It is a tranquil night when Florentine lands, light and nimble upon the edge of Denocte’s cliffs.
But such peace will not last.
She takes a breath, a whisper of air that rushes in and rushes out. Here, upon this cliff, the nymph queen of smiles and flowers is small and slight, soft and gold…
…Until the shadows begin to creep.
Up and up her golden skin they crawl. This darkness is a shawl she once gladly wore. But now they feel like ants upon her skin, creeping and scuttling.
It is her trembling that starts everything. It is the silken touch of the moon upon her back, pouring mercury, that has her fury rising like dragon fire. It is a fury that has slept, that has been pushed away. But Florentine is a volcano now. Her fury is lava that will no longer be bound and it builds and builds and builds. Yet, Dusk’s queen is no mere volcano able to rend the skies alone. No, this volcanic girl is set to rend worlds.
Her fury snaps with the energy of stars colliding. Her subtle knife rends the air, but it does not stop there. It presses and pushes and stops only when it reaches another world. Any world the fury cries from her thrumming veins. The knife rips in a jagged slash and a wound yawns open between worlds. Red light and fierce solar winds pour in through the open window. This world she has opened a window too is as wild as her anger, it is as crimson as her hurt. With her teeth she pulls the seam of the worlds open, open, open. More, more, more.
The earth begins to shake, she can feel its trembling in her limbs. It is a song that made the earth move and it is thundering its way up the girl’s caramel limbs. The quaking makes Florentine’s nerves sing, and her teeth chatter. Her whole body is alight beneath its fierce roar. Was this what it was to open herself up and let the hurt of her betrayal roar?
Stone and rock and open air resonated with this sound, this terrible music. A solar storm: a wind of fire and rage, of stars and metal sweeps into Denocte. It has no place here, like her fury, but Reichenbach invited both.
The sea is a fierce and wild chant behind her. It cries as it breaks upon the jagged cliffs and hisses its fury as the frothing waters pull back from the wetted stone. High up the cliffside the Dusk queen stands, within the ruins of a fallen watchtower. Was it once built to watch Dusk? If so, she thinks, it should not have been so easily forgotten. The lines of her delicate face darken like an artist’s shadow. She is art, here beneath this savage scene, but it not art of this world. It is the shadow of anger, the same energy that drives the raging winds. She laughs, for a moment, free and terrible. The winds arch back, like a cat and swirl about her frame, it knows that laugh means nothing good. That laugh so wild, so full of fury.
The girl was made in fire and ice. Her skin is scolded by frost, her soul lit with flames. After a fire there is always life, always flowers. It was why she is the flower girl, fed by heat and light and water. There is nothing peaceful in her life, nothing that would ever remain soft and gentle. This storm, welcomed from another world, reminds her now like the Night King reminded her then.
At last she steps away from the rampart’s edge. She is gold and beautiful and terrible beneath this keening sky of unnatural winds. An ear twists amidst its nest of gold and lavender. It listens to the crooning of Denocte’s stars and moon. Darkness dares to seep over her again and in silence her dagger rises in opposition. It cuts deep, deep into air and nothingness. But it’s pointed tip pierces everything. Florentine holds and drags that cutting blade, spilling another world’s light across the night ground in a short, sharp slash. She does not stop there, she cuts and cuts and cuts, again and again, on and on until the night is full of rippling, white light. Until it is like a thousand worlds throw their sunlight here. It falls across her skin, banishing the shadows from her body and the darkness flees like beetles beneath the nuclear force of her ire.
Her paper heart thunders in her chest but Florentine is numb, numb, numb. Reichenbach wanted her to tell him the truth. Well, this was it: Florentine is not of this world, or any single one. Not even she knows when, or where, she began to exist. This girl has been born so many times, in so many places. She has died twice already: once old and ready, once young and so unprepared. She will die again, an infinite number of times until time is ready to die itself.
Reichenbach thinks he knew her. He doesn’t. She doesn’t even know herself. Old and ancient is her soul. It has travelled time and space so well that there is no world or time, that does not know her. She is fated, for she has twisted herself up in time so much she cannot be anything but.
Time waits for Florentine like she now waits for the Night King. Upon the ruins of the old watchtower she stands, with her eyes out upon the sea. Flora had sent a crow ahead of her. It was black as pitch and dirty with sin, and it bore her message for him. Their council was now, as though beneath the light of a thousand worlds.
@Reichenbach oh wow have a novel about an angry Flora! xDD
This styling is also nice for some non-obtrusive OOC credits, wordcount or banter. Don't forget that divider up there.
He had not expected it to arrive in the form of a Crow — in humour? or a threat?
Reichenbach studied the bird, finding himself pleased by the slick of it's midnight feathers and the intelligence of it's sharp eyes. He knew that it brought a reckoning he had been avoiding, that it's feathers were dusted with fate and that to follow it would mean he would finally have to face Florentine without any excuses. There was... a lot she would be expecting answers for.
He hadn't looked any deeper for answers since their last meeting — looking deeper wasn't something The Night King dared do. Yet he left the castle with the faintest kiss to his lovers satin cheek, taking the scent of woodsmoke and jasmine from the room as he made his way toward the glowing horizon.
The air smelled different as he approached, barely a shadow in the night — it smelled dry. He soon saw why... for there was his flower girl, cast in burning light so that nary a shadow touched her skin. Sunlight embraced her golden skin, the rage hidden so poorly in her rigid limbs and vibrant eyes.
This was not the girl he'd been enraptured by all those night ago, that girl was... there, yes, but she remained only in the subtleties of Florentines lips, her flyaway hair.. the petals still falling. The woman before him was no flower girl — she was a God.
It was an ugly truth for him to bear, that he had barely known her... or perhaps had only known one side of her. Watching her so unleashed pleased him somehow, as if he was discovering her all anew. He felt as if he were witnessing an intimate rebirth, as if Florentine had fallen to ash and was only now recovering her flame.
He barely knew how to react to the woman before him, so certain was he of the anger and pain she would bring forth. Better to feel nothing, if such a thing were possible. Better to let her hate him.
Reichenbach stepped partly into the light, though shadows still clung to his dark skin, sharpening the brightness of his moonbright eyes. He leaned casually against a tree, peering up at Florentine with an arrogant half smile. Gesturing lazily at the slits revealing sunfire and solar storms, he asked wryly;
i'm a pretty flower girl check out my pretty flower curls
She stands wild and lit by the light cascading from another world. Star-fire licks across her skin and solar dust blows over her like a righteous reckoning. Light shatters into droplets as they fall upon her skin and burst like a thousand suns.
There is no darkness that reaches her. Oh she has made herself too bright for that. Florentine has, beneath the lights of this distant world, become other.
Florentine’s eyes, as they watch him, are filled with violence and promise. They are as sharp as her dagger that glints malevolently in the starlight.
Reichenbach keeps from her when he arrives. He wears his shadows with arrogance, he wears them with pride and with her dagger, Florentine vows strip them from him.
With a slash of her blade a ray of other-worldly light tumbles to land at his feet. It does not touch him; it does not need to. This is a promise to her once lover. It is a vow that the light sings, a cry from a heaven she has ripped apart with her subtle knife: he will pay for his sins, on the day of her choosing.
Florentine burns like gold and she turns her bright eyes upon him, holding this gypsy fast within her sight. Oh she knows him, every inch of his skin, like he knows hers. But all they recognize of each other is skin and bone; they do not know their souls, their hearts. Have they ever?
There is a savagery within him that has spoken to her. He has unleashed a wild part of this Dusk girl. It is a part kept bound since her mother made her; a piece of Karou, Florentine never knew was there. The ice of her father could never balance it, never extinguish this fire and it burns, it smolders, it consumes his daughter from the inside. What irony it was that her once-lover had fallen into the arms of a dragon, when she had been birthed by one!
Her chin lifts and the worlds rage from their slit-windows. Their light illuminates her every sin though Reichenbach remains shrouded in darkness, his sins covered. Florentine knows they are there. She can count their every one like ornate tattoos upon his skin. So brazen is his disregard for her!
They do not speak, not even when her petals, blown by celestial winds, reach across the space between them and turn to fire beneath the heat of a sun so close to one ragged world-window. They blow ash across his skin, a ghost of a touch, their love turned to wrack and ruin.
It is a blessing that Florentine does not know how the sight of her, fierce and wild, pleases him, or else she might seek to bring a world down upon Denocte for his ego.
Words from her soul, blood from a friend… he has taken too much and by all the gods of Novus she would redeem from him. Florentine would bring the Night King to his knees, with her dagger, with a smile, with all the fury of the universes that burst within her.
Her every nerve is wildfire, her very soul sets itself against him. She thinks she might end the world now if only to be rid of his smile, of the casual way he regards her as though she is worth nothing to him.
He is still, but she is not. She is the violent sea that eats away at the rock before her. Wild and wayward, Florentine crosses to him, with limbs that have always known the path to to the Night King. It is shameful to realize how easily she would find him in the dark, with her eyes closed, with her heart wound up tight.
Only when she is close enough that their breath entwines, only when she is close enough that jasmine dresses her where his darkness cannot, only then does the Dusk girl stop. Florentine takes in the black of him, the sins that paint his skin so many shapes, so many colours.
Close, close, close. She does not need to move closer to hear him, for he is there, his words finding the spaces between them.
Is this all for me?
Ah such arrogance! The fae-girl smiles as an avenging angel might, slow and wide. It is beautiful, lit beneath the stars, gilded in gold and held in amethyst, but its colour is pale beneath the savage beauty of her.
There is a sickening glee that twists her stomach when she looks to the Night King, when she thinks how much she wants top open a world within him. He is dust and stars they say, well, she can make him so. Florentine will turn her magic dreadful and bring the stars of the universe to pour from him like blood and the meteors like shards of bone. Oh she would break him and end him like he nearly ended her friend.
“Yes.” Florentine answers him at last. Dusk stands before Night, bright and luminous, the stars that refuse to shine, the sun that refuses to set. “It is all for you, Reichenbach. Everything, always.” There is no sincerity in her. There is no soft smile that she once wore for him: a smile that came with love. There is nothing now. Nothing but a jagged, open, broken piece of her that will make him bleed too.
Wild girl, wild and savage, she draws a breath, her eyes closing, fanning her cheek: beautiful, fragile, fierce.
“You are a bastard.” She says softly. “To stand here so brazenly when I have felt broken bones and been covered in blood…” There is a breath, stolen and ragged, and it is the only sign that she is even shaken by this man, this monster cast from her heart. “Controlled.”
Over his throat her eyes wander, down to a beating heart that thrums within his chest. Her lips press to the groove of his throat, where his artery thrums, rhythmical, wild. She laughs like splitting stars and felling trees. “I am surprised you still have a heart that beats; so many times you have given it away.”
Florentine pauses, thoughtful. “I will end you, Reichenbach. Not now, maybe not even in a few years from now. There is no place in Time or Space where I cannot find you and ruin you. For your treachery, for your selfishness, for all the ways in which you serve only yourself, I will make you pay. To think you ever had a heart capable of love... If this is how you treat those who love you, then you do not deserve any love.”
The Dusk queen leans back, liquid gold and painted by flowers. She drinks in the sight of her Night King and she hates him, she loves him, she loves to hate him.
“This is between us. This is not about our courts. By the gods you and your new lover have dragged mine through enough. Whatever happens from here is the two of us and us alone.”
@Reichenbach OML I am so sorry. I tried to make this shorter. I don't even know what to make of it, sorry.
Ash brushed against his dark skin, whispering over the planes of his broad shoulders to vanish into nothing — Florentine's petals, scattered into nothingness... a laughable remnant of what they had once been. Reichenbach noted the symbolic nature of the scene, but said nothing of it, keeping his keen gaze upon the flower girl as she raged.
He hadn't seen it before — perhaps a glimpse, that fateful night, but never like this. She was awakened... and she appeared as rash and brash as her ex-lover, filled with that inescapable fury. Chaotic despite her purpose, unbound in the face of her heartbreak and rage. She extinguished the space between them swiftly, her honey gold skin bright and shining underneath the otherworldly sun.
Standing so close, he studied the gleam of her lilac eyes, the way the light slid along each long lash. He knew which way her hair would fall, knew that if he breathed her in she would smell like flowers and fresh rain — and if he were to run his calloused hand along a wing, he knew she would tremble...
But he did not.
Instead, he watched her growing smile with cool eyes. It was not a pleasant smile. It did not make his great heart throb as her soft laugh once had — though he could sense his blood thrumming at the promise in that smile, his body pricking it's senses as it tasted violence.
“Yes. It is all for you, Reichenbach. Everything, always.”
A quirked brow as he waited for her to go on, for her to explain.
“You are a bastard. To stand here so brazenly when I have felt broken bones and been covered in blood… Controlled.”
Ah... Lysander.
He had almost forgotten the dark haired man and his gleaming smile, so little did he mean to The Night King. What care did he have if Lysander couldn't take a beating? A vital lesson for him, then, not to get in the way of Reichenbach's emotions. He had simply been at the wrong place, at the wrong time — and had added more to his sentence by choosing to dance with Isorath, too. The hypnotism... he had had little control over his magic at that time, and being so lost to his emotions had forced his hand.
His argent eyes flashed at the accusation, and he might have spoken if she hadn't pressed her velveteen lips to his chest.
Stillness crept over him at the touch and he felt, unbidden, his heart start to thrum at the familiar gentle lips. Her laugh surprised him, his ebony curls sliding softly over her skin as she pulls away, wrapping her in the smell of him — the memory.
“I am surprised you still have a heart that beats; so many times you have given it away.”
Anger flashed through him at her gentle cruelty, how she could condemn his heart, his love. Still he said nothing, watching her through wary eyes now.
“I will end you, Reichenbach. Not now, maybe not even in a few years from now. There is no place in Time or Space where I cannot find you and ruin you. For your treachery, for your selfishness, for all the ways in which you serve only yourself, I will make you pay. To think you ever had a heart capable of love... If this is how you treat those who love you, then you do not deserve any love.”
It was almost a relief to hear her speak his damnation out loud — they were the same words he had spoken to himself for a long while, ever since he had allowed his brother to leave without his blessing.
"I don't doubt it," he laughed darkly, "but, as you say — it will not be this day."
They had loved too fiercely for their romance to end in anything but heartbreak... and now, supposedly, death.
“This is between us. This is not about our courts. By the gods you and your new lover have dragged mine through enough. Whatever happens from here is the two of us and us alone.”
Now he lifted his roguish head, his baritone voice abnormally cold.
"Us?" Reichenbach laughed incredulously, advancing upon the lean Florentine maintained "Everything your Court has suffered has happened because of you. I did not cause dissent within your Court, Florentine.." A grin flashed across his handsome face as he amended, "..Well... I suppose I can take the blame for Lysander... but the rest of it does not lie upon my shoulders. It was your choice to strip Isorath of his title, your choice to let rumours of War run rampant through your Court, to sit by Lysander's bed while they worried.."
He paused, regaining some of his earlier arrogance as he peered keenly into his ex-lovers long lashed eyes;
"It seems to me that Terrastellans have lost faith in their flower Queen — perhaps they want the Wolf to return." The grin he gave her was wolfish in itself, and gleaming — but he pulled away, glancing toward the direction of his Court.
"...That being said, I do not harbour any foolish desires for trouble with Terrastella. The Night Court remains neutral."
@Florentine blag what even is this post!! Sorry for such a lack of dialogue from shadow-pantz
05-10-2018, 10:21 PM
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Obsidian [PM] Posts: 380 — Threads: 45 Signos: 25
i'm a pretty flower girl check out my pretty flower curls
She tasted what it was to be him. To be brash and wild, unbound in her fury. She was a river running out to a waterfall, but she was already over the precipice. Florentine’s ire had sent her freefalling. She was the white spray scattering into a million pieces and catching the light. All around the two of them, the same light fell, breaking and shattering upon their bodies. Florentine let the light pour in through open windows and keenly it fell upon her, upon him. It was a spotlight upon their sins, a reminder of how much they had wronged each other.
They stand close, scant space between them; it is intimate in this light. Her heart thunders with his proximity, her skin trembles to be this close. Everything about her knows him, remembers him. But nothing about them is like it was before. Nothing about her feelings are romantic or sweet. She remembers him in love and it makes the flower girl burn, hot, hot, hot. Those amethyst eyes promise to consume him with her fire too.
Had he reached out to touch her wing, like he thought, she would indeed tremble. This wild girl would shudder with a fury as powerful as a storm gathering at sea. She would take his energy like the storm from the sea; it is a storm that would destroy her and destroy him too. What a blessing it is then, that he does not the arc of her golden wing.
Instead, Florentine watches as his argent eyes flare with knowing. His misdeeds lie between them, but he casts them away as he simply watches her. This king does not care, he moves to speak yet falls to silence and stillness beneath the touch of her gold dust lips.
Those lips can feel how he falls still, how his heart rate spikes. It drums against her mouth in a rhythm she knows. Laughter, clear and beautiful, horrible and cold, echoes in voices all around them. It tattoos his skin and heralds the coming of her storm. Her laugh of splitting stars will bring no mere storm upon this earth. His eyes flash with anger and their storm is here.
Her neck curls back, her throat defended, her manner appearing shy, wary. But she is none of those things and her elegant wings flare up like forbidding arches of gold. She has seen the worst of him; Florentine could return to Dusk as broken and beaten by him as Lysander had once been and still she would feel victorious. This night boy has no hold on her heart; not any more.
Elvin ears fall to her skull and fea-beautiful stands before him, gilt and bright. Reichenbach’s old lover is a rock to the savage sea he throws at her. His words are waves and she tastes the salt of them upon her tongue, feels the sting of their force upon her skin.
He leans into her and she does not relent. She is small beside him, fragile, but her ears fall to her skull and her chin lifts. They are tectonic plates colliding and the earth would know their force.
Beneath golden lashes, beneath flowers and gilt hair, she keeps his gaze. Each word that falls from his tongue is a weapon shaped just for her. Her threat was a vow, but it was just that. The Night King’s words are those of a boy scrapping in the dirt, using her deeds to pull her down. He does not talk of the future like she, he just dredges their past and the dark of their sins.
Cold as ice, her star boy accuses her of the same things she has heard so many times before. She waits until he finishes and stays strong as he leans into her. She stands before him, grand as a cathedral, gilded in gold and painted in grace. Florentine will welcome him in, like the sinner he is.
Above him a star breaks through the dark sky and unbidden Flora remembers the boy she fell in love with: a gypsy with a heart as wild and free as hers. A boy who captured her love of night and turned it into a love of its King too. She adored that boy, but the man she looks to now has silver-moon eyes she cannot touch; he is nothing like her gypsy boy and Florentine is nothing like his flower-girl.
Reichenbach smiles his wolfish smile and she feels his teeth upon her skin. She does not sway.
“You are flogging a dead horse, Reich.” She hums, darkly, deeply. Her eyes are unwavering, her voice low enough so he will hear it just above the solar winds roaring through her open windows.
“I did not come here to lay our deeds out or list all the wrongs we have done. I could list yours too. But I won’t. Do not think to guilt me with Isorath. I hold no regrets over my actions and, even if I did, I need not, for you have helped him haven’t you? You elevated a man, who betrayed his previous court for his own desires, to another position of power. Your new lover has done well by you. I am sure his pride in his achievements is a glow all can see across Denocte. Had I abandoned Rannveig, might I now be your shadowed Emissary or Regent too? Is that what you do, favour your new lovers over your people who have served you for so long?”
Still he aims for her, still those blows strike the gold of her. But Reichenbach, you have made this fae-girl strong – does you know that? His words only harden her more. Florentine glows in the sunlight she has made. She is a torch in his land, fending off shadows. The star boy has made his flower girl greater. His once fae-queen has risen and she keeps ascending.
“Maybe they do.” She hums again, dismissive. “It is no lie that I was not made for a crown. As a child I frequently ran from the duties of being a princess. My father would have warned everyone against my ascension, most of all me.” Her eyes lower to the Night King’s lupine smile and there they linger thoughtfully along the curve of that black, satin lip. “But you forget, Reich, that for all flowers are beautiful and fragile, they are poisonous too.” She says it thoughtfully, wonderingly. Was she capable of poison? Her court possessed healers, her court possessed the Poison Master and Reich had changed her so…
Florentine stays close to him, wondering, considering. Her eyes watch the way worlds reflect upon his mahogany skin, the way his gypsy coins burn bright. She lifts one, its weight familiar, its print even more so. How many times had she idly toyed with these when tangled in an embrace? “I do miss these.” She says softly, wearing a smile that is unlike any she has worn for him this night. It is a smile he might recognize, one she has worn for him before.
What queen is it that eviscerates in one breath and fondly reminisces in another?
That smile he might recognize… it is a ghost.
@Reichenbach I love these two together. So Much. <3
