White flowers, a-bloom on the vagrant deep,
Like dreams of love, rising out of sleep,
There is a melancholy that lives in my heart and it will not, will not leave. I sing to it, and I dance for it, and no matter how much I perform, how raw my throat becomes or how sore my legs are, it is there, unfathomable, lonely, and dark. There is nothing left for me here, and though I daydream, I know there is nothing for me there, either. I have not found what I am looking for, as I have not found it since Then, and I suppose I must keep looking. I know not when my people will come for me, and I wonder if it will be after I die. Perhaps I ought to board a ship and be gone; what does it matter to a Benevolent, anyway, travel is travel, but these are false words. To travel with a troupe is everything to my people. I obsess over it, now, as I always do before I leave, before they come back to me and I go home with them. But I cannot go home. Home is here, and not-here, but it is not the home in my heart. No. There is no home in my heart, and if there is, it is empty.
So I think about the certain religions of the world as I pick through the meadow, wondering if it would be possible to keep my clumsy hooves from trampling some precious and unseen life. An insect, a blossom; they are nothing to us. What would it mean for them to matter? We would fear treading upon the earth, as certain sects do. We cannot levitate, or at least, I cannot, and those with wings must find somewhere to rest (and who is to say that hapless insects are not flattened against a pegasi’s breast or whipped to death by feathered wings, without the “highest form of life” being none the wiser?) Can any of us be innocent of murder, when it is impossible to stop its occurrence? I am no soldier, certainly, but how often is such mass murder a choice? How often do we truly have a choice?
I sigh, and watch the children tumble by, the stardust puffing into the air like pollen, drifting on the breeze to settle elsewhere. Children are innocent, and they do not care what is crushed beneath their hooves. Should I care, then, who is lost without me? We must all come around, eventually. It is not my duty to ensure that everyone does; as I said, I am no soldier, and have no duty.
The sky is purple. I long to sink into it, and disappear.
"You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while."
tracker plotter
please tag the proper character for replies
06-28-2020, 01:50 AM - This post was last modified: 06-28-2020, 01:52 AM by Mesnyi
the salt is on the briar rose
the fog is in the fir trees.
Benvolio hasn’t quite worked up the will (it isn’t the courage he lacks, no matter how Caspian likes to tease him) to tell his companion that he’s worried about him. Or more specifically: he’s worried that Caspian, hungry by nature, will never be satisfied with the simple cliffs of home again.
There’s reason enough to worry. This fall has brought an unprecedented number of festivals to Novus, with open borders all around, and Caspian has been drunk on them both figuratively and literally. He doesn’t have the money for luxury or goods, but such things are hardly necessary anyway, especially when the weather is good and the fields abundant. Dancing is always free, and a fair amount of alcohol has been too.
But more than any of that, the pair have seen a dozen new landscapes and tasted as many new foods. And the people! Such a wealth of them that Benvolio, shy as he is, is glad to sleep during the day and only stay on the skirts of things at night, doing his part to keep the mosquitos at bay.
That’s what he’s doing now, tracing erratic patterns in the purple sky, a ragged bit of shadow set free. But every so often, his path takes him swooping low over the blue paint, as if to make sure he’s still there.
Caspian has no plans to go anywhere quickly, at least until the curious plant a passerby had invited him to take a pipe-puff of begins to wear off and he realizes he is utterly parched. He shakes his head to turn the blur of lights back into distinct points, scans the meadow, finding a whole lot of beauty and horses and not a bit of water. Unperturbed he begins to walk, his eyes drawn again and again to the sky, where the sunset seems unusually intense.
Funny, he thinks, how different the sky can look from another perspective.
When he looks down again, it is to narrowly avoid stumbling into a gopher hole, and he pauses for a moment to regain his bearings. His gaze catches on what at first seems like a cloud come to settle in the meadow but quickly resolves into a unicorn - luminous, ethereal, she looks separate from the other festival-goers, the spirit of this particular twilight given body.
Caspian does not share his bonded’s shyness. The paint ables up, tilts his head toward her with a smile. “Evening,” he says. “Do you know where a fellow could find some water?”
I dip my head, noting the boy’s scruffy coat and glazed-over look. A bat chirps overhead. “Good evening,” I say, ever polite, though hardly awaiting his next words with eagerness. I’m relieved when he simply wants some water - it grows tiresome having silly boys ask silly questions so often. Not all of him is here, clearly. “Ah, I believe there was a fellow with a jug of water about here somewhere…” I make a show of looking around, but the man with the jug is gone (I don’t know if he’d have been willing to share, anyway - perhaps if I asked first), and in the sea of equines, I’m not certain that I could pick him out. The jug wasn’t that large. Despite myself, I long to get away from my dark thoughts, even if this is how I shall do it. “I suppose we must look for him.” I catch a whiff of something smoky and sharp on his coat. Ah. That’s what it is. “Yes, yes, you must be quite thirsty.” I’m no stranger to these things, myself, but that sort of imbibing would’ve invited me to only sink into my mind even further. I start walking, assuming the boy will follow.
"You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks, or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long while."
tracker plotter
please tag the proper character for replies
the salt is on the briar rose
the fog is in the fir trees.
She is polite, this unicorn, and the improbable color of lilac, or the first spring crocus. (He never thinks his own coat as fanciful, no matter the bits of blue). As she turns to look for the water-bearer, Caspian notes that she is small, delicate, but not in a way that seems less-than.
He has always heard stories of Delumine that hint the land has fairies; he wonders if she is one. The queen of them, even - it seems a little silly, now, but just twenty minutes ago it would have made as much sense as the moon slim overhead, or horses eating cakes and drinking wine.
Caspian is in a patient, amiable mood, dry as his throat is. “That’s fine,” he says agreeably, and at her next remark his gaze moves to hers, all blue-eyed innocence, even as his mouth broadens into something just shy of a grin. “Oh, yes. All that dancing.” When she walks, he is glad to follow, his attention torn between the cloud-fluff of her hair and the pearl of her horn and the way she’s adorned, and all the other marvels of strangers in a strange place on a fine night.
“From the southern coast of Terrastella,” he says, though he does not add that this is the farthest from home he’s ever been. “Have you?”