AT NIGHT, IN BED, MY LIES EMERGE AS PEARLS The first, in midwinter, Tahitian gray and silver, cold against my throat, was born a foreign object, perilous inside my chest. I slept all night to ease the pain, and while I did, I made it round, lustrous.
She rarely goes inland.
Though Locust fears the ocean, anymore (gone is the girl who would swim with sharks and dive for pearls), there is a part of her that struggles to be far from it. She might dislike it, but there is some part of her that is, like a water-horse, inextricably tied to the sea, and, as she departs Denocte’s capitol and moves inland, towards the great spires of mountain ranges that border the Night kingdom, she cannot shake a prickling sensation that runs across her skin like a swarm of ants, and, much as she wishes that she didn’t, as that last strip of blue slips out of her view on the horizon, she cannot help but look back.
Locust lingers, for a moment, on a grassy hilltop, the fresh scent of rain and newborn spring lingering on the wind, and she watches the gleam of the mid-afternoon sun on the water, which, from here, seems undisturbed by the rolling crests of waves.
The grass can be a sea of itself, when it grows tall enough. The wind sends waves through it, strumming down ridges of seed-heavy stems in its wake; she stands in grass so deep that it nearly rubs against the curve of her stomach. Everywhere, the sky is visible, as pristine and empty a blue as she can find in open waters, and here, on solid ground, she can almost pretend that she is still swimming, that each stride to carry her forward is actually a kick, that the bent strands that suggest the presence of a doe or a groundhog are the dark shapes of sharks or stingrays, and that the brush of innumerable strands of grass is actually water, an undivided and blue collective. But it isn’t, of course. It isn’t, and she can’t quite pretend that it’s the same, much as she’d like to.
Her denial can’t stretch far enough to stain a canvas of green bright blue. She keeps walking.
After hours – long enough for the sun to coat her in a fine layer of sweat that makes the grass seeds stick to her limbs, itching incorrigibly – she crests a hill, and she finds herself at her destination. Silk-smooth blue water, clear as a mirror, stretches out as far as the eye can see, lapping patiently at the foothills that roll out in all directions. Fresh water doesn’t bother her in the same way as salt; it can be cruel, but most often it is calm, and she never goes far enough into it to experience the dangers it might provide. It is only salt that turns her stomach, only salt that makes her think of a canopy of black water that could blot out the sky, only salt…
There are water-horses in fresh water, too. Different from their oceanic counterparts, she has been told, but water-horses nevertheless, and just as ravenous. (If not, some Terrastellans would have her believe, even moreso.) As she wades into the shallow water, allowing the cool, clear lake to lap at her sweat-streaked skin, Locust is aware of the burn of her knife at her foreleg -
(When Mooneye gave it to her, she thinks that it was kind. A beautiful weapon. So slender, so dark, so tantalizingly sharp. Is it crueler, now? She has heard that weapons retain the blood that they shed, and they can weep it out under the right circumstances. Certainly, it has shed enough to weep, now. She wonders how long it will take her to stumble, and cut herself on the edge.)
But nothing disturbs the serenity of the lake. No fin rises from the blue water, dark and imposing, promising teeth. A fish darts about her legs. Save for the wind, it is silent.
(Of course, you are never caught by what you see – it is what you don’t that will make a meal of you.)
@Morrighan || a little starter for you! I'm excited <3 || "tba," tba "Speech!" ||
For all its newness, the island does not scare him. He'd alighted here once--briefly--and quite obviously hadn't died. Elchanan has never known fear like he should, and besides, he arrives for the second time under cover of night, when he is always at his most comfortable; the kiss of the moon says it’s alright, it’s alright.
The wind is cool and easy, and it doesn’t take much effort for Elchanan to go soaring through it on outstretched wings. The cold ruffles his pale feathers and sinks into the bare places underneath, and a shiver rides up his spine as the salt of the sea rises upward and lowers the temperature another few degrees. It should not be this cold in spring, he thinks to himself with a modicum of concern, and then reminds himself that rules—seasonal, realistic, spiritual—don’t apply here, not in this world full of magic, not on an island whose only base is that magic.
From above it could almost be beautiful. The clumps of dark, glossy jungle trees shine bright-silver where the moon touches them and true black where it doesn’t, wafting the clean, pure smell of leaves and dirt up into the air. The bone-white sand ripples in shades of cream and ivory against the blue-black sea. Although he’s too far up to see them, Elchanan can hear the animals—jungle cats snarling and growling, birds chirping, the general rustling of movement. Even when the rest of the world is asleep, the island is teeming with life, teeming with opportunity.
Which he has never been one to turn down.
Somewhere past the southern edge of the island, Elchanan swoops down, dropping a significant amount of his gained height, and banks a hard left with the flick of one wing to turn back toward the shore. As he dives the wind seems to pick up speed, and he feels it bright and cold against his face, tangling the long cream length of his tail, pressing his dark ears against his neck. The world comes tumbling upward in a curving, swirling mess of blue and white and green, and then, a little faster than expected, he’s landing on the sand in a full-tilt run with his wings stretched horizontal behind him, trying to push back against the momentum of his dive. After a few strides the force dies down, and Elchanan slows to a canter, then a trot.
The whole of the shore is a pool of moonlight, now—turning the white sand to silver, turning the crashing ocean to a splash of grays and blues. Elchanan takes a deep, deep breath and smiles as the scents come to him, salt, damp earth, ripe-to-bursting fruits.
The magic in the air was intoxicating, like it contained a special strain of energy that lit every nerve alight. Everything felt clearer here: the colors were more vibrant and lovely, the sounds seem especially loud and crisp, the scents more potent.
Ipomoea’s magic was awakening inside of him like a great beast, yawning after a long sleep and stretching its legs, testing its claws. Even without meaning to he left a trail of grass and flowers everywhere he walked; the vines overhead swung down to greet him, the leaves if each bush stretching their spindly fingers out to touch him as he passed. He shivers as they do, and they tell him stories of the other equines who have walked the same unsteady path as he, of the unicorn queen and the ocean king, of the girl with dawn light upon her shoulders and the boy barely weaned. He is not the first to search this path for the relic; nor will he be the last.
But the animals - all the strange and fearsome and wonderful and magical creatures seemed to come out of the shadows in his presence, watching him silently with eyes of topaz and emerald, ruby and sapphire. They did not seem afraid of him - nor was he afraid of them. Ipomoea nodded his head as he passed, and a few even dared follow. A fox with a split tail and bear feet padded alongside aside him for quite some time, before turning and disappearing silently into the night. Their presence comforted the appaloosa, for he knew they would not hurt him.
A few, mere months ago he may not have dared to search for the relic at night. But Ipomoea has watched fires burn at midnight since then, and he has walked a silvery forest in pursuit of a murderer. The dark, he knows, is nothing to be feared.
An owl hoots somewhere in the distance, yet something tells him that if he went to investigate it would not be an owl he found.
Overhead it was a moonless night, so the stars seemed all the more bright. But as he passed beneath the canopy of the forest, Ipomoea looked up in wonder to see a galaxy emblazoned on the underside of the broad, flat leaves, a mirror to the heavens.
They dance and they spin, entwining themselves together into endless constellations and stories. Even as he looks, he can pick out similarities and differences between they and the real thing outside the forest. His eyes drift back and forth, and the names of the ones come naturally to him; yet it is the unfamiliar ones that hold his attention. A galloping pegasus, a flaming sword, waves that bend and break gently. His imagination is running wild tonight, as he envisions a flock of butterflies swimming through the canopy overhead, immortalized in fake starlight.
And as he stops to admire the wonder of magic, footsteps crunch across the forest floor behind him.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” he whispers softly to the stranger. “I’ve never seen anything like this place before.” It was magic he knew; terrible, beautiful, wondrous magic.
And he loved it.
He turned towards the sound at last, pulling his eyes reluctantly from the star show above to focus instead on the stranger padding through the dark. They’re still clad in darkness, but the starlight draws sharp lines upon the planes of their face, bathing their shoulders in silver.
“Hello,” he says simply, as flowers begin twining their way up his legs.
@anyone! another relic hunting thread <3
”here am i!“
There are two things to be hunting on this island. Three, if you include a god.
It’s a wicked thought that crosses his mind, one the appaloosa is not used to. But times have changed, the world has changed, and oh, the boy that once sang of flowers and sunshine has had to change alongside it, like the waves eroding away a cliffside. Life had become a game of choices and gambles, of actions and consequences, of love and laughter and yes, even hatred. Ipomoea is not yet sure if he possesses the latter, at least not yet - but there is one thing he knows. Anger has become a wild thing inside of him, a beast that takes the place of the uncertainty and guilt he once knew.
And with that anger came determination.
The sea has long since torn free the braids from his crest, so his mane tumbles in long, disheveled strands down his neck. His flowers have wilted and fallen away, so his brow is barren and pale. Even his eyes have gained a steeliness to them that even his closest friends from Delumine may not recognize.
He stands on the beach, wings furling and unfurling, reaching out to skim the waves that rush past his hooves, looking out over the ocean. He thinks he can see the shore of Novus today, so bright and clear are the skies overhead. The water is a blue nearly as deep as the heavens, so that when they stretch endlessly out to the horizon they seem to melt into one another and become indistinguishable, like two lovers embracing.
Ipomoea closes his eyes, and breaths in deeply. One heartbeat; two heartbeats; three heartbeats fill the empty space. Lub dub. Lub dub. Lub dub. A drum beating slowly inside of his chest, a crescendo waiting to rise.
When he opens his eyes he turns away, letting the roar of the water drive him away. The sun is hot and heavy, burning his back as he crosses the beach, but he imagines that it is setting him aflame instead, a fire that turns him golden, that hardens him like steel in a forge.
Ipomoea has few weapons to fight with. He is no soldier, nor skilled battlemage. But even now flowers bloom in his hoofprints in the sand, and the sandpipers and beach crabs are like a cloak trailing behind him.
He thinks of home, and he sees trees burning. He thinks of denocte and he sees flames rising into the night sky. He thinks of the island, and he feels the heat of the volcanic ash stinging his cheeks.
And the anger continues to rise like an ocean inside him.
The island holds many mysterious and hidden things, he knows. And Ipomoea intends to find at least one of them.
THE SHROUDS LEAN INTO THE SITE OF IMPACT - breaking light into diagonals and planes. one might fail to notice a hull amid the frozen waves.
The water is wrong here.
Locust doesn’t need to step into it to know that it is wrong, because fearful or not, she has a sailor’s eye - wrong, wrong, wrong in a way that makes her stomach curl and her eyes ache enough to make her head pound. There is something about it that is hard to look at directly, and it is not just the bright sheen of sunlight against the glossy blue, which seems to her to have no depth, like it has been painted on; something is wrong, and it is like a haze, covering the sea so that passer-by cannot see what lies beneath. (Not sand, she thinks, grimly, and certainly not water. It is a thin veneer, a shroud…)
She stays away from the surf, her hooves dug into the pale (pleasing, on the approach, but sickly on arrival) sand. Statuesque – metallic. Her coat catches like something made of silver in the afternoon sun, and, despite the sweat dripping dark trails down her sides and face, she does not move, just trains her squinted gaze on the water, as though she can hope to discern what lies beneath the idea of water. The heat is dizzying, out in the sun, with barely a breeze to interrupt it, but she is accustomed to it, from days on days at sea; but she is unnerved, and she can’t shake the feeling that she should run before the island can reveal itself for what it is, whatever it is. The bridge was too long. (She knows the distance between the island and the mainland. It was too long, and you should be able to see the opposite shore from the edge of it.) Even the water feels like an illusion, though she knows it extends back to the shore and near-endlessly in the other direction.
Her mouth is dry. The scent of salt water is mingled with something subtle, beneath it – like some cold undercurrent. Rotten fish, she thinks, it smells like rotten fish. But the scent is too subtle, like she is downwind and hundreds of feet away, and rotten fish are always pungent, if you are close enough to smell them. There is nothing on the pristine shoreline, and there are no dead things bobbing in the waves; she turns, momentarily, towards the woods, and the sharp-toothed birds that inhabit the branches, searching for a glint of silver in their fangs. After a moment, she looks back, her brow furrowed, towards the tide, which creeps closer with each passing moment. (She has not been here long enough to know if it swallows the shore entirely at its height, but it seems to be encroaching at dangerous speeds.) The birds wouldn’t be eating rotting fish anyways – there were plenty of living things to hunt in the waves and in the brush, and they didn’t have the look of scavengers about them.
A few others pass by her, laughing and chatting easily, side by side. (They look like young lovers, Locust thinks, with the most distant twinge of something akin to bitterness. (She, of course, tells herself that it is because she is no longer particularly young.) A smiling girl, with her long curls of red hair, and the speckled man that she is nudging, nearly ghosting her lips against the curve of his jaw; she is wearing those dark, oil-spill flowers in her hair.) There are a few other figures, spread out along the coast. The old man with a necklace of teeth – shark teeth? – who seems to be scouring the shoreline for more. A little girl with wings and a pair of curling horns that is nosing at a crab, which keeps snapping at her in turn. (She giggles. Locust wonders where her mother is; a girl so young should not be on her own.) A melancholic bay woman, with wild tangles of hair that extend to drag the ground, who stands like a wooden statue in the surf, staring out in the distance – towards the nonexistent shoreline of the Terminus, which cannot even be seen as a strip banding the horizon. A man with too many teeth and a pair of antlers, staring at the birds with a predatory gleam in his grey-glass eyes. Though they must be close, for her to make out so many details, she feels like she is a thousand miles away from them, and there is a strange buzzing between her ears, like a swarm of insects has taken root inside of her skull.
She looks back at the water, and she sucks in a gasp. For a moment, the ocean is not blue – it is the dark red-violet of wine, and the sand is not white but grey and full of jagged black rocks, like obsidian spines. Dead fish float belly-up in the water, along with beached jellyfish, bleached blood-red by the water, and sharks, and an octopus, and, in the distance, she thinks she sees a whale…and there are terrible things clawing at the shore, trying to pull themselves out of the water. With beaks. And – too many tentacles to count. Sharp claws. A thing with massive, jagged fins cuts through the deep water, and the fin seems impossibly large to her, even from a distance. Too big to imagine the size of the creature that possesses it. The sky, too, feels angry and red, and the sun is lurid and dark, the clouds an angry dash of orange that hang heavy and full on the horizon, cracked open by violent streaks of lightning…
But she blinks, and the image is gone, leaving her with nothing but the shudder of her spine and the pungent, nauseating scent of rot.
She tries to find humor in it, because she isn’t so sure that she didn’t just witness the end of the world, hiding somewhere beneath the waves. A trick of the light, maybe, or another strange thing about this island, which is already more than strange enough.
Or maybe she just drank too much last night.
@open! || lowkey inspired by The Time Machine tbh|| "sea of ice," callie siskel [title is from "like a scratchy record," alice notley] "Speech!" ||
IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME - the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
The dance of dark hooves against cobblestone.
The back alleys of Denocte weren’t pretty. That was the wrong word. If Locust had to pick one, she might call them tantalizing, in the way that most dangerous things had a strange sort of attraction to them. They were dark and serpentine, with each winding street leading into three others and crossing over a few more, and, compared to the brightness of the markets and the more hospitable parts of the court, at night they were almost too dark, if primarily because the awnings and overhangs and balconies blocked out a decent portion of the sky, and the stars were muted in cities anyways. The moon hangs somewhere above her, pale and terrible, coated in a fine layer of hazy clouds; it looked sickly, like that, and blurred. Out on the water, she could see it well enough to make out the dark indentations of its craters. Now, it looked like a dull reflection of itself, peeking out from behind the jagged spires of tall buildings.
Locust and her pearls, which glimmer and catch in their smooth and subtle way whenever she passes through a segment of dappled light, are more than a bit out of place here. (A rat skitters across the alleyway in front of her, pausing momentarily to sit up on its haunches; it stares at her, gives a soft squeak, and disappears into a pile of discarded crates, which have been thrown haphazardly in a pile alongside a bent-up gutter pipe.) Despite her rugged occupation, she has always been in possession of more than a streak of vanity, and so she’s never much looked like a pirate – even now, when it’s probably dangerous to attract attention, she is clean (from the first proper bath she’s taken in months, complete with plenty of sweetly-scented soap and oil), the troublesome coils of her hair had been tamed into neat curls and braids, and she walked with a sort of attention-seeking deliberation, the sort that came from either boredom or ignorance, and she liked to think that she wasn’t much of the ignorant type. A sway of her hips, a toss of her hair – to make those pearls clink, or the knife at her shoulder – a serpentine momentum that catches the light on her metallic coat.
It’s been harder coming back than she thought. (Of course, she knew that, even before she arrived; it hasn’t been easy coming to Denocte since before the accident, but somehow that pit in her stomach that opened wide whenever she returned to the Night Kingdom, the only land she’d ever called a home for any substantial period beyond the vast expanse of the seas, felt like it was growing wider and deeper with each visit.)
She turns a corner, and she finds herself staring at her destination; it’s closer than she remembered, but she supposes that it has been a while. (Locust racks her brain, for a moment. She hasn’t visited this one in a while, and she thinks that it might be because she couldn’t bear to go back. Was it before….?)
The bar’s a dive, but a pretty one – all dim, dark lights and strange, cheap decorations, bottles filled with little lights that hung on strings from the ceilings. Plants she’d never seen before. Wood carvings, crystals…
And she still remembers the bartender, who turns to her with a knowing smile and odd white eyes. (They’ve always unnerved her.) The rest of him is a collection of blacks and violets, like something out of the night sky. “Locust.” He greets her pleasantly, and his voice – still sounds strange. She used to think it was the alcohol, but there was something about the man’s presence that had always felt off to her, like it belonged to something otherworldly.
A mage, or something. She didn’t know. Or care. Denocte was full of things like that, and it wasn’t her job or her business to worry about them. “Hey, Jeremy.”Jeremy. Such a subtle name for such a strange figure. He regards her with a warmth that she doesn’t know she’s missed until it’s focused on her, and she supposes that’s one of the things that makes him a good bartender. Always good at listening. Caring. Or pretending to, at least. He inclines his head, looking behind her expectantly.
When he doesn’t see anyone, he looks back at her, blinking. Locust looks away, with a faint shake of her head, her eyes flickering momentarily to the wooden floorboards. “You’re alone tonight? That’s unusual.” “Not alone all night, I hope,” she mutters, with a curl of her lip. If she stumbled upon some interesting stranger, and one thing led to another, she’d hardly complain – she could use a distraction. She looks back up at Jeremy, dragging in a long breath, and adds, “You know how the sea can be, Jeremy, for people like us…”
He nods, slowly, a flicker of understanding in those empty white eyes. “Tell you what. I think I remember what you like – let me make something special for you. On the house.”
She looks at him skeptically, but finally concedes with a somewhat suspicious nod, provoking a soft chuckle from the dark man. “Thanks, Jeremy.”
For the moment, Locust goes to linger by the window, watching passer-by and glittering pygmy dragons; there are a few other patrons, here and there, murmuring between themselves. One of them is reading a book. There are cushions and blankets that look tantalizingly comfortable, but Locust is far too jittery to use them. In the near-silence, she can hear the faint hum of music from somewhere in the back, but who or what is playing is beyond her; it doesn’t sound much like anything she’s ever heard before, and she’s heard lots of music on her travels. There’s something about it that makes her think of rain, dancing along the ridges of a tin roof.
She just looks out, occasionally locking glances with a passing stranger, and sighs.
IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME - the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
The sun is high in the cloudless expanse of the mid-afternoon sky when Locust makes her way back to the docks. The Dark Strider bobs in the water, which is surprisingly clear – she can see a few feet down into it, in spite of the expansive depth. Silver fish catch in the sunlight, appearing in smudged, collective dashes, and she thinks that she catches a glimpse of the dark shape of some feeder shark, though it is gone almost as quickly as she spots it. Light catches on the choppy waves, staining the ridges golden.
When the sea is like this – not dark and imposing, but light and subtle – she likes it. She used to like it during storms, too, when the waves would rise impossibly high and the surface would grow blacker than the midnight sky, but that was before it bit her. It was easy to like frightening things, she thinks, before you realized that they could hurt you.
It isn’t a stormy day, but that almost feels worse. The water is too-still, the sun is too-still, and there is no wind – and that damned bridge, like black sea-glass, is visible even from the docks, stretching out for gods-know-how-long into the sea. The one thing that Locust knows is that you should never trust anything that comes from the sea. It is deceptive, and it is cruel, and it will turn on you in an instant no matter how much you claim to love it. She does not trust that bridge, or where it leads, and she has half a mind to collect the part of her crew that hasn’t been foolhardy enough to try crossing it and set sail for their next destination.
Pegasi can’t fly, near the bridge – nothing can. Ships can’t approach it. It’s cursed, she thinks, or divine, and she isn’t sure which option is worse.
Still, what she is actually doing is securing the Strider in its place on the dock, and locking up everything of importance. Wouldn’t keep out the most persistent thieves, she suspects, and Denocte has plenty, but, if they’re willing to pick a fight with her, she almost feels as though they’d deserve whatever they could loot for their bravery. (Perhaps even a spot on the ship – that was how they’d gotten Bird, prior to the…accident.)
She paces back and forth along the deck, re-tying ropes and testing locks; if she’s humming the tune of some shanty or another, she isn’t much aware of it. Damn fool that she is, Locust knows she’ll be heading out along that strip of dark sea-glass, and, though it pains her to leave her ship at the docks, she knows that it won’t be able to reach whatever’s on the other side of that bridge…and, even if it could, the last thing she wants is another ship gone down into the unknown.
She knows what should lie in the direction of that dark strip. She knows, somehow, that it is not there.
So, nudging a sealed crate down towards the hold, she continues to work, a solitary silver shape darting about, like the minnows in the water, on the deck.
@Charlotte|| <3 || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
Uzuri smiled as she slid into the fields just as dawn broke the horizon. It was her favorite time of day, watching the land ignite with color and the sky look like living flames. While her colors made her look like cool twilight, she had a respect for the warm colors of dawn. As the sun breached the sky, Uzi stretched out her technicolor wings and let the rays warm them. This was the best... This was peace.
The soldier of Dusk spent the morning that way, enjoying her day off of training by letting the world lull her into a better frame of mind. The sun warmed her pelt and caused her mind to explode in a rush of endorphins. To her, the morning sun had always been the perfect example of honesty and kindness. Warming the earth and waking the beings that lived on the soil. There had always seemed to be a trio of sides to the sun, the gentle morning mother, the harsh midday tyrant, and the calm and cool father. A soft huff of a laugh rippled through her at the thought.
"However... Mothers die before their time and fathers are rarely where they need to be. Even brothers are not what they should be and where they are needed most..." It was an old wound, the resentment toward her father for never wanting her, the pain at her mother's death when she was still needed so desperately... Her only remaining family was a pain in the rear and never around when she actually needed him. He had found her home, popped in to say a quick hello, and then disappeared again.
Shaking her head, she gazed around her. A pang of loneliness ached in her heart and she felt the peace that she had been seeking try to slip away. Uzuri frowned and took a few deep breaths. Perhaps now that the morning was fully dawned and others were waking, someone might be along that would be up for conversation or even friendly sparring. Even on her days off, Uzi hated to be lax on her training.
@ - Open <3
"Wisdom" Notes: anyone is welcome to come and play with miss Uzi
My heart is pure and my strength for those weaker than myself.
IN THE PARAMETERS OF CANVAS, THE COFFIN OF THE FRAME - the art of wreckage, how to figure ourselves in the ruins of what we can't traverse.
From the moment that Locust set hoof on the ivory sand of the beach (a rather lovely one, which she might have enjoyed under different circumstances), she recognized that this was a terrible decision, even for her, and she was hardly known for her stellar decision-making process.
That was before she spent several hours wandering the forest in the center of the island and managed to do nothing more productive than walk in a very large circle. She could navigate the open sea with ease, using currents and winds and stars, but forests? Forests remained a mystery, a real enigma. The only reason why she even discerned that she’d walked in a circle was because she found herself standing, for the second time that afternoon, in front of the ugliest tree she’d ever seen in her life.
It looked like, with very little exaggeration, the souls of the damned had gotten trapped in its trunk. The tree was pale and sickly, the limp, sparse leaves a mottled mash of brown and yellow. Of course, that was ignoring the gaping indentations in the tree’s trunk and curling branches, some of which were lined with bumps that looked, when she squinted, rather like blunt teeth. (Like a parrotfish, she thinks, if a parrotfish could unhinge its jaw.)
When she encountered the tree for the second time, Locust planted her hooves in front of it, glared profusely at the holes-full-of-damned-souls, and muttered a string of particularly creative curses. She’d been charmed to this island by the prospect of adventure, which was always appealing in her line of work, and the fact that she'd discovered that August (and most of the rest of the staff at the Scarab, but she didn’t really care if they pissed off a local god and got themselves eaten by some strange jungle beast) had presumably left to explore the bridge, and, if the boy had anything reminiscent of his father’s nose for trouble at that age…
Well. She wouldn’t think about where that could lead him.
But there was no sign of August, or adventure, or treasure, and, given that she was a pirate on an island, she’d worked her hopes up for a few shiny objects for her trouble...or a kelpie, while she was so close to the sea, if nothing else. (She had her knife, after all, even if she did prefer to have help whenever she found herself in trouble with one.) Instead, there was just an assortment of trees that all looked exactly the same to her, save for the tree of the damned. (Unnervingly similar, she might add - as though they'd never had time to grow differently, so they all looked exactly the same, down to each bob and weave in the texture of the bark.) By the third time she encountered it, Locust had decided that it was somehow cursed, not simply suffering from some sort of…fungal infection.
She stopped in front of the tree again, narrowed her eyes at the toothy divots, and pulled her knife from its holster, waving it threateningly. (Predictably, the tree didn’t seem especially intimidated.) “I’m going to come back with a saw,” she muttered, glaring up at the branches. She was reasonably sure that they had one, back on the boat, but that required crossing the bridge again, and, more importantly, getting out of the goddamned woods.
She turned her back on the tree, preparing to march off into the forest again, when she felt something rake against her spine. She froze. Shuddered. It felt like branches, curved like feline claws, dragging their way down her skin.
She turned, slowly, her eyes narrowing to suspicious slits.
The branches were curled at a different angle. She turned, taking a step back, and glowered at it. The next thing she knew, the godforsaken thing was going to be pulling up its roots and chasing her around. It didn’t move while she was staring at it, so, keeping her eyes trained on those gaping mouth-holes on the trunk, she turned, hindquarters to the treeline; she began to back away, still staring at the branches suspiciously, as though she expected the tree to reach out and grab her at any moment. Fucking trees. This was why she spent so much time on the water.
@open || a slightly more humorous locust post. || "sea of ice," callie siskel "Speech!" ||
There was something about the beauty of the lake that drew her here time and time again. The way the moonlight reflected off the calm waters called to her. Perhaps it was the kelpie living within her that found solace in the beauty of the lake. Perhaps it is what calls her here on this particular evening.
With so much that has happened, it has offered Katniss a moment to think and reflect, to try and decide what life had in store for her. She had come to Novus to be the defender of Denocte and yet, she found herself troubled. She was missing something in her life, a something that was a mystery to her until she found Metaphor.
Her life with the sorrel stallion was nothing short of perfect. Their meeting here was chance, but Katniss wanted to hope it was her love that drew him here. She wanted to believe that all that longing and yearning had carried him here when The Rift had pulled them apart. Their love story was nothing short of fate and beauty, it was something that should be cherished and cultivated. Such a love was hard to find, especially for someone like Katniss who was a plain, ordinary soldier just hoping to make her mark on the battlefield. But she had found love unexpectedly and even though she had tried not to feel the pull of love, it had pulled her and held her captive against her wishes. It was time that she surrendered herself to love.
Eyes look to the sky, the harpy eagle souring high above her. She smiles at him, her eyes soft and her heart full. Never had she imagined that a bird would be her companion in battle, the one true friend that she could rely so heavily on. “Finnick, find Isra and ask her to come to me. I have an important request of her.” She does not demand the attention of her queen, only asks it of her. If she was going to surrender herself to the feelings that were swelling within her chest, she needed the approval of her queen.
As she watches Finnick head on his mission, Katniss takes to the lake. Her steps are slow and deliberate, her body slipping into the water without making even a single ripple. And as the water begins to overtake her, she can feel her new magic taking hold. The way it courses through her veins is new and exciting and she cannot wait to see what it can do. As she descends into the abyss, she changes the cells of her lungs and skin, sprouting functional gills. She misses being able to breathe beneath the water, so perhaps this was just what she needed. And as the water rushes over her gills, she can feel the oxygen flow through her. It makes her feel alive. And as she waits for Isra, she stays beneath the surface of the water, enjoying the moment of absolute peace and solitude.
