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Private  - the dead cry out in the moon-glow;

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Isra
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#1



It's a tender night that finds her in the mountains among the ash and what little is left of the bones of creatures not as lucky as she. The stars and moon are bright over head and somehow the graveyard mountain looks lovely in such a silver glow. A grotesque sort of beauty, dead things surrounding a unicorn in a borrowed skin who doesn't know how to live. 

She would be better off as bones. The goats and birds were better at living than her. They thrived once in these mountains and she remembers watching them with something akin to jealousy a hot fluttering in her heart. Now she only watches what is left of them in the mountains and touches her nose to brittle bone instead of warm, furred flesh. 

Isra moves among them with tears in her eyes. It's a bitter loneliness this night, a time for healing, for burying the past in loam and ash. 

Ahead she can see what is left of a set of horns. The skull is half charred but Isra knows what beast it once came from. She remembers what sound their hooves made as they floated like angels down the mountain-side. She remembers how brave they were, to fight and live and tame the rocks that not much dared to thrive in. Isra idolized the goats and the freedom that made up every moment of their lives. 

Oh to be a wild thing, she thinks, to know not language and such an unnatural sort of suffering. 

She's silent in her digging, knees bowed against the ash and rock. It stings under her skin but still she digs her horn into the dirt over and over again until a hole opens up before her efforts. Behind her a dozen other mounds of dirt rise up like spots of darkness in the silver-lit land. 

Isra is tender as she catches a curved, blunted horn with the brutal point of hers. Their horns catch together, sea-marked girl and charred skull, and she drags the remains into the hole. It's a morbid sort of burial and she refuses to her her telekinesis to bury the wild things. It was mortals that killed them and mortals should bare the responsibility of burying the dead. 

This is the work of men, broken men. There are no gods here on the mountain, only Isra who sobs as she starts to bury those horns that once were borne so regal and proud upon a noble creature who deserved not to burn. 

The night is still young and the moon glitters on all the bones she has left to bury. It's a sea of dead before her and somehow it suits the way her chain rings like an old church bell that been swallowed up the salt-water, muted and full only of sorrow. 

* * * * *
the religion of the dead lives in my bones


@ @Raymond











Played by Offline Odeen [PM] Posts: 175 — Threads: 29
Signos: 1,315
Night Court Soldier
Male [He/Him/His]  |  18 [Year 492 Winter]  |  15 hh  |  Hth: 22 — Atk: 38 — Exp: 59  |    Active Magic: Spell Warding  |    Bonded: Ruth (Tarrasque)
#2



Raymond.
and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around


I do not wish to remember you.

If he was in the mood for sense, Raymond would have given Isra a wide berth, but the part that had seethed at the recounting of the horror she had endured, the part that had insisted upon guiding an orphaned filly to safety even after she had threatened his life, wasn't satisfied to leave the bay mare to her mournful work. Not when she poured so much of herself into what little she could do to make amends with the tortured earth.

Perhaps a generation from now, when they had gone the way of their forebears and their children (would he even have such a legacy?) stood where they stood now, the scars of this unholy blight would at last be scrubbed away by the march of time. Perhaps with the proper spirit and dedication Denocteans could see that day come sooner. But for the moment, shrouded in moon-darkness and the heavy miasma of ash and death, their only gift to the good earth was the slowly-growing procession of graves to mark the fallen. And that was her doing. Beyond her weeping and the subtle sound of his own breath, the blighted scar of the mountains remained eerily, stubbornly silent.

He approached from her front, all traces of the fury that had borne him hastily to the steppes gone. Now the curves and angles of his body seemed only graceful and fluid.

Would that they had met on better terms and in better times. Would that they had crossed paths before a time of dragonfire and tyranny. But that chapter in Denocte's history was closed now - hopefully forever - and he wondered if perhaps, like the land, Isra could move on.

"Can I help?" Raymond asked, and it seemed even the devil could be soft.




@Isra @







aut viam inveniam aut faciam





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Isra
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#3



She barely hears him approach. All she can hear is the catch of her horn on bone, that whisper soft and slick sound when bone drags across bone with no flesh or fur to muffle the echo. Over that is the soft gentle ring of her chain, the clink of rust and steel and iron. And under everything is the gentle drip, drip, drip of her sorrow that makes rivers down the stark, sharpness of her face.

It's not until his shadow reaches out, long and thick, thick black in the moonlight, that she looks up to see the looming red stallion. Even his gentle calm edges and eyes void of that raging fury fill her with a sort of dread. Only the bones around her and the graves at her back keep her from fleeing the mountains again.

What has she to fear, surrounded by dead things and ash?

Raymond can do nothing more to her, he has no wings or actual fire to singe her skin from bone. So she lifts her head and leaves her knees bowed against the ground. That sharp tip of her horn juts out towards him, a sword, a knife, a weapon wielded by a heart that has no stomach for violence-- dangerous only for the look of it.

“Are you a devil still?” Her words are nothing more than a whisper of sound between the soft, fragile skin of her lips. Perhaps the night has stolen his rage as it has her fearfulness. Moonlight makes different things of them. Isra feels as if she could be in a story, a sorrowful heart that's just brave enough to look at the monster and grin instead of cower.

The story makes her smile as she thinks of it, a wild heartbreak of a look that shimmers like sea-foam at night inside her gaze. “You can help.” Her eyes blaze against his, a warning without sting when they come from her broken, weak voice. “But do not add to the dead. Not tonight.” Isra forgets him as soon as she warns him and bows her head before the devil to go back to moving dirt back over the goat skull.

But when she finishes the one grave it somehow feels more like a cleansing of the moonlight. Her skin feels warmer for the heat of a devil by her side.

Perhaps she's learning once more that solitude is as hollow a friend as the bones and ash are.

* * * * *
a million mistakes and lies


@Raymond











Played by Offline Odeen [PM] Posts: 175 — Threads: 29
Signos: 1,315
Night Court Soldier
Male [He/Him/His]  |  18 [Year 492 Winter]  |  15 hh  |  Hth: 22 — Atk: 38 — Exp: 59  |    Active Magic: Spell Warding  |    Bonded: Ruth (Tarrasque)
#4


Are you a devil still?

There is not enough shape in her voice to name the words as question or accusation, but there was more than enough to make the red stallion think. He had called himself the devil because he wanted nothing more than to mete out punitive Justice to those pious brutes whose arrogance had caused so much suffering and neglect. He thought the turn of phrase apt, that he should be the one that sinners fear lurking in the dark shadows of the church nave.

But was 'devil' not his nature?

What was the devil but the great adversary, he who spoke truth to power and punished the wicked even in the face of his own condemnation? What had Raymond but his mortality to separate himself from that?

He offered a dour half-smile in lieu of an answer, the shadows at the corners of his lips a no-contest plea to her accusation.

Brandishing her horn in subtle warning, the mare invited him with all the enthusiasm of a DMV clerk - which was to say, no enthusiasm at all and a resignation threatening to spill over into contempt. Raymond murmured a courteous thank you and carved out his own territory next to the corroded remains of what may once have been a badger. He had no horn with which to break the ground and a distaste bordering on revulsion at the thought of making use of his scythe like a common spade, so instead used his hoof like the pariah dogs of the desert. It worked well enough, provided the soil was yielding.

After a spate of silence, when the messy divot had begun to resemble a proper grave, Raymond glanced her way.

"I don't think I ever got your name."

The uncertainty in his voice was an affectation; he knew it, she would know it, however genuinely friendly he wanted to be. Isra had never given him her name, and had wanted to forget his. But perhaps she would see the devil differently now that the tyrannical shadow of dragon wings had passed. Perhaps amongst the silver moonlight and the echoes of the dead, she would understand that the dead were not the only ones seeking peace.


Raymond.
"he's an outlaw loose and runnin'," came the whisper from each lip
"and he's here to do some business with the big iron on his hip."


@Isra







aut viam inveniam aut faciam





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Isra
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#5



Their silence goes on, broken by only the slick of their grave-digging and the whisper faint chirps of crickets and owls brave enough to wander where only the dead keep the lonely company. Isra is comfortable in that silence,  void of pretense, fear and rage.

She fills the silence in her mind, singing eulogies to bones who have long lost the ability to feel the sadness that she gifts in touches and tears. There's a religion in her silent song. There's something holy in the way her knees sting and throb against the hard rocks. Her tears are a cleansing and they dry up as the moon moves in revelations across an altar glittering with flashes of dying stars.

And so she goes on, rising and kneeling again, again, again in her now shared ritual.

Perhaps when she finally turns back to Raymond he spoke minutes ago, hours ago or only seconds ago. She's forgotten when she made shape of his words and turned them to a language clear enough to break through the chorus of her death poetry. “Isra.” Her name sounds like a question, a if she's forgotten who she might be again.

Is she something other than grave-digger? priestess of the sorrow?  the dead, sea-girl? drowning girl? forgotten slave who cries and sobs for freedom from the black stain of the soul?

But she blinks and the lines of him seem to whisper something to her with the hard steel of war-strength. Remember. His eyes scream like a blade might scream through soft bone and silken skin. Remember. She listens and when she stares at him like a brave unicorn might, a warrior made not from blood but suffering and strife, her voice is a cold as any truth. “You can call me Isra.” It's fitting, that coldness from her and it falls not like ice but winter star-shine and freshly fallen diamonds of snow.

Finally the last grave is finished and she turns from the monuments of dirt and ash and broken, bent trees. It feels to her as if her skin is paper-thin and covered with words, so many that they cluster and glitter in the moonlight and look like scales the color of the sea. She wonders if he can read them on her skin, pluck out her fears like a devil might, tear them from her skin like feathers from a sparrow.

She wonders if she seems strange in the moon-glow, a mare who stares in hours and fills the silence only with more silence or words that seem more like beginnings and endings that conversation. Her chain rattles, sharp as the tolling warning of a lighthouse with the fog comes rolling in, thick and endless and silent. It's a song that wakes her from the dead and reminds her that she's alive, alive, alive.

“Did all your rage find an end?” Isra asks-- a unicorn to a devil, the resurrected to the blood-letter.



* * * * *
dead flowers for all our lovers


@Raymond











Played by Offline Odeen [PM] Posts: 175 — Threads: 29
Signos: 1,315
Night Court Soldier
Male [He/Him/His]  |  18 [Year 492 Winter]  |  15 hh  |  Hth: 22 — Atk: 38 — Exp: 59  |    Active Magic: Spell Warding  |    Bonded: Ruth (Tarrasque)
#6

***
Raymond never minded silence. It was conversation that deviated from his overall norm, however readily and enthusiastically he seemed to dive into such things. The bare fact of reality is that one's own self is a very boring conversation partner, and it was relatively recent in the red stallion's life that he figured out that not vanishing could also be an acceptable option when faced with the concept of society.

Working in dutiful silence toward a common goal, however pointless the exercise seemed to him personally, proved to be a comfort. Consider it penance for the spark of fear in her eyes at their first meeting: if she wished to lay her dead to rest, then the gesture cost him nothing and earned him...

a name, it seemed.

The night concealed the ghost of a smile tugging at his soot-grey lips. It was a satisfied, victorious thing, perhaps best left hidden among such company, but satisfaction was a welcome thing to a land so long bereft of it. Taking the conclusion of her own efforts as a signal, Raymond called the pit he'd excavated sufficient and dragged the badger's remains into it with a pall-bearer's deference. It seemed small, surrounded by the earth it had called home in a way that it had never foreseen and would never appreciate, but beneath the earth it might rest now as it had in life.

Some superstitious folk see to the burial of their dead to appease the spirits, lest such forests as these teem with the souls of countless restless dead. Raymond believed in such restlessness only insofar as it manifested in the ancestral fire of a creature fighting to succeed or survive, but he appreciated the sentiment. It was kind and gentle and romantic, as he imagined Isra might have been in the absence of her private horrors.

Did all your range find an end? she asked, and Raymond's head tipped thoughtfully her way. His eyes were distant and pensive in the moonlight, but this time when he smiled it was for her to see, and it was full of something not quite spilling over into sadness.

Wistfulness, perhaps.

Regret, perhaps.

"I came too late," he replied wryly around that strange and dissatisfied smile. The thought of the regime escaping without so much as a stripe to mark the shame of their misrule filled his mouth with the taste of bitter bile, a scab ripe for the scratching. Here were abusers who had gone free, yet more proof of the fallibility of justice both mortal and divine. "I have to live with that. But while rage is good for a lot of things, it doesn't comport well with moving on."

There is a time to scream and a time to weep. One day, perhaps his rage against the delinquent king might be sated upon the lifeblood of another equally deserving, but the burning brand of justice unquenched would likely remain patiently in hand for the rest of his life. It was the least of his worries and the least of his challenges.

"They might be gone, but Denocte is not. Denocte is more important now."
***

Raymond
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the man comes around.


@Isra







aut viam inveniam aut faciam





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Isra
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#7



Her legs feel weak when she moves towards him. Isra waivers as she walks and she sways like a newborn dear as the blood rushes through her veins and her nerves feel like knives against her nerves feel like a million tiny, stabbing needles. This night, with the dead, makes her feel new. She could be an empty book, bound in seaweeds and sands that have turned to glass.

She could be anything. Denocte, when she looks out to the blackness that looks like the sea around this small patch of moonlight and graves, looks like a darkness that could be anything when the sun rises up and devours the night. Perhaps the darkness is not black but blood, dark but full of the power to create, to shape, to take back the nothingness.

Perhaps the night is not the night and when looks at Raymond it feels like looking at the sun, a flare of fire that arcs out and out until it brushes the winter sea of her dark brown skin.

But now her blood rushes normally though her legs and she moves once more like a unicorn. Her hooves seem loathe to touch the remnants of the ground and her chain tolls like a choir instead of a reaper's song. The night heals around him and she answers the regret in his gaze with sorrow and understanding.

Who is she but regret? Isra is sadness trapped in a skin that belongs to the imagination of the sea more than it belongs to the soul it holds.

“It always would have been to late.” It was too late for all of them the moment the pass was destroyed and the gates clanged shut with a force harsh enough to knock down the moon from the sky. It has always been too late for Isra. She was born  and it was already too late, too late to be anything more than broken.

Her soul rattles a death rattle in her chest when the thought catches and snag on her soul like a shard of glass against silk. I was born to break and I never could have been anything else. It's a revelation in her heart and it breaks her back down to nothing but regret for things she would never be mighty enough to change.

Isra knows, even as she offers Raymond the cleansing touch of her nose against all that blood color of his shoulder, that she will never be mighty enough to heal that great chasm in her soul. But still she will go on, this she promises and it's easy to think it with a fire beside her. “And you,” Her touch lingers, moving along his boldness like a farewell of the tides before they are pulled away by the orbit of the moon. “who will you be now?” The silence falls again and it feels like the fire of him has sucked out all the oxygen from the air between them.

And in that silence Isra looks back at their freshly dug graveyard and thinks that the bones below the piles of dirt will always just be dead.  



* * * * *
a devil could dress as a mockingbird and dream


@Raymond











Played by Offline Odeen [PM] Posts: 175 — Threads: 29
Signos: 1,315
Night Court Soldier
Male [He/Him/His]  |  18 [Year 492 Winter]  |  15 hh  |  Hth: 22 — Atk: 38 — Exp: 59  |    Active Magic: Spell Warding  |    Bonded: Ruth (Tarrasque)
#8

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.' and I saw.


In Raymond's mind, no one is made to be broken. They are made only because creating new life is life's only purpose, and it is the purpose that living creatures impose upon reality that breaks them. Isra was no more born to fall than a condor, but statistics say that someone must fall. On the day the Arma Mountains fell victim to the cold fire of tyranny, Isra's dice rolled poorly.

But, like a blade in forge-fire, she could emerge stronger than before - should she so choose.

Isra reached out to touch the devil's shoulder, an acceptance of the proverbial hand he had offered in truce. What she'd said was true, though it made the red stallion feel no less sour for his part. The writing went up on the wall long before he had ever been in a position to do anything about it, and it seemed the nature of the neglectful to abandon than to answer.

Who will you be now? the bay mare asked, sheltering behind the force of his personality like the moon slipping quietly into the earth's red shadow, forgetting in the hour of eclipse where her light shines brightest.

Raymond's answering smile said a lot without any words at all. Of course he would always be himself - the red stallion would never accept any less than that - but even that was more complicated than a brief conversation among the dead could hope to hash out. He was air and iron, a great leveler, as easily a saint as a devil should the situation require it. The smile came with a friendly, knowing tilt of the head.

It wasn't bad to be a devil.

He followed her eyes to the sites of the now-sleeping dead, guessing at what troubling thoughts might swirl beneath the mist of her gaze. "Don't carry them with you when you go." He turned away, headed out of Denocte and back toward the rest of Novus. Pausing, he offered a last parting glance over his shoulder. "You gave them their peace; now you need to find your own."

With that and a curt, grateful nod, the red stallion put Isra and her restful dead behind him.
@Isra

and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around








aut viam inveniam aut faciam





Played by [PM] Posts: N/A — Threads:
Isra
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#9

Isra of the graveyard

A century went by and all the graves were filled only with dirt and the bones were gone, gone, gone



If Raymond is sword and sun, iron and will-power, she is made of all the things that he will never be. She is teardrops and rain clouds. She is the sea to his eternal rock, the clouds that shift round and round the sharp peaks of his mountains. Isra is all the heartbreak that is left after war and none of the victory.

Perhaps those are the reasons why she looks at his smile and sees only confidence, a devil easy with this darkness and the blood that has surely crusted that blade at his back. She sees only things to both envy and fear, for the darkness calls too quickly to those cracks in her soul. How easy would it be to sail the seas to her homeland and leave only dead demons behind when she left?

Could she ever learn to love feeling their blood coat her skin, to watch as the wickedness bled out from their veins in oceans of red, red, red?

Isra watches him turn away and it's so lost in her own thoughts that she's slow to turn his voice to words, slower still to understand him. And when she does she only gives him back his smile. It's a sad look on her face, dusted with tear-stains and ash. “I will always carry them.” For a moment she wonders how he cannot carry them and close his eyes and dream of tombs rising from the dirt like a hundred anthills. For a moment she forgets that his soul is not a hollow pit that takes stories to fill up an endless emptiness that has no end.

There are universes inside her, black and speckled with stars and comets and black holes.

“Perhaps their peace is my peace.” Isra whispers too late and he's already gone by the time she wonders if she's talking about the stories of the bones or her own death.

Around her the night still carries on and it's only the dead that are left to keep her company as the dawn begins to rise.












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