here are things Elena doesn't understand. She does not understand why her father made a deal with the winter devil. She doesn't understand how her mother had gotten sick, how it had taken her. She doesn't understand how Frostbane could kill her father so mercilessly. She doesn't understand how Tenebrae could break her heart.
The pain was extraordinary.
There are shards of glass buried in her chest, her lungs fill with water and her vision grows hazy. She realizes, that when she left him today, she would not see him again, he would not come back and find her. The next breath is excruciating, but she takes it, fills her lungs with air that did not want to either, the motion desperate and forced. She had been a fool. A fool to think he had wanted her for more than a night; a fool to think she was anything but a placeholder. Her heart had screamed at her in warning—had told her something was amiss and she had ignored it. She had dismissed her better judgment, told herself beautiful lies.
And look where it had gotten her.
She cant go home.
She could.
No, she argues with herself. She cant.
Something wild raged in her chest, but she turned from it. She felt its wild abandon, the sobs that made her throat raw—the hurt that ached, making her bones throb with its presence. She swallowed it down into her stomach.
Blue eyes point downwards and she sees er heart lay in a million pieces, thrown amongst the cage within her breast. She didn’t bother trying to put them back together. Love was not in her future and for some reason the gods found her unworthy of it. They had given her Aerwir, but they had forgotten her own passion for life. They had presented her with Tunnel, only to have him nearly kill her. They had offered her Tenebrae and then forced her to watch his heart close away. Love isn’t real. Perhaps it never existed to begin with and everyone was just fooling themselves with a made up emotion that could never be attained.
She watches it on the ground, watches it constrict with the want of her best friend, with the need to bury her head into her crimson mane and forget the rest of the world. She wants to cry to Lilli, to let her ease in the pain in the way that only Lilli can.
The only way that golden girl will take that heart back is if she can carve out that little cavern in her chest she had placed him in.
The sky is bleeding with the light of the stars tonight.
Her breath comes out in a puff of white.
It shines like ice crystals in the night.
The tide begins to roll in, it crawls up her legs like the cold hands of winter, and she remembers another night, on another beach, in another winter, with the The Taiga behind her, her shoulder pressed into the crimson one of her cousin. Funny then, how the water hadn't felt so cold.
─ lying cheek to cheek in your cold embrace so soft and so tragic as a slaughterhouse ─
when it enters the room, its eyes are not drawn by the fine solterran filigree at the corners, or the beauty that enchants a casanova from the depth of the crowd, or the statues in the hall (some of which, eerily, follow you with their eyes), but by a painting that stands on the far wall. It looks to him, calls to him, to it, a cadence to the untapped leagues that wander the starlight in his veins, the black holes of his eyes, each lit by a crescent moon that hunts and hunts. An ocean to an ocean – they reach for one another, these horrors. His ambiance is cosmic, one that begs tentativeness when in the gravity of his presence; an eclipse in the eye of their sun. They mirror one another, it and the painting, even through the bodies that stand between them like hedges.
It is swathed in blues and golds and shining sandy tans, (and blots of indigo, violet, faint, forgotten needlepoints of white) a galaxy that repeats itself over and over through painstrokes that gleam in the light drawn through curtained windows. At their center is a deep dark, one that tunnels on, on, into unprecedented depths – but it knows where it reaches. It knows what waits. And oh, how the boy that was Erasmus would shudder, having learned. It is unlike the other paintings that deck the halls of the noble house – this one is enchantingly atmospheric, haunting terror, a gasping torrent of fear amid the pleasantudes of smirking portraits and aristocratic abstracts. It speaks to him, and he speaks to it.
The aether hums to another galaxy, a dreaming drumbeat pulse that resonates in his ears, his jaws, his veins. It is a song, a dirge unto the bleakness of the unknown which you dare not touch in your worst imaginings – and the beauty in it that waits beneath jaws of a bewildering, lachrymose beyond.
It is silent despite these wonderings between the folds of flesh and spirit – where the aether nestles like a pit of black vipers, as it does in the hollows of his flesh. The noise does not escape his throat, where it grows like an impending thunderhead, black and unfurling. It dreams of great stones rising from the bruising blues of the vortex's lining, of red sore suns bleeding light from its most desolate corners, of things that flutter, not unlike birds, not unlike fish, over the violet-eyed haze of drifting islands. The sands are acidic sheens of vapor rolling, devouring, choking, and the blackness which waits – well, we know it, do you?
He has closed his eyes then, but a servant arrives at his side and clears his throat. Glass rattles and the echo dies, and Erasmus, eyes still entangled with chaining voids, looks to him like shifting shadows at the end of a windowless hallway. The servant's breath catches in his throat, but he remembers - “Could I interest you in a drink, sir?” and though his words threaten to stumble over one another as he is nearly swept into a celestial chasm, one that bites and gnashes but promises things beyond dreams, he ushers the question like it is his last confident breath in a dying world. Erasmus looks to the drinks that gleam in the golden light, watching their contents swirl like glimmering cosmos. For a moment he lingers between sapphire and emerald, something picking at the back of his skull like a needle prodding for a memory, before he selects the oceanic brew.
The servant does not wait to move on. Before he does, something unconsciously slips into his eyes like a second pilot, and for a fleeting second it is discomfort, denial, and demure, then it is gone again.
When the servant's back is turned to Erasmus, the thing looks back to the painting and drinks deep of the tincture.
─ this is where it starts, this is where it will end here comes the moon again ─
☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "Too much / of a good thing will chew you up and swallow you whole. / The moon is in your house and has nothing to say / about all your nonsense. Now may be a good time to go / on a long journey. The stars think you need to clear your head. / The stars think you need to run."
Solterran parties are gilded nightmares, when you get a good look at them.
That is what Ishak says, anyways. I try not to look at them to hard, so I can’t speak to the veracity of that statement (and Ishak is not always an honest man); I have always been content to quietly observe, to linger on the edges – at the walls - without looking too hard or too deep. I have been learning, lately, that it is very difficult to unsee things after you have seen them once.
(I am trying to forget, but, like a red-hot brand burned into the back of my mind, I can’t forget anything. If I look too deeply – too deeply at the party, at my siblings, at the whispers on the lips of the gathered nobles, brought together from all four courts – I am afraid of what I will see. It is better to keep my eyes closed and remain ignorant.
Ishak says that it is that quality of mine that gives him the most trouble. I could do, he insists, with a bit more awareness.
I’m not sure who I would become if I opened my eyes any further.)
So – blossoms braided loosely into my hair, stride guarded, posture exactly demanding enough to denote me a host (but subdued, compared to most of my gathered relatives) – I press my way through the crowds, which part easily (most of the time) to allow me to pass. Ishak is only a step behind me, his eyes scanning each and every gathered figure in much the same way that he looks at a concealed knife or a dark alleyway; his stare catches on someone (I am not paying enough attention to know who), and his lips prick up at an odd angle. He brushes up against me, the gentle touch just enough to tell me that he intends to investigate, and then he is gone, disappearing in the swarm of bodies with unnerving ease.
I am not alarmed. Ishak is always nearby (unless he isn’t – but that is rare), whether I can actually see him or not, and I spent years unguarded (to his chagrin) regardless.
Through the window, I catch sight of the courtyard; my stare falls on Hagar and then Corradh. Adonai is at the other end of the hall, looking quite like a statue himself. A part of me contemplates – briefly – collecting all my courage and approaching my brother, asking him the question that has been on the tip of my tongue since he fell ill, but I am not nearly brave enough for that. (And – it would be tactless, here. I am not naïve enough to forget that there are eyes and ears everywhere.) I saw Pilate near the entrance, greeting the guests (and indulging in the drinks). I do not know exactly what they are serving at the bar, but I know that I am not interested in putting anything that my brother has mixed into my mouth.
I know him a bit too well for that.
Finally, I decide to slip up a staircase, towards one of the areas I suspect will be quieter. There are more servants gathered on the second floor, and fewer partygoers; most of them have remained on the ground floor, or in the courtyard, where most of the party is taking place. It will be more crowded later in the evening, when more people have gathered, but, for now, it is relatively quiet.
I slip out and onto the largest balcony, which unfortunately subjects me to some of the sounds from the courtyard below – but, from above, they are not quite so jarring. A few people have already gathered; I think that I spot a few sets of lovers in secluded areas, whispering sweet nothings from beneath the shade of potted fig trees and glittery, hanging décor. A pair of noblemen are discussing business – loudly, in a way that suggests they want to be heard – from the railing; I think that I catch one of them looking back at me, almost purposefully, but I opt to pretend I didn’t notice. A group of girls, young and dressed in obnoxiously ornate outfits with elaborate jewelry, giggle amongst themselves; they raise their eyes to me, and I think that they whisper something, but I ignore them entirely.
I find a secluded spot on the far left and settle near the rails, staring down at the figures in the courtyard below. I can pick out Corradh, who looks more canvas than man, and Hagar, who has attracted several people to her booth in spite of its secluded location thanks to her undeniable allure, and, for a moment, I feel the bitter-bite sensation of envy coiling around my throat.
(Of all the curses that must have been laid upon my house, that has always been the most pervasive.)
But I shake it off – quickly, because I have practiced – and distract myself with the heavy chill of night air and the cloudless sky above.
@Raziel || <3 || clementine von radics, "your latest horoscope"
Once upon a time there was a little blind girl, and she lived in a little cottage, in a great big woods with her mother. The little girl liked to collect flowers and mushrooms and butterflies and bring them back to her mother as gifts. She loved to play and explore, and one day she said to her mother, “mammy, when I grow up, I want to go to the city and plant flowers in the streets.”
The little girl could not see, however, that the woods were growing darker and darker by the day. The mother, knowing her little girl would never be able to protect herself from the beasts that dwelled within, brought her down to the cellar and told her, “now, little flower, trust your mother, for I know best. You’ll be safe down here forevermore…”
She hadn’t really meant forever… had she?
Yarrow holds her breath and thrusts herself up against the heavy, diagonal wooden doors. She expects them to protest, to clank with the nauseating and cruel sound of iron chain links rasping together, as they had time and time before. But as she presses her nose, gentle but firm, against the oak, they lift a little, blowing cold air across her face.
And when she grunts, shouldering through, they burst open and this time she does not squeal, recoil and let them slam shut again, cursing the radiant flood of light she could not see but could feel. This time she tumbles from the cellar, landing on her knees in the untouched snow.
Morning sun touches her, strewn across her mottled form in slants and dapples shaped by the near-naked canopy above. Though the air is clean and cold, and snowflakes settle, soft and fat, into the nooks of skin and bark and petal, she is warmer than she has been in a long, long time.
She does not blink as she might if she could, hard and forceful, having just slipped through the sill between such shuttered darkness and untouched white. But her body tightens around itself as she finds her feet, knees quaking. Muscles throb as she traces a slow, orientating circle in the snow, chest heaving.
The invocation mammy grows expectant and heavy in her throat, like a stuck morsel or a squeezing hand.
But, she knows. Perhaps, she’s known for days, as she grew more and more hungry and more and more sure of her imminent withering away.
It dies on her tongue, releasing as a soft whimper instead as she turns her head towards the lean-to cottage, painted in peeling and sun-bleached cobalt-blue and bumblebee-yellow. Its shutters clack gently against the walls as the wind pushes and pulls. The door, too, creaks its soft-spoken and eerie language—wide open, with nothing left inside.
She cannot see it, but she imagines as it yawns, open and closed, what reveals behind it’s warped and rain-rotten jaws is a black much blacker than even her own. An abyss. Beyond those walls—once, Home—is now a Cimmerian depth so complete it would eat her whole again. Swallow her back down into its dank and sunless gut. Into the place she had been planted, like a stunted peony, amongst the spores and damp pages of old botany tomes, and instead of be safe from the sundry monsters, she became sad.
She runs—
She runs from the emptiness. She runs from the wolves and from the wraiths; from the way she knows that none of them are real—except that they are to her, and always have been. Have been the architecture of her life, of her solitude and of her love. The needle and thread that seamed her to a world made just for her—a fairytale that never had its happy ending because there was never going to be a prince, or a kiss, or a sweet revival from a glass coffin. Nothing that would not be reckoned with destruction in the end; tithes paid for disobedience and ingratitude.
Dry and brittle snares of bramble and tree-limb grab and pull at her, digging deep into the darkened plain of cheek and curve of shoulder, drawing thin scratches that bead with blood. She runs down overgrown paths still etched in her mind from girlhood—places she had walked in her reveries for years. Tracing the familiar knolls, crouching in favoured hiding spots and running her nose over the grass and bark and starflower petals.
With some luck, winter had drawn its scythe across Viride, clearing her way except for the odd fallen log that trips her up, scraping her knees as she scrambles for purchase.
She runs until she feels her heart might burst, lungs stinging with each gasp of cold air. The world whirls around her; looms and leans. In the shadows she cannot see, but can feel, as sure as the bruises throbbing to life on her skin, eidolon take shape and disperse. Hulking beasts and fanged creatures—darknesses, shades of everything that was and was not—facts and fictions, and the weird places where they touched and became her fable—come together like jaws around her.
She shivers, the Yarrow-flower, leaning against the rough bark of a stripped oak tree, pressing her floral face against its ungiving stiffness. She tries to forget what happened to the little girl when she wandered into the woods.
☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "I heard the incessant dissolving of silk— / I felt my heart growing so old in real time. / Her heart must be ash where her body lies burned. / What hope lets your hands rake the cold in real time? / Now Friend, the Belovèd has stolen your words— / Read slowly: The plot will unfold in real time."
Save for the desert blooms braided into my hair – a shock of pastel pink against the ink-black and brown, more unsightly than I would like to admit (but sweetly-scented) -, I have not bothered to prepare for the party at all.
(The flowers themselves only came with some insistence. In the winter, the blooms that are common in summer and spring are considerably more expensive. I thought that they would better-suit my sisters the moment that I saw them, but they had already been prepared – and I felt some small, prickling desire for recognition as an Ieshan, or a noble at least. I had hoped that they would be yellow, which would, at least, be tolerable, but they came out as pink as the sunrise blush; and, even as he braided them into my mane, Ishak had struggled to keep a straight face, and admitted, in the end, that they did not suit me at all.)
I have very little interest in my brother’s parties, illustrious and exciting though they may be. I lack my siblings’ sociability; I know that I am better now at interacting with others than I was as a girl, but I still catch myself forgetting to react to things, to smile when a smile is expected and to force a demure laugh at someone’s attempt at humor, amusing or otherwise. I am grateful, I suppose, that certain social cues are formulaic, but they make me innately aware of all the ways that this world is not built for me. I wish, quite often, that I didn’t possess any desire to adhere to them; I wish that I could finally abandon my futile search for normalcy. I know I won’t, though. Not until I can make myself content with being half-filled.
I don’t like the parties because they are so full of obligations. I doubt that Pilate cares about my attendance; I love my brother, but we have never been close. (And I still remember the way that he – that all of my brothers – teased me relentlessly, when I was a girl. It was Miriam who protected me from them. I don’t think I’ve ever made it up to her.) I love my brother, but I am not sure that we share much more than our family name. If I spent the evening in my room, nose buried in a textbook or sorting through my herbs, I doubt he would even bother to be offended.
But I am sure that Ishak will attend, if only to pry, and I do feel some quiet need to assert myself as an Ieshan. (I have no desire to wane further than I have already.) Besides. There is some, small part of me that longs for my family to act like a family, if only for an evening.
It is another one of those futile things that I hope for. Another obsession with normalcy. I have a feeling that, if my siblings could ever get along, they would no longer be themselves.
The halls are swarmed with servants, busily preparing for the party. The noise is headache-inducing, so I slip outside and into the courtyard, which is no less busy but has the benefit of being outdoors. It is still sickly hot – winters are only cold at night, in the desert -, but I barely notice; I spend most afternoons in the hospital, which is stuffier and hotter by far. I recognize a few of the faces among the servants worriedly attempting to arrange the decorations, largely from Ishak’s anecdotes. If I were them, I’d be worried too. Pilate takes considerable pride in his ability to throw a party, and I am not sure that I want to know how he would react to any failure to meet his (exceptionally high) standards.
I consider them briefly, but it is the figure of Hagar, who seems to be working away at…something…that catches my eye. I have never spoken to Hagar as much as Miriam, but I feel like I have seen less of her than usual lately. I have seen less of all of my siblings lately.
I pause, for a moment, at the edge of the courtyard, and then, possessed by some desire I can’t quite put to words, I stride up to her, eyeing her current project. “Hagar?” I incline my head at her, a moment too late to seem entirely natural; I have to remind myself of what curiosity looks like. “What are you working on?”
I suspect that it is for the party. I have never asked Hagar what she thinks of them, but I suspect that she enjoys them – and, even if she doesn’t, she is Pilate’s twin, so I am sure that she will take part regardless.
I am not sure that I am actually curious – but I am one of the hosts, whether I like it or not, and I’m sure that it would be form to be out of the loop entirely.
Snow dusts the rooflines, and the thin sunlight turns everything to old gold and ancient diamonds. It’s a cold day for this early in the season, enough that even the raven’s breath is visible, as are all the prayers of the monks in their mountain monastery. In the low streets near the markets and docks all the little dragons are curled atop stoves, dreaming of warm food and warm days.
And what is Amaroq, in this slumbering story, but the wolf that waits outside the door?
Today the sleepers need not fear him. Today he prowls far from the city, where the forests of shaggy pine march right up to the coast, and the only beaches are hidden coves with pebbles like teeth and driftwood like bones, buried in fog. He is hungry, but not enough to hunt; there are deer and elk in the forest, and seals in the sea, but their big dark eyes do not watch him pass. Today he is nothing but another unicorn, and when is a unicorn something for a wild thing to fear?
☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות "The mouth was open / stretched wide in a call or howl / (there was no tongue) / of agony, ultimate / command or simple famine. / The canine teeth ranged back / into the throat and vanished. / The mouth was filled with darkness. / The darkness in the open mouth / uttered itself, pushing / aside the light."
It is mid-afternoon – the hottest part of the day, even in winter – and I am standing in front of my sister’s door, freshly-washed. (My hair is still wet, at the roots, but I think that I managed to scrub the smell of hospital and blood from it; the moment that I walked in the doors, this morning, I had a near-dead patient all but thrust upon me. Something about a fight in the marketplace. I didn’t care enough to pay attention to the specifics, but I noticed the man’s jutting ribs and the way that Ishak’s stare seemed to darken a shade during the doctor’s explanation.)
I pace a few steps to the left, then a few steps to the right. I don’t know how long it has been since I have seen Miriam. It could have been days, or weeks – time has blended together, recently.
Ishak is on the next floor down. Last I saw him, he was speaking with one of the maids, a familiar and easy smile pulled taut across his lips. It’s the sort of look he gets on his face when he is prying for information, but he doesn’t want to make it too obvious. (It’s obvious to me, but, then, I am the exception to his rule.) I don’t know what it says about my family that my guard feels the need to spy in our own house. Nothing good, I’m sure; but what’s worse is that I didn’t stop him.
What’s worse, or worst of all – is that I feel the same way.
My gaze drifts to the knocker. I pull it up halfway, then leave it suspended in mid-air, unwilling to take that last step and let it drop. (I can imagine the sound in the hallway; deafening-loud and sudden as a shock against the empty silence.)
I don’t feel the sisterly obligation that I know I should towards Miriam. I am not at her door for her, even though I should be. Of all my siblings, I have always loved her best, and, if ever I could ache for anyone, I want to believe that I could ache for her; but, even now, even as she seems to be slipping from my grasp (and everyone else’s), I don’t ache. Not like I should. Any pain I feel is purely self-interested – if I were to trace the tangle of emotions that roil quietly in my chest as I stand in front of her doorway, I am sure that they would lead right back to me, not Miriam.
The realization should be a horrible one, but I am not surprised by it. I know that she has sacrificed much for us, and I-
I am from a family of priests, and I have never learned to sacrifice at all.
(But this isn’t – shouldn’t – be about me. She has been troubled, recently, and not in a way that I know how to fix. I considered bringing her something, because I have seen enough visiting families to know that they tend to bring gifts to ailing relatives, but, when I tried to decide what I should bring, it occurred to me that I don’t even know what Miriam likes. Sometimes I wonder if I even like Miriam – or if I just like what she does for me.)
I take a breath that rattles in my throat and drop the knocker. It resounds, and somehow the noise is more jarring than I expected; I don’t wince, because I never wince, but my teeth grind together in the back of my jaw. “Miriam?”
I say it like I don’t know if she is there or not, but I know that she is. I’m not sure if that is some kind of strange courtesy or- or if I am hoping, although I know it is futile, that she is out.
I want to see my sister. I don’t want to see what I’m anticipating. It’s a rather strange feeling, though it is one that just might be normal – I have seen it on the faces of strangers in the moments before I lead them into the operating room, or into a back room at the end of the hospice ward.
The sentiment is almost comforting. But I have always had a strong stomach; it troubles me more than it soothes me that I am troubled at all.
It is harder to lie, that way; and it is much harder to forget.
@Miriam || first posts are an Experience, huh || atwood, "projected slide of an unknown soldier"
And there's a millipede
Angry on your carpet
Oh and I must admit
He's staring with a vengeance
✧
I
wonder why there are so many dead things in the forest.
Is it because the leaves are coated in skins of frost, the air so cold everything glistens? Does winter collect dead things like a poacher collects furs? I look to Rook with these silent questions but he is staring down instead, down at the carcass, nothing but pale fur and a stomach torn wide open and guts strewn out on display.
My mask flips over my head as I peer down at it too. I prod hesitantly at a patch of matted fur that would blend near perfectly into the snow, were it not so covered with blood splatter.
It's eviscerated. Steam rises in fluttering waves off of the guts—entrails—and I turn my nose away, faintly disgusted. The marmots and hares the boys dissected back home weren't quite so torn and bloody.
E-vis-cer-a-ted. The word has a strange loveliness to it. Like:
Ex-san-gui-na-tion.
Bird—be quiet. I startle before looking guiltily towards Rook's dark, stiff back. I forget, sometimes, that he can hear me if I'm not careful enough. I back away from the dead thing until my tail presses into the golden fringe of a witch hazel.
I almost think back you were the one who taught those words to me until the carcass grows bloodier from farther away, and Rook grows a little bit less like a deer.
Biting my tongue, I remind myself that he hates death more than he hates me, and that I don't want him to think me the same as Ma.
"Fine," I say instead, my voice bouncing eerily from tree to tree. "I'll bury it."
Rook nods, his white antlers skating distractedly over my neck, before he turns away into the shadow of a snow-laden oak and takes all of his thoughts with him.
On the days that Rook is quiet, it's because he's remembered something he wishes he hasn't.
✦
I approach the torn up carcass like I'm afraid of it, but really it's because of the stench. It's perhaps a day past freshly dead, and even with the snow the smell of decay coats the inside of my nose like one of Elder's infernal perfumes, the ones in the colorful bottles she delights in making herself.
Sighing, I pull my mask as low as it will go over my face, inhale the familiar scent of feathers and bone and old death (like leather, or paper left out too long in the sun), and lean over to start digging the little body out from its thick shroud of snow.
It shouldn't be left there in the open. When I had buried the kingfisher, Rook had made me take it all the way out to the riverbed and scrape away layers of hard earth until I'd reached the soft mud beneath. I'd marked the grave with a smooth stone, and covered it all over with moss.
I'd seen Elder do the same many times, over graves both big and small, because even emptied bodies, she'd said, needed to be properly buried so that our magic (her magic) had no places to fester like rot.
When I've cleared away enough snow so that the carcass can be moved, I drag it gingerly out by its bushy, black-striped tail, and tell myself that there aren't any eyes watching me from the dark between the trees.
« r » | @Isolt
(the dead thing is a grey fox, though bird doesn't know this yet!)
aybe it comes to no surprise to the wandering mind, that beauty attracts those who are intimately acquainted with it. The nature of it is as varied as the individual who is often posed the question, what do you find beautiful, some will follow the inevitable and often tragic trend of following the masses. Subscribing to the trend of popular, in order to conform and seek appropriate and objectively manufactured approval by those who would sooner watch paint dry than attempt to obtain a name to a carbon copy face.
Beauty is subjective, and Orias finds the abstract even more so. Things and souls whose magnificence is sharp and startling, otherworldly. Things which persist to defy the conventional, make the mind question whether the depths of the universe's creativity and diversity have an end. Whether the being in front of them is truth or the sum of a magnificent illusion. They wouldn't question the validity of the latter, as they wind through crystal formations, their gait smoothe as silk. Hair flowing as the maiden of the sky's angora tips liquid starlight into the cosmos.
At the beginning of their excursion into this palace of mirrors and wonders, they had seen only reflections of themselves. Winking back at them, others no more than a smirking countenence of mirth and curiousity. Judging, they'd like to say, measuring the sum of their adventures. Briefly, he hopes that it's rather bland on their palate, even if reflections typically do not have taste for fine things and adventuring. Slowly however, as the crystals had changed shape, so too had their own reflection staring back. There are glimpses of his younger self, bounding out of view and back again, all long legs and no coordination.
Then of course, there are glimpses of their future self — arguably the most tragic thing of all to find in an otherwise pristine palace of glass — eyes listless and legs crooked, there is no orb between their gold crown to glean the secrets of the cosmos. Just them, stripped back, watching the sand in the hourglass turn to dust. Orias has only an annoyed huff of breath for those mirror images, at least they keep their cheekbones. It's somewhat of a palm, the same way one shadows their face as they slip away from a rather unsightly altercation. Orias walks until they're surrounded by crystal structures. Some smooth, others jagged, each one strange and brilliant by design.
They gaze deep, and watch as their life gazes back. A gilt hoof raises upon it's sharp tips as they play the image of a relaxed adventurer, but they're anything but. There are secrets here.
"Why?" Spoken a tthe end of a wondering exhale, an ear crooked in thought. An ever changing island is a mystery to be sure, but islands don't just change shape and if it is the work of the Gods, seldom do they often do things on a whim. But what do they know, these Gods are not theirs by design, by blood and by loyalty and the Gods of their homeland are far more tempestous. Playing with an island seems rather quaint.
When Erasmus found him on the shore of Vitreus Lake, there was a moment almost made awful by the way he was no longer a he at all but beneath, an it. For the Erasmus-That-Was, cradling his most recent memories, would have recognized the dappled gold and the tattooed scarab immediately. He would have recalled him from his many gamblings at the White Scarab, and his next thought would have been green eyes in the incensed dark, beautiful green eyes and sharp things he'd gladly bleed himself on, but then his third thought would have been action. He would have run to find help – maybe a medic, maybe an able-bodied pegasus that could rush him to the Hospital in Tarastella. There may have been more thoughts as well in between, thoughts of “what happened to you,” or thoughts of “I must move him from the water before it drags more of his bandages away” or thoughts of how August's bindings revealed just enough red, red, just enough to be tempting but not enough to peel away his sanity.
It was not The-Boy-That-Was-Erasmus that found August. It was something worse.
It found him, appetite panging as it always did against the hollow cathedral of his ribs. His core rounded like a viper, rattling and rolling heat and need when it saw red taint the waters and it thought of the toothy things in the darkest currents, toothy things that weren't sharks but weren't not sharks. They would have the golden man, if it didn't first. And there were no witnesses, no one that would see it carving the still hot-blood of a man who was well on his way out anyways. The last thing that could ever possibly serve it well however was if August was left to those waters while he devoured him, and then whatever waded there just as hungrily would surely yank the body into the depths. He didn't doubt that they hadn't smelled the blood already and were coming. The body was still warm, still malleable, and the blood was still rushing through his veins – though when it pressed its skull to the hollow behind his shoulder, it could hear that the blood was running very slowly, but very steadily.
It would have to kill him quickly if it meant not spoiling the meat.
So it moved, hooves clicking against the water that lapped hungrily at the bleeding wounds, and attempted to swing August's body from the water with a harsh shove. Aether bled from his pores – surging, aiding, their maddening hum just as loud as it was in his own ears with deplorable hunger and deprivation – it passed beneath his heaviest parts, and all at once thrusted the mass over the rocks and sand. When August shifted, it heard him cough, saw him stir, and its eyes grew wild and wide with a primal, lusting fury – and it reached his curved fangs for the crook of his neck but – but –
The scent of Solterran incense wafted to it gently through the halls of the memories of What-Was, as though Erasmus screamed from the deep, dark crypt of whatever scraps remained of him. It filtered its hunger through memories of the Scarab, of drinks and cards and smoky laughter in the night, of green eyes and golden filigree and then dappled gold and pale hair shining in the shadows. A name escapes him verily, as though it matters if he had one, as though it wouldn't devour named things just as well as nameless things. It doesn't need a name, thinks a strain of aether that yearns for culture, that remembers being the acid wind that roved over its hostile planet but wishes that it had been life instead, wishes that it had been the thrumming pulse of an ocean teeming with life as well as death. The thing that became Erasmus snorted harshly, and the strain of aether that yearns for blood and the necessity of death scornfully obliges, shirks the image of August's wounds from his mind. It drags his body farther from the waters, but it is not enough to save a man, only stave off death while it searches for help. And so it did.
**********
It had taken three of them: Erasmus, Bernard, and another Tartaros patron that the aether had not searched deep enough for the name of, but they had stolen August out of the haze of dusky evening and into the starless night that shielded them from curious eyes. They had moved August by what Bernard amusedly referred to as a 'stretcher' – by some arcane piece of old work he found in the vineyard, a wooden cart that just narrowly faced a year before dilapidation, and despite greasing its wheels it was certain they lessened its life with the weight. It did well regardless, except that they once had to beat the wheel loose when it was jammed with prairie grass, and it had jostled August a little the entire way, but it did so without much complaint otherwise. They had then carried him down, down, down between them, through a narrow passage hidden on the edge of the Night Court, and the no-name fellow had slipped at some point and artlessly cracked August's head against the wet sandstone and Bernard had hissed through grit teeth, “you're an impudent ass, you know that?”
They brought him to the Fighter's quarters, a grand room that could be mistaken for a medic's bunker. (Though that was only sidestepped from the truth.) It was a clean room, except for a massive bloodstain that sprawled the stone floor at the foot of one of the three slabs there. Along one wall, shelves were bolstered with apothecary jars filled with dried herbs and flowers as well as a multitude of volumes on the healing and hallucinogenic properties of each. Some jars were empty amber cases in the light cast by the tall lamps in the corners, upon which Bernard made quick work striking a flame in. The southern wall bordered the limestone slabs that served as operating tables, and were decked by shelves that armed rudimentary medical tools. Against the wall ahead of them were a spaced line of cots with maroon sheets – they found dyed sheets were better than the horror a pained, concussed fighter may feel sleeping on an already bloodstained white sheet – and between each, a stand that offered place for necessities and a lantern. They dropped August on one of these cots as delicately as they could (which wasn't very delicately at all) and the springs groaned beneath his weight but held, offering him back as they uncoiled with a creak.
Erasmus dismissed the no-name man then, and asked Bernard quietly for “belladonna and sea moss.”
**********
The aether did not come from a place like the world that was ward to Novus. It did not come from a place that was walked by creatures quite so developed as those who lived in Denocte, or Delumine, or Tarastella, or Solterra, or even The Wilds. The aether learned how to breathe the air they breathed, to speak the words they spoke, to walk on nimble legs and move as they moved. It was tedious work often, but it would never have been able to do so without the bountiful bank that was the mind of the Erasmus-That-Was. It would tap into those stores as a parasite leeching life from the core of a hidden world, tonguing feelers through each subject it felt lost to in this foreign space that offered little relief. It did it then, in that dark space beneath the Night Markets, working against its deplorable hunger that ached and ached.
Erasmus, before he had chosen to travel abroad on that fateful trip that brought him to the aether he was destined to, had done well to garner a plentiful understanding of herbs. Many were toxic, but he had served well to even investigate the extent of their poisonous properties – understanding how much was too much or how much was too little, and the truth of how he found these limits is a horror in itself for another day. Today, or tonight, whatever it was as it was unclear in these underground passages, the knowledge of those limits were useful not only to it, but to August. It had given him a decent dose of what he called belladonna between the man's feverish wakes. Belladonna is sweet, almost to the point of tartness, a dark mauve potion he poured from a black wine bottle each time August could muster the strength to raise his head before returning to his dreams. Dreams which, between the potion and the fever, may have blended with reality either euphoric or horrifically, or both. The lucid nature of these dreams were a paltry side effect induced by the already affected state of his mind. The wine ultimately would serve as a fever reducer and a muscle relaxer.
It's unclear how long they kept August there, in the bleak underworld. Erasmus rested in a cot beside him, his back to the cold limestone wall, stirring when the golden man would groan in his sleep. He had placed the damp sea moss in the places that Isra's bindings had peeled from, and all was seeming to do well. The bottle of Belladonna sat half empty on the bedside table, prettily plum in the amber light cast by the lantern. He waited now, patiently, counting the drip-drip-drip-drips that echoed from deeper in Tartaros between lapses of unconsciousness. Somewhere in the Grand Hall, a few patrons played a friendly game of poker, and now and then the quietly revolving sounds of laughter, failure, and victory would echo softly through the crypts.
Erasmus grinned as August stirred with softer movements now, as the feverish tremblings and shudders ceased over time, and raised his head so that his black mane cascaded in waves over his shoulder. He had snuffed the lamp in his own corner hours ago, the only light in the chamber cast by two oil lamps on the opposing wall and the soft glow of the lantern that burnished the wounded in honeyed hues. Shadows curled meekly about Erasmus, aether coiled about him like resting vipers, and the darkness that swallowed him made the sharp brightness of his crescent moon pupils appear supernaturally insidious, full still with unrelenting and bitter hunger. "so he wakes," his voice is a lull, almost a song spoken from the many-breathed depths of aether shadow, a softness that romances the inexorable ambiance of predatory peril. he did not move any other way, lounging like a feral cat on the only semi-comfortable cot.
