All her dead and hungry selves lived here. They were strangely nice to look at.
In the cobblestone corners of the streets she saw her childhood reflection, slim-hipped and violent, the hair shorn close to the black nape: not much had changed then, had it? The same pair of sleety gray eyes, reflecting firelight in a way that was near demonic. The kid - she was a kid, really, the ghost Marisol was watching - had no idea she was alive anymore, and walked with the same urgency she always had. Her hooves made no sound on the stone. Her face was hard and bitter, hair bristled off her back. She was wearing a leather cuff on her back leg, the same Marisol wore now. The same scowl on both of their lips. Mari watched the girl, the old her, moving quick and wraithlike in the pathways of her youth, and could not decide if she was prideful or disgusted. In a stomach made of that much iron it all felt mostly the same.
It was dark overhead, the night purple, the crickets cooing, and Marisol folded her wings to her sides to slink more easily through the Court, bap-bap-bap the gentle sound being made as they slimmed easily to fit her ribs, the feathers fluttering in loose wind, and she saw all her dead and hungry selves wandering the Court like spectres and did her best to ignore them, fuck you. No use reminiscing. She closed her eyes and turned it away. Dark, then - darkness all over, comfortingly full and deep, blocking out all those Terrastellan ghosts. A cool breeze graced her cheek, and again Marisol was happy, or she was disgusted. Who knew. Who cared? The wind would be the same either way. It was eternal, and adept.
She envied it immensely.
It was dark overhead. The clouds spun their awkward gossamer. Like water she moved through the streets, sleek and dark and cool. Whoosh went the feathers as the wind rustles them; clack-clack went her hooves on the stone. The three stripes on the back of her wings were so white they’d become near-fluorescent in the dimness. Halcyon Commander. Often she rolled the title around on her tongue, just to make sure it still belonged to her. Commander. Commander. A wing shuddered restlessly, as if it had been set to life, as if something had bitten it just below the surface. Marisol’s long-lashed gray eyes were quiet in the dark, and they remained fixed ahead no matter where that hard-lined head turned, as if they could see something just adjacent to the plane Novus was fixed in, something in a slightly off-put astral world.
Commander. The wing shuddered again. Marisol absently willed it to stop, and it did.
It is easier and it is harder, walking the winding cobblestone streets of Terrastella in the dark.
Easier because they are nearly empty. There are few faces to turn toward his in bruised evening, and none that spark with recognition; nobody wants anything from him this time of night, least of all to know why. Asterion has always been anonymous, a plain bay passerby, a wanderer remembered only for the shimmer of twilight on his skin and starshine in his eyes. Like a dream he had always been gone from a place by morning. Regent has hung on him more millstone than title, especially of late.
But it is harder, too, because of the sound each step makes on the stone, and the way that light reflects off of walls, fluid and bent. Even the way the wind blows, sweeping through narrow pathways. When the bay closes his eyes it is not so difficult to imagine that he is back in Ravos, in the maze, and that there are terrible and wonderful things ahead. If only he is brave enough – if only he is strong. (In the end it hadn’t mattered; in the end he had been swallowed up by light, by magic. Sometimes his dreams still conclude this way – a glow far more frightening than any darkness that only grows and grows until it consumes them all.)
A breeze kisses his cheek, breathes onto him the scents of honeysuckle and the sea. Ahead of him there is the sound of hooves on stone, though he has fallen still. When he opens his eyes again he is a little ashamed, but he is no longer afraid.
It is not fear, then, that tumbles his heart at the sight of the figure ahead – all darkness, save for bright bands of white, like a strange light at the end of a pitch-dark corridor. It is something else, and it makes him shiver. Still he presses forward, falling into step beside her, telling himself it is his duty to touch base with the head of the Halcyons following that last disastrous meeting in the swamp.
“Commander,” he says, and Asterion does not think it strange that she is so young. He wonders, sometimes, if he will ever stop feeling like a boy. “I trust all is well with you?”
@Marisol idk what this is but enjoy? (also I figure they may have met briefly/he'd know about her appointment since he's been regent for a half-year, but message me if you have different thoughts or more thoughts or any thoughts at all)
05-12-2018, 03:50 PM
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RB [PM] Posts: 277 — Threads: 28 Signos: 180
Of course she notices him, trailing behind her like a phantom. Of course she hears his footsteps, hears his breath on the wind, knows exactly how many steps it would take for him to catch up - what kind of warrior would Marisol be if she had not learned to keep track of her surroundings? In the darkness, noise is amplified. The moon is a living thing. Every motion, every tiny change in the still earth, reverberates louder, sharper, longer. Her ear flicks at the sound of movement, but she does not turn. In the few puddles that line the streets she catches glimpses of her own high cheekbones, those steely gray eyes, the short, angry bristle of a mane cut with a hot blade. Then, moments later, the rippling reflection of Asterion as he comes to join her.
She does not speak first. She will not. Marisol is a woman of few words, and what words she does speak are carefully chosen. For some, she knows, the silence must feel awkward, but it is hers to keep and hers to offer, and she will not change it. She can only hope that Asterion is not one of those many. As they begin to fall into simultaneous step, she acknowledges him only with a look: her gray eyes are not dull, and they regard him with at least a modicum of respect, cool and interested under dark lashes. After one slow blink she looks forward again. The night, between them, is rent with possibilities, and Marisol does her best to avoid thinking of any of them.
Commander. At that, she almost cares to smile. She doesn’t.
All is not well, and Asterion must know that. Marisol sees him as nothing if not intuitive. The few times they’ve crossed paths - in meetings with Florentine, on Mari’s rare visits to the Terrastellan markets, or brushing shoulders as one or the other is caught sneaking in or out of the library - the conversation that has passed between them is brusque and business-like, collapsed, for the most part, by Marisol’s silence. Once every so often, she regrets it. Thinks that, perhaps, they could be friends. If Florentine trusts him then he must be worthy of something, and the look in his eyes is always one of warmth; once every so often she hates herself for picking the farthest quarters from the court, for leaving every festival early, or for cutting off every relationship at the root. Then she remembers the stripes on her wing, and the weight of them blows that hatred away like a petal on the wind.
They have reached a corner now, and Marisol slows to glance at Asterion over her shoulder as she turns it. Wellness wastes the skill of doctors. Her companion glistens almost like an oil-slick in the dim light. It’s so much easier to meet his eyes when it’s so dark out, when Marisol is sure he can’t see whatever turmoil lives inside her bones; she gazes at him for a moment, as if scrutinizing, then regains her previous pace through the streets. And where would Terrastella be without its doctors? Again she almost smiles - humor even tinges her voice - but it is lost in the darkness, in the way she turns away just to hide it. You know trouble stirs.
She does not speak of the fire in the Arma Mountains, nor of a certain Night King gone feral. Such words would be a waste, and woe be to those, she reminds herself, that waste anything.
@asterion
05-13-2018, 11:20 PM - This post was last modified: 05-14-2018, 11:13 PM by Marisol
There is something he finds strangely comforting about the severity of her. In the hard shine of her eyes, the efficient way she moves, the blunt cut of her mane, Asterion sees control. He sees a woman who knows her purpose and how best to accomplish it – someone who never wavers, never doubts.
He is not a man given to jealousy, but oh, how he longs to be so certain.
For a moment they are only two dark shadows that match stride-for-stride beneath the watchful moonlight. Maybe it shouldn’t, but Asterion feels something in his chest ease. Her sureness makes it easier for him to pretend his own.
He even smiles, when she answers him with a brusqueness he has come to expect from her. This, too, feels somehow safe – it keeps him from sharing his own secrets, that dark wash of feelings that always seems so eager to spill. “I’ve never heard it phrased that way,” he says amicably, and side-steps a gleaming puddle before meeting her gaze again. “We’d be fewer, anyway.” His voice is still light, almost teasing, but the words are too close to truth; indeed, without healers, at least one man would have been lost in recent months.
If his dark mouth hadn’t pulled down then, it would have at her next words.
At first he says nothing, only drops his chin in the barest of admissions, turning his gaze away. Silence would swallow them but for the sigh of the wind, the soft clip of their steps, the even tide of their breathing. Asterion considers how easily, how quickly, things had fallen apart: was this always the way of it, a swift break no matter how careful the building?
There are so many things he knows – what kind of clouds signal which change of weather, and where the sea-birds lay their nests, and what makes the best cover for a rainy night spent in the woods. But politics, and the histories of a people, and the intricacies that bind them all together and pull them once more apart – of these he is unlearned. Asterion is a willing student, but his mind was not made to bend to such things.
Duty, he thinks, and watches the way Marisol sets her shoulders, the way she takes in their surroundings like she’s reading a book.
“Has it always?” He hates himself for the part of him that wants her to say yes. Yes meant that the wheel had long been in motion – that nothing he and Florentine had done or could do could alter its course.
“I suppose peace wastes the skill of commanders,” he adds, and hopes he might catch another hint of a smile.
How long has it been since she walked like this with another person? Step in step, with no end point in mind. The city sleeping around them, just barely-torchlit; the well-worn cobblestone under their feat, bricked down in patterns always familiar. There is something magical about the Dusk Court when it is quiet like this, undisturbed by civil disagreement, by merchants bargaining for higher prices, by the looming threat of a dragon, a war, a revolt. And it is even calmer, Gods help her, walked with somebody else. The faint warmth of another body is, as much as she hates to admit it, comforting, especially in the cool blackness of the overhead night.
And in this nighttime quiet is when Marisol is most herself. The stripes on her wings will dissipate when tucked into her side, covered by gauzy shadow, and then she is just a girl, just some young soldier wandering the streets of the city she would die to protect at a time that doesn’t make her feel like she’s about to die, though she knows full well danger might lurk in the blackness, or around any corner. She is seamless within the blue night. Dark and fluid, serene and civil. Even the hard bristle of her mane, so angry in the daylight, is somehow softened by the wavering yellow torchlight. The bright blood in her veins is cooled by the wind. The rise of her cheekbones is no longer a weapon.
Asterion has fallen dead silent at her answer, off-put by the honest admission. The dense air between them makes the hair on the Commander’s neck stand up straight. Silence, still. She notes his discomfort and dismisses it. He should’ve known, even before he asked, that she wouldn’t bother lying to him, especially about a thing like this, at a time like this. Still, infuriatingly, something like guilt bubbles in the back of Marisol’s mouth.
Look how easily you fucked that up - something like guilt. She swallows it with concealed effort.
I suppose peace wastes the skill of commanders.
Her nostrils flare in contained amusement, her step slows, nearly falters, and then, magically, strangely, unexpectedly, a smile curls the edges of her sooty lips. Asterion could almost miss it in the dark, but Mari knows he won’t. A smile from her is rare all on its own - the way it reaches to her eyes for a split second is yet rarer. Sometimes I think that is a skill better wasted. Heat courses through the stripes on her wings. Marisol thinks, that she must be allergic to everything that lives inside her. The emotions, and the trauma, and bitterness - it all must be eating her alive, burning from the inside out - what other explanation is there for the strange blackness that overwhelms her when she opens her mouth out of choice, not necessity?
As for always, she continues, half-whispering as they walk, only Tempus could answer you. I have known nothing else. But - and then that radiant smile again, just for a half second - then again, I know very little.
The destination matters little to him; wherever they wind up, wherever he bids her goodnight, he will have been grateful for their walk. Even when she says something disquieting - trouble stirs, words that might wrap around his mind when finally he beds down for the night – he cannot be afraid, not beside her.
Asterion is so grateful for his friends, for the strength of the people who call the Dusk Court home. They steady him when he would drift, pulled by a tide of his own fretful thoughts.
He wonders, now, if this was why he had spent so many years wandering – when he was tied to nothing, he worried for nothing. It was easy to be careless, and easy to be brave.
Overhead the torchlight flickers, and ragged clouds veil the moon. For a heartbeat, two, everything is dark and hushed, and her heat beside him is reassuring. And then the light re-emerges, and he glances to see the moonlight catch in her eye and illuminate the briefest of smiles.
Of course he catches it; it is the kind of smile he excels in, himself. Like the moon from behind a cloud.
Sometimes I think that is a skill better wasted.
“I’m reassured to hear it,” he says, and colors his tone with humor. “Bloodthirstiness is better suited to other courts.” Why is this, too, easier in the dark?
When her voice drops, his head does too, bending toward her, an ear flicking inward. The name of the god makes his skin want to prickle, to shiver, though he does not know why. Asterion does not believe in the gods; how can he, when the ones he’d known walked beside him, when he saw them change the land, perform miracles, give gifts? And yet –
“You invoke them like no one else I’ve met here,” he says, and there is no judgment in the soft syllables, only curiosity. “Will you tell me what they are to you?”
The slow spread of her smile feels almost like defeat. Marisol knows how it looks on her face, has seen it in mirrors and glass just once or twice. She knows the way it sort of melts her hardness - the way it makes her look human, for once - and loathes the way it sends cracks through her stone exterior.
Yet she does not work too hard to hide it. Asterion is as much her friend as anyone can be, and in the darkness it seems a waste to hide such a small flash of teeth. As much as it pains her, she lets the smile overtake her for that one brief, grim second, and then, as it fades, she feels her heart still again, her blood cool again, her dignity regained. Once more the night is omnipresent, and something is comforting about how fully it drowns them.
The citadel looms just ahead, and Marisol draws to a stop at its wooden doors. In the dim light she is oil-slick and serpentine, head drawn to her chest and neck bent in a smooth arc; with her wings drawn tightly to her side and legs squared underneath her, she seems almost statuesque, only the quick flicker of those gray eyes giving away the violence, the intensity, that is always living and moving inside her. From overhead, torchlight turns her skin dark-gold.
You invoke them like no one else I’ve met here. A frown crosses her lips. Momentarily she is confused - them? here? - until she realizes he is questioning the one name Tempus, a name so familiar, so common to her, that Mari hardly remembered saying it at all. Her brow lifts in quiet surprise. Asterion is their regent; how can he serve their Court sans an ounce of religious conviction when so much of Terrastella exists only in Vespera’s name, when even now they stand in the shadow of a temple covered in Her tapestries and statues?
Marisol’s dark head tilts, and she meets Asterion’s gaze with gentle curiosity. What they are - repeats the Commander. Her voice is low and strangely soft. Something akin to addiction? Although that makes it sound involuntary, and it is not. I is easy to be reliant on a god when they have never failed in supplying you. I have always thought of them as - a plane of existence just above ours. Invisible, but not inaccessible. Some part of her is pained by explaining it like this: so simply, and so incompetently.
Asterion would tell her, if he could, that being human makes her no less hard. But surely she knows this already – that people are far more monstrous indeed for their ability to feel. It is among the chief lessons he has learned in Novus, and he will not forget it.
The dark mare (dark save for the stripes on her wings, and then the underside of them, which spread like a secret unfurling when she takes flight) is no monster. This he does not doubt in the way he doubts oh, so many other things, like himself or the gods or the fragile longevity of peace.
They draw up before the high-carved wooden doors, near black in the dim moonlight, and he lets his gaze wander up them, picking out the little intricacies, whorls inset with such care. What hands, he wonders, had made them? What horse had first decided that they should all sleep inside, where the wind could not reach them, where the starlight could not color their hair?
It is almost a relief to meet her gaze again, though she speaks of mysteries, too.
It is, perhaps, the most he’s ever heard her say at once. He listens to the low rhythm of her voice and it reminds him of a late-summer rain, deep and easy, and although Asterion nods it does little to settle him.
When he thinks of addiction it is not the gods he pictures. The twilit bay has been devout, but never for them.
Perhaps he should feel guilty – that was a piece of religion, was it not? But the regent can’t bring himself to. He wonders, instead, what Tempus (or Vespera, he supposes) has supplied to the commander, and how she knows from whom such gifts came. But Asterion knows he is far from understanding tonight, and for once he does not mind.
“Invisible, but not inaccessible.” He repeats it as though it is part of a liturgy, and then, smiling, inclines his head toward her. “I like that. Thank you, Marisol, for your company.” The bay turns away then, just enough to touch his muzzle to the doors. If he wished it, he could part them with a thought (or with a shoulder), but while he is not so restless, not so wound-tight, as when he first saw her tonight, he is not ready for sleep.
At least, not indoors.
“Sleep well, Commander. I’ll see you at some council or another soon, I’m sure.” With a last smile, muted as the moonlight, the stallion turns away.
In the shadow of the doorway Marisol is near-invisible but for those silver eyes, deep and caustic under their layer of dark lashes. They never move from Asterion’s, even as the world around them seems to dim and settle, seems to fade into usual quietness. It’s comforting, the silence, when not accompanied by loneliness.
(This something she had not come to realize before tonight.)
Thank you, Marisol, for your company. As always, it is near-startling to hear her name from someone else’s lips, but in Asterion’s it is at least handled carefully, and for this, she is thankful. Often Mari wonders how she would handle other people’s, if she said them with any frequency at all. Her days training on the cliffs or mucking through the swamp are rarely, if ever, spent in company, and even her trips to the inner Court are usually (like this one) late at night when no one else reasonable could be expected to be awake, so that she might often go a week or so without any conversation at all.
When it does come, it is often more painful than this: stilted, childish, awkward. It is often unrelentingly awkward. But not tonight.
Sleep well, Marisol repeats. A she turns toward the door, one of her wings brushes his side, just barely - a casual goodbye as strange as it is unexpected, coming from her. Warmth glimmers in that dim-dark gaze. May that council meeting remain far, far away.
She grins briefly and disappears.
@asterion
06-17-2018, 09:32 PM - This post was last modified: 06-17-2018, 09:33 PM by Marisol
