Novus
an equine & cervidae rpg
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Novus closed 10/31/2022, after The Gentle Exodus

Interactive Quest  - the hidden hiding in plain sight

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Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#1

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.


She says she would find him in her mountains, but has Aspara ever tried searching out a wildling boy, grown by the Novus wilderness itself?


He hears her.


He smells her. 


He listens to how she crashes through the woods and thinks how he might teach her to walk quiet as a doe, cunning as a fox. But when he sees the flash of her between the columns of the trees, he knows she is more wolf than girl. Even then, wolves know how to creep and slink and go unheard.


The fae-youth’s lips are berry stained and his tongue still holds the puddled juice until he swallows down that last sweet taste. Apsara has drawn him from the berry bush as she fills the woodland with his name. 


Leonidas goes to her, of course he does. Stepping through the wood he nears her like a nymph and she the god brought to summon him. But still her rejection stings his young-thin skin. Still that frustration at her rejection is a tidal wave that breaks against the corners of him. So he does not step out of the brush and into her path. No. The wildling boy sinks into his woodland greens, his gold darkens with the dim-wood light. He steps around fireflies that beg him to remember that this was the girl who he nearly faded with. The glowing beetles fly out between the woods, from him, to her. But already he is gone from where they came. 


How he wants to go to her, to share the taste of berries with her, to see her lips stain as red as his. But he doesn’t. Instead he watches as she wonders, as softly pale as a phantom through the wood, her skin stained faintly gold by the champagne light.



@Aspara
“Speaking.”
credits










Played by Offline Rae [PM] Posts: 118 — Threads: 19
Signos: 20
Inactive Character
#2

A S P A R A


I wasn’t that loud.

I had spent just as much time in the mountains and by the sea as I had the court- enough time to learn the best (well okay... maybe not the very best) places to step and the way to shift my weight quietly. I knew the language of the woods, spoken in broken twigs, muddy trails, gently parted branches. Maybe I would always be a creature of halves- half city girl, half forest; half of a twin; half in love and loathing with every wild-eyed stranger I met- but I would always embrace the pieces of me and try to grow them into a whole.

So. I wasn’t that loud, and anyone who thought otherwise would be smart to never mention it to my face. Anyway... although I was no wildling child, fleet and silent of foot, at least I didn’t go around stealing from people just because I didn’t know better. Hmph.

Leonidas.” It was not an exclamation or a question. I knew he was here, somewhere. A few paces back I had found a beautiful golden feather on the ground, unlike that of any bird that lived here. “Come out already, you’re being dumb.” A crowd of fireflies flew toward me, disturbed, and I leapt toward where they had come from. But there was no golden boy there, no feral child. I sighed, ears tilted back in clear expression of annoyance, and began to look around the area.

I should have brought Furfur with me, but in my great haste (and, admittedly, my confidence that I could track anything in these woods) I had not summoned him. I found the bond between us, stretched very thin with distance, and I tugged gently at it. I knew he may or may not heed my summons; we were aloof even with each other, in a way that I found without fault or blame. I would ignore myself, sometimes, if I could.

I returned to the clearing where the fireflies once nestled. Memories of another forest, different fireflies, filled me with an array of conflicting emotions I did not want to think about at that moment. I pressed away the memories and turned my attention to my magic. First I let it gather and build in me. It was a process that once felt like trying to catch smoke- impossible- but in just two years I had grown quite adept at it. The next step was what I still struggled with, especially in the forest. I needed specific information, and I needed to identify the thing(s) around me with that information, then extract it. Anything still alive was hard to talk to, but forests especially so. There were so many stories layered in the trees and moss and leaves, and a forest doesn’t notice things the way a stone, or a carpet, or a necklace does.

I pressed my horn gently into the soft bark of a stump. “Hello,” I said to it with my magic, because even in a rush it was good to greet an elder. “Did a… colt-stag-bird come through here? Do you know which way he went?” The answer came more quickly and clearly than ever before- it was surprising to me, and exciting. If it were any other day I would have laid down next to that old stump and let its stories fill me until I had no magic left.

I placed a kiss on the stump in thanks and farewell, then raised my head and turned it the exact direction in which I knew Leonidas had gone, not that long ago. I walked toward him with renewed confidence, quickly and… not silently, but remarkably quiet. For a half-city-girl.

THE SUN SHONE HIGH THOSE FEW SUMMER DAYS
LEFT US IN A SONG, WIDE-EYED HAZE
IT SHONE LINE GOLD
IT SHONE LIKE GOLD


art
@Leonidas <3










Played by Offline Obsidian [PM] Posts: 123 — Threads: 14
Signos: 520
Inactive Character
#3

some memories never leave your bones.
like the salt in the sea; they become a part of you
- you carry them.


She is loud as she steps her way through the woods at the foot of their mountain. (Their. It has become theirs because she regards it as hers and he regards it at his. And so it must simply be called: theirs. At least until one of them admits defeat or the mountain finally reclaims itself as belonging to none but itself).


The city girl is loud. And a wildwood boy would have no qualms in telling her so. Yet, he is a young man flawed, for Leonidas misses how she walks, silent as a doe already.  He inclines his ear to her like a boy who has nothing else to do but listen to a girl he likes walking through the woods. That is: he listens to her because there is nothing else that would interest him more. The wildwood boy listens to the pretty, city girl with every fibre of his being. And so, to his ears, she is louder than she has ever been. 


He hears how the fog grass brushes, nobly, at her knees and the aspen’s shed limbs break rotten and dried beneath her heels. They might have been but whispers on the wind. Yet he hears them loud as thunder in his too-keen ears.


In warning, a shivering cloud of fireflies suddenly tangle about his antlers and face. They remind him of a night in another wood, where ghosts slip through the gossamer veil between the living and the dead. He was irritated by the flies glowing bodies before, and then, and he is irritated too by their fluttering wings now. His head switches this way, that way, and then he leaps through them. They scatter like fairies, fleeing from him through the trees, regrouping in the clearing before Aspara.


She is close. She knows, he knows, the fireflies know. His feral heart stutters and as she leaps into the fireflies he leaps away in response. His toes brush over a knot of gorse and thyme, stirring the air warm and sharp with spice. Still as a stag Leonidas pauses, and twists his head back to listen to where she goes next. He is still, but for his heart that thunders in his breast. It runs faster than it had for a monster and that time with her when his body vanished beneath him, non-existence reaching out to disappear them both more silently than a sleeping sigh.


His magic blooms in his blood, encouraged on by his racing heart. It stirs up like dustmotes beneath a damselfly’s wings and presses a whispering hush into the brighter parts of him. His brilliant golds turn dark, tarnishing as if Leonidas was merely a statue stood out in the weather-rough wilderness too long. His magic blends him into the dappling dark of the grasshopper greens and oak-deep browns. Leonidas hides from Aspara’s searching eyes yet he cannot bear to leave her wholly. She pushes him on a step for each one she takes. She pulls him back with every step she takes away.


If Aspara would like to ignore herself sometimes, Leonidas might think he would like to ignore her even more so. But maybe they both fail miserably in that, for when her footsteps fall so suddenly still behind him, he stops instantly and turns around. She is there, a smudge of snow in the hazy warm of the woods. Apsara draws Leonidas’ attention like winter commands summer to yield. She turns his gold to burnished copper and on to fading brown like the turning of autumn. He could not ignore her if he tried. (And oh, how he does try).


Woodland magic is a shiver along his spine. His skin twitches with its passing. He wonders what secrets the tree stump gives the half-city girl and blushes as she presses a kiss to the rough, old bark. Betrayed and dismayed, his ears fall to his skull as his heart leaps when she turns towards him. All thoughts of her kisses are gone as he turns again, flighty and fae, to press deeper into the woods.


Still he thinks of their last meeting; it is what stops him from turning back to her, of pressing his muzzle into the warm of her naked neck… Behind him, upon a stone within their path, the wildwood boy leaves his half-city girl a carillon of foxglove bells. The flowers are as beautiful as Aspara and both are equally dangerous to him. He has begun to wonder if such beautiful things  are only supposed to be seen but never touched. Not by the likes of him at least.


“Don’t touch it.” He calls out in warning, low and rich as the song of an ancient wych elm (a voice finally broken) as he slinks silently between dappled shadows.


@Aspara
“Speaking.”
credits










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