Gentle drops, sliding down my heart

[Florentine]

f l o r e n t i n e

She stands in the midst of the water. On all sides the cool waters stretch as flat and sleek as glass. Ripples radiate from her, water whispers that grow larger and larger as they race towards the still banks. With gentle chatter and bubbles the water breathes against the shoreline; stones, sand and grasses all submerged beneath the cool lapping waters.
 
Flora looks to the surface of the lake, her eyes studiously taking in its every colour and movement. But is it not truly the water she watches, but the sky above. For the sky is painted upon the surface as though it is a window to the top of another world. It is another world that beckons her to fall forwards and tumble, tumble down, down to the rocky mountains below.
 
The Night Court sky that is a curious blend of night and day, a purple haze that refuses to leave the sunlit sky. Stars blink and never sleep. They glow brighter than any in the Dusk court and leaves the Dusk girl with with a promise of the night to come.
 
Florentine holds her breath, willing her heart to stop, if only to put pause to the ripples that run with each beat of her chest. The more she holds, the more her body stirs, oh to be so alive that motion can never truly be stopped!
 
Her lips curl as lavender flower drifts idly by, a flower that seems to float in the perfectly reflected sky. The waters spread her mane and tail, parting each strand as best they can. But even the waters cannot un-work the wild snarls each flower makes as they grow from her honeyed hair.
 
The waters stir in earnest, new ripples racing towards her from a new direction. This tranquil moment, this blissful silence, is shattered and idly Flora wonders if this is the beginning of a new party at the Night Court. Reichenbach had, after all, cemented her belief that this was a court of revelers.
 
The waters breaks into a song of steps, each splash heralding an approaching footfall. A solitary ear twists to catch the newcomers approach, but her amethyst eyes are drinking in the circling mountains as though parched of such beauty.
 
“What name could ever suit a place of such beauty?” The flower girl asks softly. There is no hiding the ardor in her voice, nor the breathlessness that comes of such awe.
 
Purple petals bob upon the water as they float towards Lothaire. It is not often that Florentine is so serious, so thoughtful. But who could not when faced with a beauty such as this? A world not yet ravaged by eternity.

@Lothaire

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

[Lothaire]

 
Lothaire had found himself emerging from behind the curtain of night each time it fell now, as though nocturnality had aways been his natural state. Admittedly as a child he had oft lingered a moment too long at his bedroom window, watching the summer constellations dance the way he never could; cold fingertips collecting dust as he had traced the great frames. How long ago those nights seemed now, how far from his heart. Lothaire had travelled countless miles from his past, in both flesh and mind, never to return. For he had found something close to solace in Novus, more specifically in Denocte. There could not have been a more perfect amalgamation of calm and culture; enough to peak his interest and keep his wanderlust at bay, for the most part.  

Summer was nigh, he could feel it in the air - temperatures had begun to soar, and even as sunlight died the heat remained still. Against his skin it pressed, tight and unyielding, enough to coax Lothaire to change his course. Toward the lake he slid. 

It was the girl's scent that gave her away at first: cloying and ornate, but most importantly - foreign. Dusk Court sang from her perfume. His sharp mind whirred, picking apart the faces he associated with such an aroma, until it clicked. Yes, he recalled her wide-eyes watching the coronation of Reich. How curious it was that she had been present at all. As Lothaire paused at the edge of the lake, spectral as ever, he entertained the question of why this girl had so boldly ventured again into a land that was not her own? It almost amused him, almost. With great sweeping movements the reptilian man sank into the water, welcoming its cool wet kiss upon his limbs and underside. It seemed he had caught this delicate taupe girl in a moment of awe; the look in her gaze fascinated him. Eyes like those could hide entire worlds within their caverns.

"I've seen you here before, child of Dusk."

@Florentine <3

[Florentine]

f l o r e n t i n e

The water barely stirred for him. The soft babble of the night-strewn liquid upon the smooth serpentine curves of his torso was an easy noise to miss. Florentine would almost not have known he was there, but for the sigh of breath before he spoke aloud.
 
An ear, tangled in her mane of honey threads and lavender flowers, twists to better hear him. Though her eyes do not fall from the star-flung skies above. It is quieter here, today. There is no revelry and Florentine is allowed to be quiet, to be sad for a power that has slipped away from her as fast as water through grasping fingers.
 
Time was not hers to travel anymore.
 
Her heart gave a wounded twinge and she wonders, idly, if he heard it. “You have seen me before.” Florentine confirms, the melancholy song sounding strange upon her lyrical voice. She longs to reprimand him for calling her a child, in the defensive way only an adult just out of puberty would, but she does not have the heart. Not today, not tonight.
 
Her eyes, at last, tumble from the skies to fall upon the smooth lines of his face. She spends a long moment here, unabashed by the time that tries to draw itself out awkwardly between them. Her eyes and body move like liquid, small movements, unceasing, forever changing. She is like the water she stands in, and like water, she soothes the burn of her rude staring.
 
His earless head invites her eyes to cascade down the arch of his neck, the undulations of his spine and the twists of his serpentine markings. They follow the bones and joints of his wings. Outstretched and aloft they would surely be like the ribbed vaults of a grand cathedral; if only she believed in gods. “I have never seen anyone quite like you.” She sighs and she lies, for she is already forgetting the past she can no longer return to and a serpent boy who lives there with his torso of warm, warm scales.
 
But Flora does remember him in part and finds comfort in Lothaire’s serpentine appearance.
 
The girl who stands in the water this night is not the vivacious girl Lothaire had met at Reichenbach’s coronation, though the wild tangles of her mane and the dirtied scuffs of her body beg him to remember her so.
 
A wing dips into the inky water, spreading ripples, setting the fallen petals of her mane dancing. Those petals spin and swirl, bumping into him, bumping into her, before drifting out, colourless in the silver of the moonlight.
 
“Have you come to tell me to leave, Boy of Night?” She asks in a whisper, her amethyst eyes drowning him in the purple bruise of dusk. 

@Lothaire - sorry he has just had to experience Flora's first ever mopey post. My apologies!! 

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

[Lothaire]

 
"You have seen me before." 

The lilt of her voice is saturated with a feeling he cannot quite place, unsurprisingly. From an age earlier than he cared to remember Lothaire had distanced himself from the lapping tide of sentiment; pushing inward, turning his cheek. Perhaps it was an amalgamation of incapability and lack of heart — no, there lay no truth in that. The strings of his red organ might have been tenuous, gossamer and laden with dust, but they existed still in his cavernous ribcage. Beaten by his mother's scathing eyes; her hatred hanging like a noose around his young neck, her ancient grief systematically crushing the feeble germination of joy in his head. So, to the purple of night he had retreated from her burning anguish where it was safe, where it was cold. And there he had grown: abstract, sober, dispassionate. 

Florentine was a study he had not yet conducted. Not the first Terrastellian he had met, mind; for the memory of the Dusk queen drifted idly in the dark of his thought, like the petals floating indiscriminately between he and Flora. Upon first impressions, at least, this girl before him appeared quite unlike Rannveig — two women; one pragmatic, one whimsical. But Lothaire knew better than to take said first impressions as gospel; everyone he had ever met had been as vast and as ceaseless as the constellations decorating the sky, and he no reason to believe Florentine was any different. Eyes carved from the skin of space itself stared right back, placidly indulging her musing gaze. She reminded him of the dandelions that had adorned his garden as a boy, with her wild ethereal beauty. So nymph like, he wondered if she too might grant him a wish if he blew gently enough against her untamed skin. 

"I would not be so thoughtless as to send a being back to where they do not belong." A bold statement, testing, probing. In the everlong dark, he waited.

@Florentine

[Florentine]

[quote pid='1797' dateline='1499858710']

f l o r e n t i n e

He says so little. The silence draws itself between them, palpable and as keen as the trembling notes of a violin. But there is no trembling note to hear, only their mingling breaths to layer the song of bubbling waters.
 
Where Lothaire had been raised beneath the suffocating veil of hatred and anger, so Florentine had been like a seed and her parents the sunlight and water. She had flourished outward, Lothaire only inward. They are yin and yang beneath the moonlight; they should rub, they should abrade, but the water soothes.
 
She feels the nothingness of him and tastes the impassiveness of a heart that has gathered too much dust. Like he does not know the emotions he feels upon her, so she does not know the ones she feels upon him. Their ignorance is kin.
 
Water drips and drops from a solitary feather as she lifts her wing from the water at last. She watches the way the droplets shatter the silver moonlight and set the water to shiver as they fall.
 
She has begun to grow cold here, in the cool of the silver moon and its inky waters. Not even the swaddling heat of the summer’s night can warm her anymore and her body, greedy for heat, leans towards his own; the water protests – a ripple, a push, a slosh.
 
“I wish you would be so thoughtless.” She says, to the melody of the breaking waters that begin their lament, for she has no doubt failed his test. “I may quite like you for it.” She adds insult to injury, though her small smile is as fragile as the waters between them.
 
Then, with a breath, long and slow, she maybe, just maybe, saves herself of his scrutiny. “I belong nowhere.” Her eyes lift, rising through pitch and stars and moonlight. She was once a kite without tether but now, the very thing that gave her flight, keeps her chained to this earth – to Novus. “Do you ever dream of worlds beyond this?” She asks him then, suddenly wild like the tangles of her mane, the dirt of her honeyed skin. Her amethyst eyes fall back to Lothaire’s, sinking into their chasm of black, black night only to burn and burn like the final throes of a dusk-dying sun.
 
Then, there, she fancies she hears the subtle whispers of her knife, its humming against her breast. But oh, it was there just a moment – a fleeting little thing maybe born of imagination and whimsy.
 
And the dusk girl dares to hope, for her dagger has already been too quiet, too long. 

@Lothaire <3

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

[/quote]

[Lothaire]

 
Florentine seems to pulsate; blooming and shrinking with each delicate breath she drew. As though the myriad of thoughts in her mind were as alive as the flowers curled between the strands of her hair. True to say Lothaire had never met a girl quite like she, but this was not an uncommon occurrence - he had spent his life watching weathered souls in ragged clothes, hearts coated in a bloodied silver he could almost taste. He wondered whether this winged violet had seen them too. 

His patterned skin feels the cresting water and a shiver is suppressed from within, as though his reptilian ancestry had run his blood cold as night. The girl feels it too, keenly, and Lo glances back toward the shore, his ears meanwhile catching her gossamer voice. A flush of air falls heavily from his nostrils at Florentine's words; she did not need to like him - nor he her, Lothaire had always sought more than that; more than he could fathom, at times. Starless eyes had searched deeper, burying himself within a labyrinth of phantasmagorical rumination until he had lost all sense of time. Often, his dreaming had fallen into macabre mire; nightmarish, haunting - and he bore the scars, the inner halls of his body were riddled with them. But never had he sunk beneath himself, never had he drowned.

"I used to think as such - until I made a home within myself." His tone was straight, sober, but designed by softer chords than before - caught in thought. And the following words Flora almost threw upon him pulled his head toward her quite swiftly; no one had ever asked him such a question. A moment the length of an entire lifetime hangs between them, until finally, "Always."

"My grandfather would tell me stories as a boy," he held his breath, the cold gravel of his voice drenching the air, "perhaps I listened too closely, too filled with hope." If Lothaire closed his eyes, still, he could see the castles in the sky; perhaps that then was why he had kept them open for as long as he could remember. Caught in compass, torn between a fathomless longing and the dreamless strength that had kept his knees from breaking beneath his childhood pain. And yet ... and yet, there was something about Florentine's eyes he couldn't shake. Dare he ask? A whisper born from something he couldn't name: "Have you seen them? Those worlds."

@Florentine ;o

[Florentine]

f l o r e n t i n e

      I used to think as such - until I made a home within myself.
 
His words capture her attention and her gaze falls from the star-strewn sky to fix upon his eyes. But they offer her no balance, no place to ground herself. Like the black between the stars, they pull Florentine in and she feels herself falling and falling. At his words she wonders if she should fall so deep as to find the home he made for himself, within himself.
 
It is only with surprising effort that she pulls herself back, that she pushes her eyes away from his – the purple of dusk, not yet ready to give in to the black of night. “Is that not lonely? Keeping yourself so enclosed?” She asks, and she thinks she is falling again, tumbling into the chasm of his eyes. Maybe she never resurfaced… A shiver trembles and slides its way through her body.
 
He does not give Flora a chance to know whether she is falling or not, for his eyes snap back to hers. Black, black, black is all she feels, all she knows, and another shiver ripples down her spine like lunar light. This time, she holds his gaze, defiant. Yet there is not a cold, hard line in her eye. No, she is instead bold - as colourfully painted as the setting sun and with its fierce fire she holds Lothaire there.
 
She feels every second of the lifetime his silence holds her in. Creeping fingers, like old age, crawl across her skin. Time drags out and for once she fears it. Her lips open, for her heart is frantic and the water is rippling with her shivering wings…
 
But then, oh then he speaks and time suddenly starts again. He pulls her on with his words, back to a world that drifts idly by. It is certain, rhythmical, monotonous in its passing. There is a scream in her throat that does not come and does not sound, but oh it cries out as loud as loud can be. This is not her Time, this world is so wrong without her dagger’s power. She needs its power back. She needs it.
 
The cold gravel of the emissary’s voice grates against her too-sensitive skin. But she relishes it for his words. She drinks them in as though they were fine liquor. Upon them she hangs and lets them draw a smile from her lips, at last. “You could never listen too closely or hope too much.” The dusk girl says and she would laugh at the cliché, were it not for the fierceness of her belief. Were it not for what she saw.
 
“Yes, I have seen them.” She says and the wildness of the sun returns in her voice. It returns to play across the water, to call to the stars – that sea of celestial space that drifts on and on and on. Back and back and back the stars stretch until only Time sees fit to stop them.  She lifts her eyes to them, her smile now blissful, now lost in a tide of memory that has her floating, drifting. “Worlds of gods, of creatures that have no name - who are so fantastical not even our imaginations could create them! Worlds of lands that shift with ancient magic, lands that fall apart and bend before such wild, wild magic…” She trails off, thoughtful, dreamlike, her soul ascending into the void of space.
 
But it is grounded by the silver of her trembling dagger.
 
In silence it rises from her breast to glint softly, sadly in the silvery light. “This once parted worlds for me. With it, I could open a window to any world, any place, any time you yearned for. It could take me anywhere…” For time has space for everything. She does not say.
 
“When I find its power again, I will take you... If you wish.” She breathes her offer in silver, starlight smoke.


@Lothaire

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

[Lothaire]

 
The quiet which cloaked them was not stifling to Lothaire; if he had ever found anything comforting - it would be silence. He shivers, still, the cold seeping further into his bones as though its intention was to stay; but having been carved from a dark shade of ice himself, Lo did not yield.

Florentine presented him the concept of loneliness, and had he been blithe, had he been weightless, he might have smiled. Might have. "Solitude is not the same as loneliness." Perhaps in his earliest memories he could recall the dull ache of something he couldn't define, only to presume now it had been a forlorn longing for someone, something, to share all the beautiful and ugly parts of himself. But it had faded indefinitely as he had grown into and unto a man impervious to such soulful desires.

His focus drifted languidly back to the girl before him, the water lilting between them, and she smiles then. It was a fascinating thing, her smile, and the darkness of his mind absorbed the flash of her white teeth and the wrinkles around her lips. But it was the words which danced from her tongue that truly caught Lothaire, stringing up his old dusty heart with rope and tether.  Worlds, magic, Gods. He could only listen; the black emptiness in his eyes burning darker still - showing nothing, feeling ... something. She might have been but a storyteller, a liar, a fabricator; it mattered not. 

Lothaire gazed mutedly at her dagger, as though it held all the secrets of the universe within it's silvern hilt. Not for the first time in his life the reptilian man is quite short of words, holding the silence tighter for the familiarity of its cool embrace. Yet - he breathes: "I would like that. I would like that very much." It was gone - whatever light magic had stirred before in his chest, for Lo knew it to be dangerous. He retreated into himself once more. The tall man turned his body toward the land as again he shivered within the water. "Come."

@Florentine sorry this is so late and rather uninspired, my muse went on vacation in the bermuda triangle.

[Florentine]

f l o r e n t i n e

Florentine has never met anyone quite like him. Lothaire. His name is ease upon her tongue, a sigh, she fancies, in the dark of this night. He is opposite to her, in nearly every way.  Maybe it should grate against her, but it does not. This meeting and the air they share is too easy. Their silence is a balm, soothing and warming like impending sleep, creeping, silently, sweetly upon her.
 
Solitude is not the same as loneliness.
 
Those words leave the flower girl lost. Solitude within herself could only mean loneliness… could it not? Her heart stutters as she wonders of her own foolishness, even as she searches herself, only to find her soul an open book and her heart exposed for all to see. Florentine had never been reserved, never kept to the quiet corners of her soul nor let herself become acquainted with the distant parts of her being.
 
Not even death had driven her to reside more closely within herself. It has scarred her friend more than it had ruined her. “You are right.” She acknowledges at last, feeling the lap of water at her sides when he shivers. The cool inspires her own body to tremble and she does, in earnest.
 
Gold eyelashes lower to fan across her cheeks, midnight black, even in the dark of the night. When at last her eyes open, they find Lothaire once more. “But solitude can lead to loneliness.” She warns him, lightly, sadly.
 
Her words draw him in, loosing the dust from his heart and setting a flame to burn in his eye. A blink, however, and the moment is gone, just his words, keen and curious, still linger where the warmth of his desire once was. “Then visit me one day Lothaire and I will tell you my stories and any you like, I shall show you, one day.” When my magic returns her sadness whispers from the ragged hole in her being.
 
The serpent boy turns from her and she moves to follow, silent, obedient, their bodies leaving a rippling wakes to spread across the water. It is upon the shore that she stops beside him. The air of this summer’s night is a fierce bite along her wet and dripping skin. She shivers once, twice and again until it becomes near constant.
 
“I must go, return home before they think I have deflected…” Her eyes trickle over him and hummingbird fast, the girl thoughtfully lays a ghost of a kiss upon his cheek. She is away, with wings spread and only a flurry of air to let him know she was ever there. A solitary glance is cast back as she takes to the air, “Don’t let yourself become lonely, Lothaire.”
 
And she is gone, only her voice remaining, its soft “Goodbye,” drifting across the water.


@Lothaire 

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

[inkbone]

Staff note: OBSIDIAN and KEZZ both redeemed signos for completing this thread and threading with each other for the 1st time.

Congratulations on winning the "Thread of the Season" for Year 501 Spring with this amazing thread!
+100 signos has been awarded to both Florentine and Lothaire's account for this achievement.