it was impossible, even besides considering whether or not trying was even the right thing to do.

This was Cephiro’s new future, and as the hours passed and the sky lightened, heralding the approach of the sun, it was full of possibilities, and of hope.

Clef finally blew out the last guttering stub of the candle and stood, stretching tentatively until he felt like he could move again, ready to throw himself into the challenge of rediscovering the lost parts of Cephiro.