It crept upon them like the kiss of the tides on ocean beach shores, a gentle lapping pressed into the edge of their consciousness. The trees split themselves into indiscernible patterns and boughs bent low into the underbrush surrounding them. The day was fading, and it was the hushed threat of night that whispered sweet nothings into the ears of any still lucid enough to pay attention. They were but muted sounds that brought a hum of fear as they pushed the dying light out of the spaces it slept, a warning call to any who knew its words. But she never learned their songs; in her travels she never flew into the skin-crawling sense of danger like that which lurked in the shadows of the forest. And so though the sun was setting and the wind picked up to bring a chill to the air, she was unaware of any danger that might have wished to show its darkened face.
It had been but moments in the face of eternity that the weight of her wings dropped her into the swallows of whatever land she stepped into. She had seen many faces and bodies and sights in the time since she disappeared from her small village; useless knowledge of gods that didn't show rattled in a mind built for that one purpose. Everything about the world outside of which they existed was kept from her, all the views and wonders and miracles held out of reach of a child that knew of nothing but the lives of ghostly figures. She waded through the long-limbed trees that seemed to grasp her close and have no sense of pattern, and as her thoughts swirled aimlessly around she had appeared to lose her way. Night was creeping in and darkening out the already-muted atmosphere--she would have kicked herself in dismay at her negligence had a snapped twig not sounded nearby.
She should have been alone, but the noise alerted her to the possibility that someone had found her. Her footfalls ceased as motion halted, ears pricked high in vigilance. She knew nothing about murders, about a monster that lurked just behind the curtains of the weeping branches. Even if she had, she probably wouldn't have believed it to be a monster at all. "Someone is watching." Her voice was low, simple, a slight roughness to the otherwise curved edges. There was a sense of a hidden wolf, a serpent, a silent thing sitting still in the cover of the shadows.
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Viridae Forest had changed. It was not just the turn of the seasons – that stripping of verdant leaves from trees and the yellowing of meadow flowers – it was something more. The forest was hush, as if its voice of bees and chirping birds was lost. All hung silently, its breath held, its spirit broken.
Florentine stepped, slowly, slowly. Twigs snagged in her tail, leaves fell like tears from the trees above and in her mind she remembers. If she closes her eyes (each forest step careful in the dark of her mind) an owl swoops from a tree. It’s wings are outstretched and it glides in silence and beauty. The dawn light slides along its feathers, it pours liquid gold upon the bird and below Florentine smiles at the wild, free creature.
Then there is Po. Oh, beautiful Ipomoea with his smiles, with his wings at his ankles. His flowers are bright and vibrant, every part of him is born within this forest. From it he is carved, his joy is reflected in the vitality of the woodland. But then Flora remembers their last meeting. She steps into the clearing she last saw him in. The ground, when her eyes opens, is littered with flowers, they are more mature, a ray of rainbow light in a forest, grey with recovery.
No longer does Florentine’s wing hang, broken and listless at her side. Now it is bent up and held tight to her side by a binding cloth. It wraps the girl about her stomach and holds her wing up. It is comfortable and yet, it chafes with the heat. Already that white bandage is dirtied and worn.
It had taken only days to fly here before, but to come upon foot took weeks. She is weary, road beaten and her eyes are glossy lilac. But as her golden lashes bend up, her gaze peering through the clearing, a voice comes, beautiful and light. Someone is watching.
Florentine pauses, a slim limb held bent, ready to step, ready to run. Her heart stutters in her chest. “Are they?” the flower girl asks the stranger and peers around. Slowly she steps toward the source of the voice, weaving between laden tree boughs, stepping over raised roots.
When her gaze settles upon the stranger, it was no woodland imp as Flora might have once wondered. No, this girl, this creature is wreathed in a crimson cloak that hangs like pouring water from her back. Her horns are gold and lavish, her face painted, her body bejeweled.
Florentine pauses, for there is no elegance of her to match, she has only petals that tumble and roll playfully toward the stranger. Not even her dagger hangs around Flora’s throat, it is safe with Lysander, Florentine knows, though now she yearns for it. Now she begs for its hungry silver, desperate to slice between worlds.
Shadows were crawling, and Florentine’s heart is a tattoo against her ribs. “I do not believe we have met – are you new?” The girl asks of the stranger.
@Forseti <3 It has been too long. I miss your words, so much
The hushed closeness of the trees encircled her larger body, massive bird wings tucked at her side against the slight chill the darkness beneath the canopy above brought through. Between the whistle of the leaves and brushing of boughs against boughs and overall silence of the remaining nature elements she couldn't even tell where the sounds were coming from; from the trees, surely, but what else was rummaging through the underbrush while she stood still in the middle of it all? What eyes were on her while she, cloaked creature with her skull-faced markings and molten golden eyes, looked out into the blackness of the spaces that disappeared from sight? It wasn't night yet but the placidity of the forest had an almost eerie song clutched tight to its breast, the words a hush across her body that sent restrained chills along her spine. For one not easily unnerved, the girl of little emotion and built on the foundations of logic and reasons, she was put slightly on edge. Perhaps that is what worried her the most.
Certainly she had been lost before, amid the endless mazes of woods and cities that had no direction. They pointed her in confusing ways, and while she twisted around turns and slipped between streets, there always seemed to be an end to their intricacies. But there in the land that she knew nothing of--the one that seemed to hold promises of greater purposes--everything was a conundrum and she was not in the mood for solving puzzles.
How satisfying it would be if, for once, she didn't have to ask questions.
A voice of a girl weary broke through the silence, her own thoughts scattering suddenly at the noise. She hadn't expected an answer. Though in reality the response she received was an inquiry at the statement she spoke out at the emptiness, it seemed a bit rhetorical in form. Her horned head turned toward the source of the words as the pale golden figure pushed through the rest of the small glade. She seemed almost to drag herself across the grasses, a slender frame with a ragged appearance that seemed unfitting. Something shone brightly beneath the rough exterior she presented then; a simple beauty in the way she moved, her girlish image a thing of endearing qualities. Even with her partially handicapped position, Forseti knew anyone wouldn't be wise to not consider her alluring. "Someone is always watching." Cryptically, impartially, she spoke about any number of things that could possibly be out there--for she knew of too many places with gods to discount the idea that some could exist there too.
With the flowered girl near enough to touch, Forseti set liquid eyes on the bandage holding a singular wing tight against ribs. Injured, perhaps broken, the wing was made to stay immobile. She asked no questions about its history, but instead shook her head slightly in disapproval. The girl's question came as the death-painted mare made motion to face the soiled wraps. "Yes." Her singular answer was but one beat as she pulled the end of her cloak to them and began tearing off the end, simultaneously undoing the cloth the pale girl wore. "I will mend it later," she explained, as if the concern would be why she was destroying her own cloak and not the pain that would come with changing the bandage. She was quick, efficient, and instead of the turned-stained white rags the smaller pegasus then sported a deep maroon one.
Pulling back to give a respectable distance, she asked her own question, certain that the girl would have been around at least long enough to sustain her injury in that land. "Do you know where we are?"
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The woman before Florentine was a spectacle. There was little about her that was not intimidating. Her beauty pulled from Florentine’s lungs each of the breaths she had pulled in tight. Grace was fierce upon this creature of gold and bronze and wicked red. Elegance drew itself in glorious curves and forced Florentine’s eyes down, down.
As a child, Flroentine had never cared of how she looked. Not even as she ascended to the Terrastellan throne with muddy limbs, tangled hair and eyes too wide, did she even consider how she might look. Only when a boy first truly saw her did she think she might like to look more beautiful, more… desirable. Yet even that was effort. Florentine was as Florentine is. Even this day she cares not about appearing elegant or graceful and yet, beside this creature, this woman who studies her through liquid gold, she begins to feel quite inferior.
A crimson cloak pours from the stranger’s slender back as crimson wine from a spilled glass. All of Florentine is slender and shaped by soft curves, but there is something sharp, something heavy in this stranger’s gaze.
“You are right.” Florentine says, for the stranger is. There are eyes that watch them, yet Flora does not think of horses, of politics, but of birds and wild animals. They all watch, they all wait, and as they stand, Florentine thinks that even the earth itself watches and waits. The woman, who glows before Florentine, who wears her skin as gods might, is worth the earth’s attention.
Forseti, as Flora might come to know her, steps to her side. The flower-girl stands statue-still, as if her skin is not warm and soft, but made of golden metal and cold as stone to touch. Her bandage falls away, uncovering her skin, her wounds. It stirs from the very core of her ghosts that whisper in the Dusk girl’s ear. Lysander chides her in whispers in her ear, imploring her to heal. So why can she not? Why does she stand like a deer before this reckoning woman and lets her tie her band of cloak tight about her torso?
Florentine is now crimson and gold, she is as rich in colour as the woman before her. Her bandage is as red as the flower-girl’s sorrow. It is roses wrapping about her body and her breath is shallow enough to barely stir a flower’s petals.
I will mend it- The stranger says and Flora’s eyes close. Lashes of gold press upon her cheek. She tilts her chin towards her chest, hides her eyes behind her veil of golden fringe, and breathes a breath that rattles her bones like leaves. “You will?” She asks, she hopes, she prays.
But then, where are they? And Flora’s eyes open wide and daylight floods in bright and bold and beautiful. “Viridae Forest.” The girl answers the stranger. “In Delumine, the Dawn Court. Welcome to Novus. My name is Florentine.”
@Forseti
She didn't know anyone there well enough to think about them while she got lost in the forest; there were no moments of nostalgia, no glint of recognition in the prison cell bars that held her captive. She didn't know anyone there at all, really, save for a man with tears cutting through his heart, and a soul almost as lost as she (but at least the frozen one knew where they were). And the past in which she fled held no significance, at least not enough of any to be worthy of remembering in times that allowed for free thoughts to roam rampant through wayward minds. The only sense of longing she knew was the kind that tugged her in all different directions, the kind that muddied her waters instead of cleansing them. She knew she wanted something, but there was nothing to tell her where to find it.
It wasn't clear whether she would find whatever she was searching for there either, with the golden girl and darkness that began to close in around them, but it seemed that she would at least be of some help to her newest companion. Nothing was said between the two as she started the process of tearing her cloak and mending the flowered-hair's wing, and for as observant as Forseti was she noticed the tension coursing through the muscles in girl's body, the way she seemed to both freeze and shatter all at once. Her mind seemed unable to process exactly what feelings to feel at that moment, and how Forseti would have envied her--a tiny emotion, any at all, is the only thing she begged for, if only she knew it was the one thing she needed. Perhaps that was the thing she was looking for, the thing that sent her off to quell the growing longing in her breast.
She didn't know if she was supposed to answer the question posed once maroon and gold blended together; nothing she said would have been what the pegasus wanted anyway, and even though the horned didn't know what thoughts possessed her, she could at least tell the question spoken was better off meant for someone else. There was only one heart that beat in the forest: the other was long hung up and tethered in places Forseti could probably never find.
Places that were meant for the girl, not her.
Delumine, she said. So they were still in the territory of the Dawn Court, the name she heard from the icy creature beyond those gates. "I am called Forseti." Since Florentine offered her own name, Forseti did the same. Their world was Novus, but she didn't know if it would be any different than the others she visited before then. Where would she even start to find out? She gazed around the thickness of the trees surrounding them, soft creatures making noises, but seeing none other like them. "I got lost here. You are the only one in this area with me," factually, the blood-stained woman pointed out. She wondered why it was so quiet, save the usual whispers of native things scampering about, why she hadn't seen anyone else since getting herself turned around. "Why are there no others?"
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The cloth is light and soft. Its frayed crimson edges are as Florentine’s wounds that do not heal. The girl lets her eyes rove over the torn edge, where fine strips of thread waft in the breeze that slips through the woodland. The thread would unravel, slowly, but it would become undone. Would it make it back to Terrastella with her?
“I will get you a replacement.” The girl says, softly. But still her gaze is upon the fine silk and her wing held snug beneath it. It was softer than the bandages Florentine chose and maybe that is because it was no bandage at all, but cloth made for glory and divine things. If she closes her eyes, the flower-girl might imagine it was woven with healing magic. As she thinks such things, her heart aches for Terrastella. It is the only place in the whole of Novus with a hospital. It was the place that saved her, that stopped her dying and bleeding out upon Denocte’s cliff top… What irony that it was there that she would nearly die. There where she shed her tears over Reichenbach and ripped open portals to a dozen worlds in her ire and resented how he unspooled her heart with just a look.
How ironic indeed.
A breath draws itself in to her lungs. They ache as they fit in every particle of that steeling breath. Florentine lifts her amethyst gaze at last to Forseti and smiles a slow, small smile. That look upon her face is the slow beauty of sunsets, the weeping of the evening sun as it gives itself over to night in fiery throes of red and gold. That is Florentine, the girl of the setting sun. And she stands now clad in red and gold and wonders what is next for her.
“Forseti.” The Dusk girl muses and, not for the first time, falls silent to better feel how that name sits upon her tongue, how it fills and owns the space between them.
The small smile, still sunset beautiful, does not change upon her lips, but it does ebb a little towards black. Night was coming, as it always was and will and would for all eternity. Would Florentine be there? Was there an end of all things? When everything would become nothing? Or was this just a continuing cycle, like her? Florentine was born to die and be born again. Over and over and over and over. This is she, the girl who does not stay dead, the girl who Time blessed to roam wherever she wishes. Florentine knows she is not the only Florentine, that unnumbered more are littered through space and time and each one can wear the same sunset smile as she and love a once-god who, in their reality, might still be a true god.
Yet she is here and she is now and her eyes drink in Delumine’s empty forest. It is so still, so silent, but for the stirring of Forseti’s cloak with its frayed edges. “This is a place of gods and monsters.” The girl breathes as if it is normal as if she has never lived a day without gods or monsters. She has not lived even a minute without them. There is nothing that surprises a time-girl like her.
“Delumine is healing. Its woodland is healing… Like all of Novus. The people will be in the Dawn Court, shall I take you there? I am from Terrastella but I have come to visit an old friend.”
