The whispers echo throughout the courts, on the lips and tongues of every equine who has returned from the island with a black unicorn emblazoned across their minds:
Tempus had returned, and with him, his Relic.
It is enough to draw her attention away from the frantic -- and fruitless -- hunt for Erd, enough to draw her back to the island she had circled once and then twice again, searching for the familiar sight of Erd’s bright coat amongst the jungle or perhaps sprawled across the sand.
Each time had yielded no results.
This time, she braves the jungle for her own peace of mind, to satiate her own curiosity -- it is selfish, and wanting, but she doesn’t think she can bear another second of looking for Erd and not finding him, of feeling useless in her own skin.
So she will search for a relic, and she will pretend like she is not still searching for Erd as well, Ard’s words burning in her ears.
She looks at the unicorn that rears with groping hooves up to the stars which midnight holder, bright and twinkling. It’s flesh is pale, liquid moonlight and frangible as bone china. If she touched it, she is sure it would shatter into a thousand pieces, returning to little more than the blinking shards of stars above.
The horn, it points to one lone star. It gleams brighter than the others. It’s laughter is fire in the darkness. It’s lungs roar and it burns hot and wild. With glittering eyes it watches the star fire girl below; the girl who walks beneath that still, marble gaze of a sculpted unicorn.
Leto bears nothing as sharp as that unicorn’s horn. Her weapons are soft, their threat is nothing cold and solid, like a sharply worked blade. No, they are hot and wild. They are the gentle licking of a flame, soft blue edges, hot as a furnace. Her magic is the heat of stars falling and the keening of a world that watches its sky falling.
She comes for the blood divines such terrible things. It whispers of ancient magic stirring, rising and evolving. Leto comes, with her breath held like a vice in her lungs. Oh, oh, time slips and slips and the blood she wears is singing.
Florentine does not need the boy with his breathless cries and wide, wide eyes to tell her so. She does not need the metallic singing of her blade, ringing out like metal and essence to make her feel the aching of her blood. Maybe it was lesson enough to teach her that her magic was deep within her body and not wholly contained in the blade that hung about her lover’s throat. Flora wonders if he might feel it though... would Lysander heed the rousing of her blade. Would it pull him here like her blood has she?
The girl moves upon dancers feet. Not even the swell of her laden stomach is enough to deprive the girl of unearthly grace. Her belly sways like galaxies, it’s cargo growing like universes billowing out, out. She laughs like a girl who has swallowed worlds, she steps like an imp unbound by earthly laws. Her blood knows only wild revelry, her soul the press of ancient magics and the familiar whisper of Time’s unending voice.
The stirring in her stomach, that stretching, that pressing of new life, makes her dancing slow. It whispers ‘soon, soon’ and how that echo is upon her upturned, mischievous lips. How it glimmers in her amethyst eyes that study the silver unicorn and springs in her limbs as she steps amidst the black, wild flowers.
Time knows, she feels it’s laughter in her blood. She feels the restlessness of her child and knows that it’s time is here and it is now.
OOC: please can flora’s extra roll happen now - thanks! <3
STAFF EDIT***
@Florentine has rolled a 1! She has been awarded +1 EXP point.
@Florentine has used her extra roll from act II, and rolled a 6! An RE thread will be started for her shortly, please message @sid with any questions.
I though she walks upon changing lands and a bridge that turns from cold lava into sand, she walks like a girl upon her red carpet. She feels the press of his eyes upon her flesh and in his gaze is the velvet of her carpet, the glittering of her jewellery. August is gilded gold, he is metallic and bright, the sun to her endless mine of silver stone.
But oh, Minya is a creature more fine and lavish than any plain stone. She is more glorious than the shining gold of August’s skin. Though she is finer, though her body the more perfect art, she knows that together, she and August are the most perfect pair.
Her eyes, pink and bright, behold the might of the fierce unicorn. It wears its blemishes as scars of war and hungry magics. It rears in defiance, its maw ever parted in a cry of war as deafening as the earth’s greatest roar.
She listens to his wondering, to his ruminating over magic and old, old things. What space has she for magic? When has she ever needed it? They say her beauty is magic, her hold over fire - her ability to never be burned- a gift from the gods. But no part of her is magical. She prides herself upon appearing transcendent when really there is no magic in her bones.
His question draws a snide smile across her lips. Her eyes darken, lashes glittering like shards of glass, as she drinks in the Scarab boy and the sign above his head. She drinks in the smile upon his lips, the ones that jests, that plays and toys and, without a care she huffs, belittling him.
“Then maybe we are all just animated by magic. Nothing more than flesh and bone set to the whim of magic. Do not ire the gods or they might strike us back to statues - stuck still as death.
Her eyes trail over the sign. “Are you accustomed to kneeling August?” Then, with a huff, with a dismissive flick of her hair and the draw of silken lips her eyes darken ever more. “I have no time for gods nor magic.”
STAFF EDIT***
@Minya has rolled a 2! She has been awarded +100 signos.
Solterra is a phantom behind him. It is an itch upon his skin, the twitch of a fly that pesters and pesters. The island is full of whispers, of a boy and a note, of a jewel that controls time; a gift from a god...
Raum moves, slow as mercury, lethal as a hunter. Within his gaze is fire, his lips a line like a scar and a weapon. The unicorn reaches for the sky, it’s horn sharp as a spear. His eyes, bright as electricity, trail over the statue and the message. He does not smile, his eyes do not spark with greed for a device that could give him ever greater power. No, simply he turns from it, simply he listens for the voice that call for his blood.
His nerves fire, full of chaotic energy, ah, the time is now. Something is changing, Sabi’s gaze is a phantoms haunting him. Rhoswen’s soul, a sun scolding his back, never sets. Ah how he chafes and burns, oh how she sloughs the flesh from his bones. When she slipped from existence, she dragged a part of him with her. He does not know who is the more cursed as a result.
STAFF EDIT***
@Raum has rolled a 6! An RE thread will be started for him shortly, please message @sid if you have any questions.
I touch the French window
And leave you behind, one last time
The island is a spark to light the detonating cord between her candle-white teeth.
She loathes her skin and her mouth and every synapse in her head that allowed her feet to carry her here, as she stands hidden within a garland of prismatic colour.
These men and their women and their children -- they clamour and creep beneath the shadow of a God she doesn't understand.
She watches with eyes coloured by pain as they seize Tempus' hooks like salmon migrating south, and she wants to reach out to free them; but what does she know of Time? Of Freedom?
Perhaps she is the fish speared by time.
Sabine thinks to herself, as the world pivots on a dystopian axis, that none of it matters anyway.
i'm full of poetry now.
rot and poetry.
rotten poetry.
"The Relic," said a mare as sleek as a greyhound, her eyes misted over, her voice a rasp of garbled tongue. "The Relic is here."
Caine slicked his wings back and stooped under the leaves of the bowing palm tree. Coconuts bigger than pitchers grew in groups of twos and threes, and dragged the young palm's slender trunk to the sand like a battleship's groaning anchors.
Spindly green fronds tugged at his braids as he parted the leaves and peered into the milky eyes of the seer.
"The Relic, you say?" Where had he heard it before?
Tempus. The time god's name flowed like molasses into his mind, fetched from the catacombs of memory one letter at a time. But he remembered. Out of Novus' five pillared pantheon, only Tempus' name and story had survived past the lashing waves of the Terminus Sea.
The Relic of Time, an artifact of unimaginable power — though what exactly that power was had been conveniently left missing in the scroll's spidery script.
"So that's what all the excitement is about," he said, eying the crowd of bodies gathered like curious sandpipers at the end of the beach. If he squinted, he could just make out the sunlit silhouette of a black — horn? — attached to a mass of smooth stone, piercing the cloudless sky like an angel's sword.
Feeling no pressing inclination to join their ranks, Caine turned back to the silver haired mare.
He knew her (not well, but he rarely knew anyone well) because he'd met her before. Deep in the twisting heart of Denocte, more than a year ago — back when he'd crept despondently through the four courts after a Prince who would never learn his name.
"Will you join the search?" came the seer's needly rasp, her long thin nose turned nosily towards him. He watched as a coconut shook violently on its stem, fell onto the sand with a dull thud, and rolled to a stop at his hooves.
"No," he scoffed, and kicked the coconut back towards her. "That wasn't what I came here for." More specifically, a mad hunt for an ancient artifact wasn't the trivial yet distracting one night excursion he had flown to the island to seek. It was larger than that, hungrier, and Caine preferred to keep the number of blood-starved problems on his plate to one convincing betrayal, one furious revolutionary, and one tyrannical king. That was already trouble enough for a lesser man to gorge and die on.
"I wouldn't know what to do with it either, if I do somehow find it in my possession." A thin smile glanced upon Caine's lips and obscured the ribbon of unease buried within his words. His ear twitched, the only indication that the very idea of wielding the Relic disconcerted him more than he chose to let on.
The seer pursed her lips, amused. "Wise boy." He shrugged. Wise? One had to be old, in spirit if not in body, to lay claim to that. He merely didn't desire for things that weren't meant for him.
He glanced up, startled, when half of a coconut, its meat hanging in jagged chunks where the seer's stone had smashed instead of cut, was shoved a negligible distance away from his face. "Ah. Thanks." Hesitantly, silver eyes paling, Caine tilted it to his lips and drank the cloudy water like the seer did, though with distinctly less pleasure. It tasted marginally better than seawater.
The halved coconut reminded him a little of the moon. There had been a story the Denoctians liked to tell about the moon, and the man who'd fallen in love with it. The man had lived his life in anguish, driven mad by hope borne of impossibility. Caine hadn't seen the point of the tale, if there had been one at all. The impossible would never become possible. Wasn't that the whole purpose of dreaming? As the wielder — or manipulator — of those, Caine knew the solace to be found in dreams.
But he also knew how easy it was for torment to wear the face of a lover, honey-lipped and rosy-cheeked. Only to claw their eyes to clumps when you leaned in to kiss them, lips rotten, cheeks sunken. Shrieking with the sick delight of the nightmare-departed. "If they knew what was good for them, they would leave the Relic buried."
But he knew they didn't, so he knew they wouldn't.
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.
When Locust hears the news, her response is, at best, dull shock. At worst, it is apathy. Tempus. Oh, she knows who he is; she’s even been assured that he’s real, and Locust is superstitious enough as a rule to believe the rumors about him. And, really, his presence on the island made sense. What other force would be enough - would so much as want - to create a place like this? She doesn’t have to know much about time gods, or gods in general, to know that this feels like a place befitting of a god. It’s certainly as strange as one.
Of course, that has nothing to do with her. She isn’t of this land, and Tempus certainly isn’t her god. There is certainly a part of her that desires the relic that is apparently hidden somewhere on the island, but she is no devotee, so she assumes that it is pointless to spend her time looking for it. There is certainly someone devout, determined, and in possession of proper Novus citizenship who will be looking for it, and who no doubt deserves it more than she does.
(After all – who knows if it would even continue to work if she left Novus? Locust wouldn’t give up her seafaring ways for anything, even a relic of unimaginable power and control over the ebb and flow and time.)
The rumors which accompanied this revelation, however, were something entirely different from the revelation itself.
The island had felt like a trap the moment she’d set hoof on the pristine, white shoreline. Nothing so utopian was ever actually good; that wasn’t the way of the world. Assuming that it was a trap and knowing that it was a trap were two slightly different things. Now that she knew who had created the island and why he had created the island (to find a worthy possessor for the relic, she could only assume), she could make some guesses about the character of the place, and the nature of the traps within it.
(None of Novus’s gods were kind, or so she had heard. What god ever was? If they were kind, as far as Locust is concerned, they would not be gods.)
Tempus was knowing, but that did not mean that he could not be cruel. She suspected that the stakes in this hunt were deadly, and she did not intend to be one of the dead, though she was not searching for the relic so much as she was anything else that might be of use. Tempus was the most neutral god, but he was fond of tests.
She wondered what the penalty for failure might be.
(She considers leaving, briefly, when she sees the statue. This land’s affairs, and the tests of its gods, are no real concern of hers. She spends quite some time staring at the bridge, wondering if it would be best to return, board the Strider, and escape Novus before the island sprung.
She stays, of course. She doesn’t know if it is curiosity or something more fatalistic.
She stays.)
Despite only being on the island for a short time, she already felt bored. Then came rumors of a relic.
Supposedly a god blessed a relic and it held special powers within it. However, one has to find said relic first in order to tap into its abilities. Conveniently, the rumors leave out what the relic actually looks like, so Lucinda is unsure what she's looking for. Surely it would need to be something out of place in this vibrant utopia.
That is why the statue that suddenly appeared on the beach catches her attention. It's a rearing black unicorn and she does not recall it being there before. However as she trots over, her lips curve into a frown and her eyes narrow. There is nothing useful here except a note with a riddle - "Time is Free, Time is Here". Given the fact she knows little of the gods in this land, she is at a disadvantage. No matter, she'd figure it out one way or another.
Her mind works over the riddle as she turns back away from the beach. She decides to set out towards the pool and at least get herself a drink of water. Maybe then she'd come across a better clue for the relic.
(Don't mind me, just bringing these threads back from the dead for xp lmao)
![[Image: x341oLX.png]](https://i.imgur.com/x341oLX.png)
![[Image: dbnivdi-4dcf9461-8e04-49e8-966c-3f4599c0...KvnIBGQKn8]](https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/62895f4e-8c60-4924-a6f1-54bf30743d42/dbnivdi-4dcf9461-8e04-49e8-966c-3f4599c007d1.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7InBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcLzYyODk1ZjRlLThjNjAtNDkyNC1hNmYxLTU0YmYzMDc0M2Q0MlwvZGJuaXZkaS00ZGNmOTQ2MS04ZTA0LTQ5ZTgtOTY2Yy0zZjQ1OTljMDA3ZDEucG5nIn1dXSwiYXVkIjpbInVybjpzZXJ2aWNlOmZpbGUuZG93bmxvYWQiXX0.PjqRHv2E76NkDTBRzRJ3RW9yPdM9QXqjhKvnIBGQKn8)
