Sunlight fractured through the stained glass windows adorning Solterra's famed ballroom which, even in such a state of disrepair, was still a sight to behold. She had pushed silently through the tall, dust-collecting doors, stiff as she had imagined they would be, to creep into a room which might have existed only in her dreams. It was, without a doubt, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen; in Rhoswen's mind not even the ocean could rival this ancient embellished tomb. For gold and crystal as old as the ground beneath their feet glimmered everywhere, woven so intricately upon the walls, paintings of their great warrior-God Solis watching from the impossibly high ceiling above. Chandeliers with tall candlers dangled proudly: a promise of light and revelry. In a Court which treasured hardship, austerity and militance, the Solterran ballroom was the only exception. Rhos remembered the fireside tales of how the Day Courtians of old would host a great formal ball for all the courts upon the night of midsummer once every five years, and oh what a spectacle it had been. A moment of peace, of prosperity, and of course a perfect display of wealth and power.
Of course, there had not been a ball for nigh a hundred years; they existed now only in the mouths of children and the myths written in scrolls. Rhoswen sighed, blowing the dust from a particularly large candelabra - perhaps one day this room would be alive with music and voices again. It seemed such a waste.
@Raum short but i wanted to get something up quickly xx
08-25-2017, 08:58 AM
Played by
Obsidian [PM] Posts: 146 — Threads: 16 Signos: 0
If Rhoswen thought the ballroom was beautiful, it was nothing compared to her in it.
Raum had arrived only a few days before, taking those days to get himself settled with Solterra and its harsh, sundrenched lands. All the while, he knew this moment would come: a reunion, 12 months in the making. There were no others when he chose to go to her. No ears to overhear their conversation. There were things the red girl knew that would be better kept between them. Only dust motes, caught in the sunlit windows, were here to keep them company.
He moves from where he had been watching her, in the shadow of the doorway. Raum slink out, quicksilver passing through ebony shadow. He moves to her with the silent ease of a knife cutting through air. She is stood before him, resplendent, a splash of crimson blood within a gilded gold hall.
Around her the room was slowly dying, and yet it went so gracefully, still able to steal the breath from one’s lungs. Much like the girl who watched it now.
He knows the force of her cloudy eyes before they even set themselves upon his skin. But when they do, he lets their intensity roll over him, smoke over water. He would be the cool wind to drive on her threatening storm.
“You have grown, Rhos.” Raum says, his voice smooth, even for its lack of use. Denocte’s civilians often joked he had no voice, the Ghost of Denocte, a creature of silver nightmares. Yet this girl of blood and silver, would be the last creature scared of him, and she knew the sound of his voice.
He ignores the eyes of the god above him, yet he is sure he feels their judgement blaze upon his spine. Solis was seated in his rightful place in the hot, hot sky, but he was no god to Raum. The quicksilver thief was born to worship Calligo it was in her darkness he bathed. The goddess of shadows and stealth was the only reason he could move like liquid night. Only she could turn his bright silver skin from gleaming metal, to sooty shadow.
Sea blue eyes watch only Rhoswen, and how the room bends to shape her. The Crow wonders idly if she has always been this beautiful, or if it just this room. Here this palace of expensive candelabras, gilded pillars and rich tapestries, pull her in to a lavish painting, drawing more colour from her skin than Raum has ever seen.
He stands beside her, now taller, but only just. The silk of his scarf breathes in the space between them, his dagger cold against his leg. He is silver moonlight to bath in and her hair was the fire that burned at their evening bonfires, her skin the silver smoke that rose. But now, now seeing her here, knowing she turned from The Crows, from Denocte, from her brother, Raum realizes he was wrong. Rhoswen is the fire of the sun, raging, burning, consuming.
But she would not consume him.
“Long time no see, Rhoswen.”
@Rhoswen - gah, HTML is being a butt! When I get his picture I shall get some proper HTML on ze go! <3
You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
08-25-2017, 02:33 PM - This post was last modified: 08-25-2017, 02:39 PM by Raum
The scarlet girl should have heard him slip through the stone doors, should have recognised that sound of liquid silver against the air; but it had been so long, or at least long enough that she had forgotten it almost entirely. Almost. A voice so enigmatic filled the room, then, and Rhoswen froze as surely as water in winter. He came to her as a wraith - for what else was he but a ghost of her past; abstract and intangible. Her legs felt leaden, heavy, pulling her down into the baroque marble floor until it was all she could do but turn to him with disbelief simmering upon the roof of her mouth. "Raum..." It might have been a question or it might have been a poem, his name falling from her mouth as fast as her own chest had fallen at the sight of her childhood friend. Friend... was that a lie? A fabrication? Certainly things had started out amiable enough; Rhos could have been mistaken as a Crow herself, if not for her lineage, so often she spent with them all. But the memory of the last time Raum had laid those glacier-blue eyes upon her was scorched into the walls of her memory. The anger, the accusations, the objection. And she right back at him! The mere memory of it brought heat to her throat, umbrage flushing violently.
And all at once, the shock vanished from her face, replaced instantly with a torrid skepticism that was so very plain to see. Eyes of thundering summer storms narrowed, her auburn tresses snatching at her ankles in absentminded restlessness. It was true: he was the cool weapon of the moon, she the volatile incandescence of the sun. Rhoswen brushed aside his statements, holding his gaze with a steadying hand. "What in Solis' name are you doing here?" For once there was no amusement in her tone, no jests pouring from her mouth, only a suspicion that was settling itself deep into the marrow of her bones. Nothing good could come from this; only blood, only tears.
He sees the way she stills. The way she turns to stone before his medusa-blue eyes. He wonders if, should touch her, she would be as hard as rock? Would she be as cold?
No, not with the way she burns like wildfire, hungry, untamable. She carved her path away from the Crows, leaving ash in her wake. It was the sun that called her and he hates how gloriously she wears it as she leaves them lurking in the shadows. But Raum has come now, with distrust slipping like poison through his veins, to watch the Solterrans, to watch her.
Flecks of gold fall from the flaking walls. Through raging blue, he watches as a they land in her hair, dusting her with privileged gold. He had once thought her a Crow, but not now.
His name tumbles from her lips, unsure of itself. Was it a poem? A curse? Her mouth hold secrets, he knows. The Ghost watches, he waits but she offers him no more that just his name. Rhoswen, beautiful, beautiful Rhoswen is still too still and still too silent.
Their last meeting plays out between them. It is there in their shared gaze, their phantom voices echoing off the walls. He still feels her scathing looks pass across his skin. He still sees her flinch with his accusations and he still feels the sting of her anger, the bite of her words.
Suddenly she melts, her shock seeping away into the dusty air. He knows this is the quiet before her storm, the intake of breath before her tempest eyes crash into his. She lights like wildfire She burns, she blazes and yet her voice, when it comes, is the steady rumble of static. Warning, threatening.
He blinks, lazy, idly, impassive, even as her words clench his teeth and grim knowing flares in his belly. “Crow business.” Is all he says, dismissively. He might have once trusted her with more: with his secrets, with his life. He knows what to say to make her wild storms rage, he knows what to say to draw blood and what to say to ease her nerves. He can turn her to ash. He doesn’t.
Instead he asks softly, “Forgotten the name of your goddess, Rose?” A pause, a spark, “At least it isn’t her name you take in vain.”
The memories of how the folk of Denocte had whispered about this boy lived, thrived even, just behind her ashen eyes - he was the perfect fable for a mother's tongue: "behave child, or from the darkness he will come." And they had every right to fear this assassin, now a man, standing in the open grandeur of this room. For Raum was silent and sharp and ruthless; he might have even defined fear himself. But Rhoswen? Rhoswen was not afraid. Rhoswen was seething. Her anger had grown, small and obscure at first, but with each passing moment that she stared at the Crow it had bloomed turbulently. Who did he think he was? Had his final words not been enough? His barbs of "traitor" and "fool" surely stung as vehemently now as they did all those months ago. Now here he stood, in her court, as bold as brass as if they had not spent a single day apart. Back for more, was he?
"Crow business"
Her heart roars, flares of amber, gold and bloodied scarlet to match her skin shoot up her throat - flashes of her hot-wired temper. For a moment the question of how Raum had even made it this far into the castle simmered in her mind before she brushed it aside; he was not rope-walker for nothing, the man lived in the shadows for heaven sake. If anyone was going to slip passed Maxence and his regime, it was this silver fiend before her. Rhoswen could still smell the lilting fragrance of Night Court on his skin, but... it was faded? As though it had been days since his last visit home, and mingled strongly with it was the familiar scent of Solterra. How long had he been here? Confusion amalgamated with the briny bite of her irritation, before it clicked: he was here to spy. "Crowbusiness..." her voice bubbled ever so softly, the rasp of her normally-dulcet tones barely breached a whisper. Pompeii was reaching her boiling point.
Rhoswen wasn't like Raum; she wasn't level headed or calm, she was a volcano: blistering and volatile.
The softness of his voice echoes against the gold and the tapestries and her soft, hot skin. Rose. The redhead snorted, baby-pink lips curling back in distaste. Nobody had called her that in years, even toward the end of her time in Denocte Raum had desisted, as each day they'd split further and further apart. A stake driven straight down the middle, fracturing their tenuous bond. Rhoswen had never liked the nickname the silver boy had chosen, but that was why Raum had been so insistent on making it stick; teasing, brotherly almost.
She snarls - "Caligo was never my fucking goddess. I tried to love her, I tried to listen, but it's hard listening to silence and darkness and sheer nothingness. She abandoned me." The smoke in her eyes seethed, her voice almost cracking as she felt the sudden stabbing of pain in her chest. He thought it had been easy for her; this life, this path. He was ignorant, he had no idea. "If you had ever taken a second to look at me, really look at me, you might have seen that I had no fucking choice." Perhaps, that was not entirely true. Everyone in life had a choice, Rhoswen understood that much - I suppose, her choice had been simple: stay bound to Denocte until her soul was crumbled into dust, or leave.
@Raum excuse the bad language, this is an overspill of angst that's just been waiting to explode ehe
08-26-2017, 01:40 PM
Played by
Obsidian [PM] Posts: 146 — Threads: 16 Signos: 0
This red, red girl is wild and fierce. About her the gilded walls were surely trembling, the marble pooling at her feet. She was an inferno he let rage; a blaze that would consume him with passion and fury.
Raum lets her build, watching the lightning crack behind her stormy eyes, watching it gleam along each eyelash. The room continues to bend to her, she controls it, she masters it. The worlds would surely shiver before this creature of smoke and brimstone. She was the dragon that would never be tamed and he was the quiet thief that would steal all of her treasured belongings whilst she slept.
He would take from her, feeding her with simple words designed to spark, just to watch her burn like the sun, piercing the sky. She commands his eyes and they go to her, willing and obedient. They are the ocean to her fire, the waters that will extinguish her, if only he let them… if only he would find the words to sooth along her smoky skin, to cool her down to smoldering embers.
The Ghost watches as her clever mind worked, as she drank the scent of his skin. Yes He thinks with a smile that hides behind his lips. It is a smile he hates because its for her, its because of her. He watches Rhoswen’s mind work, crow-like and quick. Then, she is there with an avian look of burning embers and wild thrashing storms. Her fury is palpable, but it is nothing compared the name - the spark - that opens her up like a volcano: Rose.
That name fell from his lips as both a feather of fondness and a knife designed to cut. He hates this girl. He loves this girl. His fury simmers within him, somewhere dark, somewhere deep. Somewhere no one, not even he, can reach. But it’s there, oh its there and it lurks, thick like tar, consuming him, eating him and it’s black, black, black.
Her voice clatters off the walls, it hisses, water on flame, as she rages in this gilded hall. He wishes she would burn it, he longs to drag her back to Denocte, back to the Crows, but this is her bed and the more she speaks, the more she cuts into his skin. They would neither survive this encounter.
He steps close to her, quiet anger, silent, deadly anger. The silk of his blue scarf brushes against her hair, blue, bright contrasting beautifully. The water to quell her raging fire. If only that was what he desired.
Inside Raum laughs. Inside he is furious, but it sinks again and again into that tar and all that slips out from his lips are soft, soft words, “Caligo never abandoned you, Rhoswen. You abandoned her.” He lets it hang there, the accusation, the menace. His blindness. He cannot see why she would betray them.
The Crow knows just how long to leave it before he speaks, to stop her talking, to stop her leaving. “You were never quiet enough to listen to the shadows speak.” His words are both adoration (of her fire, of her unremitting vitality) and a lament for her. For she was the girl who never gave herself a chance to follow Caligo – not so far as he saw at least.
He did watch her, from the darkness, from within Caligo’s thrall, he watched her. The beautiful privileged girl, always a Crow and never one. Was she above them? Is that what she felt? “Have you turned your back on us Rhoswen? Did we stifle you?” He asks, measured, slow and sinister. Her eyes trickle over her face, over the lines he once knew so well. The boy knew where they crinkled when she laughed, when she smiled, when she wept… He waits for her now, reading her. Would she lie to him? Could he ever believe her?
Rhos didn't trust him, not anymore. He was artful, made from the cold light of a winter moon - one that threw ugly shadows against every line and form of this earth, contorting them to the point where they were utterly unrecognisable. That was how she felt about Raum, and of the great Court she had left behind. A gaggle of roguish shadows. A half-truth, of course. For she was still of wolfblood, and maybe the wolf was in love with the moon, each night crying for a love it would never touch.
Her anger remained palpable, but there was something else fusing now with the frayed strands of her rage: hurt. Rhoswen had tucked away the bruises, hidden them underneath long sleeves and longer hair, feeling their tenderness long after they had faded from her skin; she could still feel their ache if she closed her eyes tight enough. Bruises left by Raum's brittle bludgeoning words. At first they had been sharp, almost startling to hear from a mouth she had grown (something close to) fond of. They had sliced her skin, but she had preferred that knifelike pain, to that which set in once the shock had passed. It had been dull, pounding, unbearable. He didn't understand her. And she couldn't understand why. Or, perhaps she couldn't understand why it pained her so that he did not. This blue-eyed boy. To everyone he had been a killer, to her he had been... he had been....
She couldn't seem to find the right words anymore.
The volcanic woman watches him watching her, this dangerous dance they had begun. Except Rhos didn't feel like she was dancing, it felt like she was descending. Into what, she wasn't yet sure. She didn't want to know.
Raum takes a step closer, and Rhoswen inhales, her breath ragged, fitful even. She read the flickering in his electric gaze, she could feel the tremors of his own fury even if it did not bleed the way hers did. It seemed like hatred; oceans and oceans of hate - well, she hated him right back. Hated the way even now he made her skin itch and her heart bang against a wide drum she loathed the sound of. Hated how small he made her feel with that straight cold stare, as though she had cursed Denocte with her absence. Did he suspect that she had spilled all of Night Court's secrets in Maxence's aureate bedchamber? He should have known better, but then perhaps he did not know her at all.
When at last he spoke the whisper of his rage was gone and from his lips came only silk. More words to lash like a whip against her hide, except this time, Rhoswen was ready: carrying steel armour and an exterior of flames to banish away his venom. He is like a blind man, unable to see what was right in front of him. But, perhaps there was truth in both their causes. Maybe he was right; had she listened long enough? Had she given up too easily, when the sun beamed and the night sulked. Rhos has always been more at home in the light, wearing Solis' golden rays with a pride that slipped away at the fall of night.
A hiss burned from her tongue, quieter now. "She was never there." Frustration caused Rhos to break their steadfast gaze for the first time, auburn tresses snatching around her delicate ankles as she looked away. He probes her, questioning her intentions and her heart. What business was it of his anymore? Did she even know the answer to his interrogations? "Maybe I have and maybe you did. It doesn't matter anymore. I am Solterran now, and apparently so are you." Her guard was raised, now, she didn't want to talk about the past anymore. Her words were belligerent almost, shielding the truth behind their force.
Rhoswen looked back at him, the smoke of her eyes dimmed into something harder, steelier; "If they catch you, they'll string you up by your neck with that pretty blue scarf of yours. I hope you know that."
Rhoswen hadn’t cursed the Night Court with her absence. She had cursed Raum. It was a fact, he artfully hid beneath that tar-like pit of anger, deep, deep within his body. It was cast out, left to fester there, and fester it did, growing more and more hungry, billowing out with its wild need.
It reaches for her now, lured like a moth to her flame and it fuels his anger like a bellows. It begs to be listened to. But the Crow would pay it no heed, not even when the very girl of fire was stood before him, with hurt gleaming in her eyes. He thought, if he moved a little closer, he might see the wounds upon her skin, feel the bruises his words once, and still could, leave upon her smoky skin.
Did Raum suspect her a deserter? Yes. Did he suspect she revealed Crow secrets at the attentions of the Day King? He did not know… It was why he was here, it was why his eyes will no longer stray from her. The Ghost will listen, the ghost will watch. He has her in his sights and he will not let her go; ensnaring her in silk, keeping her close. His gaze will be upon her; a dress she cannot shed.
The storms pass, her eyes breaking from his and all at once he misses their force, even as they flash with weakening lightning. Her lashes, crimson fans, lie across her cheeks, gold dusted and lavish; like the whole of her.
“Caligo was there.” He corrects her softly, blue eyes still upon her lashes, waiting for the storms to return. It was a soft beginning, but it was a herald to the approaching stab of accusation. “I saw her shadows on you.” And there, it hisses out like a striking viper. He saw how Caligo wove around her, but the fool, the boy so blinded by love, could never see the chains the shadows made upon her slender ankles, the way daylight called her. So he thinks, with bitter ignorance, that she did not care to try.
Rhoswen’s words arrive as she rises to him, the sea surge beneath their storm of reckoning. Her retort crashes against him, tongues of fire leaping upon the crest of each wave. It was the answer Raum wanted, and yet he doesn’t believe this girl of phoenix flame.
Maybe The word precedes her belligerent retorts, they soften them, even as she refuses to back down - as she refuses to confess. “Tell me the truth, Rose.” He murmurs and for once the guard has slipped, for once a tinge of pained curiosity seeps into his voice. He wanted her to say she had abandoned them, that they had stifled her. The Crow wanted vindication for the acidic pain of her leaving him.
The nickname he chose to use again was no insult this time. it was not used to strike her like a bullwhip, designed to provoke that lion heart that roared within her breast. No, it was there, spoken so gently - a balm to their wounds, coaxing her as though she were a wild deer.
The moment is gone when she speaks again. The volcanic girl becomes metallic, delivering her with words of warning, making them as hard as steel, sharp enough to cut the silk about his throat. Could he trust her to help him, if he was ever found out? Once he would have trusted her with his life. But now…
He blinks, impassive, unaffected by her words, death was coming to him, in one form or another. “Then so be it.”
Raum, ever the moonlight to her sunlight, makes no effort to hide why he is here, not when she already knows the reason. This girl knows him too well to think he would ever forgo being a Crow for a place in Solterra, even if it was beside her.
There is a pause, when the world around them falls to stillness, where the only sound is the rasp of their combined breathing, ragged and rough with rage. When he speaks again, it is softer, a whisper breeze along the flames of her back, words strong enough only to stir the smoke she wears like shadows.
There seemed an endless chasmic void between them that threatened to swallow her whole. It was too dark and too wide for her to cross even if she had wanted to, and she certainly did not. For he wasn't listening ("Caligo was there. I saw her shadows on you.")- a man too deaf and blind and dumb to her plight to comprehend the logic behind her actions - and why was it her task to heal him? To prove to him she had not acted out of spite, only following the truth in her heart. The night was too stifling and suffocating and desolate to inhabit, the light of day had made her feel whole again.
"Tell me the truth, Rose."
Suddenly, she is tired - a deep fatigue draining the fight from her bones momentarily. She looked at Raum, embittered and weary for this was a war she had been fighting her entire life; a battleground she knew like the back of her hand. But, she would not break and she would not bend, too stubborn was her heart of brimstone and fire. "That is the truth." A cold statement, bolstered by the slight defiant lift of her chin. The boy had no right! How dare he seek her out as though she owed him an explanation, a reason, after everything he had said. Rhos watched the shadows clinging to his pale skin as though he had drawn them from the gold-plated room, conjuring them with his elegance and his dark rhythm. She misses his tentatively lowered guard; too shrouded in her contempt. It was gone before she even knew it was there.
Raum whispers again, thrusting a question she wasn't ready to answer into the palm of her soft little hands. Instinctively her mind breathes - Of course, how could you ask such a thing?! But the void between them has transformed into a cosmos Rhoswen could not see beyond - it was eternal in its blackness and so infinite she couldn't bear to breach it.
So she lies, and doesn't care if he knows it. "You are a fool to think I'd even consider helping you, Raum." By coming to Solterra he had put her in an impossible position and the irony of it all only seemed to enrage Rhoswen further. The redhead had left the Night Court life behind - all that stress and anxiety, only to find that it had followed her here in the form of this handsome silvertongued idiot. "You couldn't just leave me alone could you?"
They are two planets set upon a collision course. Each push and pull was intoxicating, infuriating. It was an inescapable force, drawing them in together. Each step they resisted, each step they fought, savage, hurt and angry. Raum wonders of their collision. It would be terrible, beautiful, destructive.
His teeth grit, the gilded hall with its golden laughter rang out around the girl of fire, her heart the brightest inferno in all Solterra. Rhoswen will turn him to molten metal and he will scold her with just a touch.
Her chin lifts with her statement, her eyes an iron sky of fierce determination. This creature, born beneath shadow and darkness, was never destined to remain, adorned Denocte’s darkness. No, light and gold were her garments of choice, Solis’ voice the only song she would ever dance to. The Crow wondered what it would be to see her dance now, beneath the fire of the sun, with sand at her feet and gold as her sky.
Yet each step the mercury boy would drag her into darkness, fierce, determined and every step she would resist. A part of Raum, deep and dark, enjoyed watching her fight him.
Her words are a knife to his skin, he bleeds, somewhere, somewhere deep and yet, and yet he smiles. He laughs. The gilded hall of soft, soft sunlight and vapid luxury, rings with his laughter. It chimes off dusted glass chandeliers, it ripples through faded curtains of crimson velvet. It is a laugh as soft and choking as the scarf around his neck. There is nothing humorous about it. It was a laugh not designed to make her smile. It is the snarl of an animal.
Blue eyes close for the scent of her, close, maddeningly close. They blaze beneath his eyelids, laying electric pricks along her skin when they open at last. “Then I had better hope I never get caught.” He says softly, a blunt, beautiful blade to skim across her skin.
The only sound they hear next is the Crow’s sigh, for their simmering anger is heard only within themselves and only seen in the wild of their eyes. “I couldn’t leave you alone, Rhoswen, not even if I wanted to.” He leaves her with his confession, stark and naked in the air between them. It is a piece of him exposed, given to her upon a voice made weary by this draw to her he cannot escape.
In silence, in darkness, he leaves her to her gilded hall, resplendent and beautiful.
![[Image: x341oLX.png]](https://i.imgur.com/x341oLX.png)
![[Image: rhosbyspace2_by_outofthefurnace-dbkwvw7.png]](https://orig15.deviantart.net/7f0b/f/2017/234/b/6/rhosbyspace2_by_outofthefurnace-dbkwvw7.png)
