Posted by: Noëlle - 07-11-2020, 01:05 AM - Forum: Archives
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She watches from the sidelines
A subtle frown carves out between her brows, her jaw tightens and her limbs straighten and clutch with each anticipated hit. There are a few who practice in the ring, dirt at their hooves. Teachers scolding students, and opponents assigning purpose to each breath, and every movement.
Some dance with feral intent, poised where others struggle to define their violent reckoning. Though not to the degree of a starved wolf, or the rage of a beast – this chaos is restrained within the ring, and forgoes the blood, teeth and claws of an animal.
Though, they are not far from it – she thinks to herself. Perhaps they are training for greatness, for noble causes. Warriors protecting their people, their Queen – though rumor has it the Queen is more than capable of protecting herself.
The day is running low, and the sea ushers a cool chill – a return of death, and snow to entomb the living – winter at its heels.
There are only a few of them now, practicing in the pit. The public has largely returned to their warm homes, for food and drink – combatants resuming to tend to superficial wounds. Or more likely off to drink in company.
Curiosity draws her past the opening against the wooden barricade. Hair pulled back in taught braids that give the false impression of a bulging neck. The mare’s steps are hesitant, as she begins to walk along its edges. Trying not to stare at the pair grunting as they sought purchase for an opening. Mouths frothed, and skin wet.
Great big stakes are planted at various ends. Some of them crossed, others of lines and targets. Their skin is weathered with scrapes and cuts. They begin to loom as oppressive figures in the dim light.
She picks up her speed, feeling the earth underneath her with an exited magnetism. Propelling high steps, and a firm drive. She thinks of green, electrified clouds – and the brightness of bodies flashing for a moment, and dissolving the next.
Why did she fight? She thinks of her mother, plunging head first into an inescapable ending. She is lost in those strange clouds – she can never recall her features, past the frame of an ever-changing body, or the horn attached to a chain. Memories of a child, and a dead relic haunt each step.
Her breath picks up, as she darts towards one of these wooden polls. Stops with her hind legs, and comes to a sliding halt. Suddenly uncertain of her intentions, her purpose for being drawn into a game she would have otherwise ignored.
She walks up to the pole, gathers her limbs and rears with a grunt. Stretches out one of her forelimbs, and ‘boops’ the target painted closest to her height. When she lands, a half-hearted laugh escapes her.
« there will come a ruler whose brow is laid in thorn »
—
T
onight, I will go to the festival.
There is an old saying that there is no party like a Solterran one—and, while us of the Sun Court are well versed in our boasts, in this, at least, you must admit we are correct.
There is no party like a Solterran party.
The equinoctial festivals are the only events of the solar year where the rich and the poor mingle as one. It was custom, during the old days, for the masters of the house to shed their finery for plain white robes and seat their servants at their table, piled high with delicacies and an endless flow of spirits. The festival itself had been closer to bacchanalia than celebration, the streets running red with wine, children tucked to bed at sunset, white-robed lords and their ruby-clad mistresses stealing away in the haze of dusk like thieves, or a pair of young lovers.
I remember one spring festival I had made Mernatius sit at the head of our table. He had resisted, flustered, until I had pushed a fistful of grapes into his mouth, sealing it until he had swallowed. Father had looked on in amusement as he'd served Mernatius, and his father, chalices heavy with our finest wine, looking less like a lord in his plain linen robes and more like a man than I had ever seen him, his cheeks bright with blood, his smile less of a heavy thing.
The scene had delighted me, until Pilate had squalled from our mother's breast. I had sealed his mouth shut with a purple, syrupy fig.
The way to the markets are lit by thin black sconces that reach skywards in branchlike appendages, spiderwebbing into an arching canopy. Thimble-sized candles flicker within each knot, a thousand beating hearts. Wax drips down in clumping white tear-lines, staining a festival-goer's clean linens.
Pearl-shaped sapphires fall in gold chains down my brow and chest. They clink together like bells as I walk, pushed along by the rowdy procession. Some already hold wineglasses, brought, I assume, from home.
The last time I had worn such finery had been at my father's burial.
Soon, the first of the vendors' brightly coloured stalls loom over the widening path. I do not know which one to stop at, so I stop at none and continue being swept along, like a pauper prince. So far I have not been recognised. I have yet to decide if I am disheartened or not.
A dark figure tugs the edge of a pale cape loftily past me, and I wonder if it is Pilate. Long ago we had come to these festivals together.
My lips lift into a sneer. Long ago is not long ago enough.
El Rey heaves himself over the canyon rocks like a thing that is not meant to do so because he is not, never has been, and never will be. His skeleton feels like iron weapons curled in the shape of a man. He wonders if he will live to write about it.
I think I deserve this, he thinks. But maybe not. Maybe he’s being unfair.
We all do things because other people want us to, don’t we? It just happens that way sometimes. We’re just made that way, at least some of us are.
It feels like a lie, wrapped around his windpipe like a funnel of sand. He knows it to be false.
He has so much to live for, Rey thinks. There must be something to live for that is not my death. One day I will come to an end and if it is not today it will be another day, and this man will have nothing left to live for if I am it.
I wonder if I am it.
He thinks about asking the other man, but he is running, wheezing and clambering up the sandstone like a great black slug, death gaining momentum on his trail of slime rather than slipping on it.
The black bull slides down a mess of rocks and when he lands in the clearing he is bleeding. It feels like being trapped in a great great dish. He wonders if it could fill with his blood, if maybe this brother o mine will make it so.
Anyway, he caught up with me.
”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“ I pledge you now, to death they all are bound,
Battle-fury is still an aching drumbeat in her bones when her father's staff drape the regalia across her shoulders, coat her skin in gold-dust, and paint bloody lines of red in a half-moon below her eyes. Her teeth throb like a mouthful of hearts as they braid her hair and whisper the rumors of the court into her ears. Amaunet wants to tear into them like a feral thing, a monstrous thing, a thing that is not bruised and battered from the tournament.
They will never see your wounds, they whisper in her ears like ghosts, all they will see is gold. She tries not to hate them, these dove-like fools, flitting on the edge of her sword and calling it a willow-tree.
Amaunet wants her wounds and her gold laid bare for the world to see. She wants to be a fury of a girl, a god, a sand-hurricane in the crowds of mortal men bloated with liquor and greed. She wants to be chaos, and embers, and a storm of a girl.
And she is chaos when she steps through the palace doors and walks down the stairs like a bit of smoke instead of flesh. Her skin is gilded in dew-gold and gold-dust. The cloak trailing in her wake where a shadow should be (she is too bright for even that bit of darkness to hold on to) is as blood-red as the tournament sands. The expanse of her wings does not settle, not even when the crowd pushes into her space like a pack jackals.
She is unashamed, brazen, and as furious as a star in the clouded brightness of the crowd. She is teeth instead of the simpering smiles of the nobility gathering in corners like mice and hens. Like a bear, a wolf, a lion, she circles the room all lighting energy without a direction.
It boils in her skin and shivers down her spine like a caress. It begs like a broken thing on bloody knees for anything, anything at all but tameness draped in gold.
Amaunet listens like a god to her magic and the lighting.
When she passes by him, the unicorn with the forest-green eyes an a horn as pale white as ancient bone, Amaunet lets her magic turn to prayer. She greets him as a storm might, with a bared throat and a smile that challenges instead of welcomes. “You look as bored as I feel.” A purr, a warning, and a promise all at once.
Because they don't have to be, not tonight, with liquor enough to conquer a world running in rivers around them.
And she wonders if he has been playing the game for as long as she has.
n the span of an hour Caine has toasted to a jester, a beheaded marchioness, a puppeteer with three painted (living) marionettes tied to his strings, and a child moaning balefully beneath a floating white sheet, which he was later informed (kindly, by the child's grandmother) was a ghost.
As for himself, he had dusted off his crow-feather mask, draped his cloak between his wings so that it covered the scars, and manipulated the amount of shadow leaking off of him so that everything below his withers became writhing, amorphous darkness. His hair he had left alone, a curtain of liquidy black, pulled sleepily over an eye.
When other party-goers politely inquired as to what he was, he politely inquired what they thought he was.
The answers were amusing and various, yet thematically similar: a raven, a dead raven, a magician, the Shadow Man, a (dark) faerie prince, the reaper. A girl with a lacey white mask over her eyes had nudged her younger brother, the one who had answered reaper, and whispered: "No reaper would look like him, Jem. If they did, then we would all be in trouble." The brother had scoffed; the girl's cheeks had pinked beneath her mask.
In response, he had bent down towards her and conjured a red butterfly to flutter past her nose. "It's precisely because we look like this that you should be troubled. Never trust too pretty a thing." He had said it joylessly, but all she'd heard was his words. Staring wide-eyed at the butterfly, rendered just as it had been in her dream, she had bowed quickly before dragging her brother after her back into the nebulous crowds.
He has somehow polished off only one glass of wine throughout these episodic encounters. The wine, fragrant and sweet, has done nothing but chew a hole into his chest.
(A hole he is afraid to call longing.)
A floating fox-mask jostles roughly into Caine's wing, sending his glass shattering, and the smile he has been wearing like decoration stretches wan and thin, like taffy. He bends down and stares at the jagged glass pieces strewn across the cobblestones.
He supposes he ought to discard of them.
Sighing, he shakes off his cloak, dispelling the shadows (the ones nearest to him shiver with the sudden cold) and sweeps the broken glass gingerly into it. He stands, wrapping the cloak with its heart of glass carefully into squares; he does not know what next to do. His lessons in etiquette had not been quite so conclusive. And night markets sold everything but bins for disposal.
So he moves to the fringes of the crowd, near the mouth of the city's walls, where cobblestone gave to rubble and soft swells of sand.
It is faintly ridiculous, he knows, but he can think of no better solution than a burial.
@Lucinda I spent a long time describing a mind-bending gauntlet filled with a blood-thirsty forest full of hungry animals. This is a journey from land to another via an spell/enchanted forest. Unfortunately for Diaval, the exit of the forest was abrupt as the magic ceases to exist once in Novus. Essentially he has fallen out of midair and into the lantern-filled shallows of Vitreus Lake. :/
It is a strange thing to watch a dragon and not feel a Biblical sort of fear, terror in the form of condemnation, punishment, enlightenment. He knows the tremendous beast would carry him if he were to only ask—in fact, through their Bond, he feels Damascus’ frustration he has not done so—but Vercingtorix feels a prideful twinge. To become powerless before a monster—
It isn’t like that, Damascus reminds him, for what must be the hundredth time. A Bond does not mean to Torix what it means to the monster—and even that thought, so clipped and cruel registers in Damascus’ mind, and a feeling of anger wafts through their Bond like a scent. I am not a monster.
No. He is the compilation of every broken piece of Vercingtorix’s Soul, left to manifest itself in some hellish pit. The field Vercingtorix walks through in his travels is brittle, and yellow. In Oresziah, he knows, it would be time for harvest. Vercingtorix stares out at the rolling hills and Damascus flies above; he dips and turns and, with eyes like a falcon’s, seeks out prey. Occasionally he deviates from their path and comes back with bloodied jaws; a bison or elk having fallen hapless victim to the beast’s endless appetite. Yet, the sun is beginning to set and Vercingtorix decides it is better to stop rather than continue. They find a small creek that must brach, somewhere, off the Rapax. Vercingtorix starts a small fire and settles for the evening.
The smoke sails up into the sky.
It Damascus who says through their Bond, We are not alone. But Torix cannot see beyond the ring of light and so, he only waits. Damascus is settled beside him and, as far as he can discern, he has no reason to fear whatever lurks beyond the fire's light.
divinity will stain your fingers and mouth like a pomegranate; it will swallow you whole and spit you out
Vercingtorix comes here because it is where she used to dance.
The tavern is ramshackle, old, on the lower end of the economic scale. He had been in Novus long enough to follow her here, one night; and it had been too difficult for him to mend the void, come forth from the darkness, and speak to her. She had seemed impossibly far away; planets; stars. Yes, Torix remembers. It had been like looking upon the cool, distant face of a star.
Her eyes had even glanced, briefly, over him. He had watched her dance, from the back. He’d worn a hood, of course, and stood among the thong of patrons. He simply looked as if he belonged; her eyes had not even lingered on him.
In her ribbons, and her war point, and the cry of her broken heart.
It was watching her dance that told Torix she didn’t love him anymore.
He supposes, of course, it was for the better. He never could have loved her the way he wanted to; the way she deserved to be love. He stares, now, at the stage where other dancers dance. They are outfitted in silks, painted with metallic colours, performing acrobatics. Yes. It was for the better, that she didn’t love him anymore. He could never forgive her, for the lies, for being—for being a woman, not his companion, not his trusted soldier in arms.
But when Vercingtorix dreams; when he romanticises; it is always her. He hates himself for it, of course. But somewhere along the line, Bondike had become his dream, his partner. They were meant to have spent their lives together, twin sides of the same blade. They might have married; had children. But that was besides the point. That only kept up an image, a front. They were always destined to come back to one another—
The dancers bow, and file out of stage. The next performer comes on, and Vercingtorix goes to the bar. A seed of anger is growing under his breast; but the seed is an ember, and it burns, and burns, and burns.
Damascus is in the mountains, on the cliffsides, staring out at the city from a distance. He is watching, and feeling all of Vercingtorix’s hurt. Through their Bond he says, We could always find her. We could always apologise.
Torix is taken aback at how quickly he had gone from a singular “me” to a sudden “we.” He says nothing back; he only imagines all the ways it would go poorly and how in no reality does it go well. So he orders a drink, and watches the next set of dancers as they begin to perform in the tavern. He knows, of course, she is far from here; he knows, of course, she is taken by the sea.
And that, too, is something he cannot forgive himself for. But he is not so lost in his thoughts, in his regret, that he does not realise he isn't alone at the bar. No. There is someone else there, who seems as heavy as he feels. Quietly, he orders them a drink and toasts to them.
The broken find the broken. That's the way of the world.
"Torix." || @Morrighan
wine-dark and wanting. you will reach for it again and again, greedy human fingers clutching at everything you can reach. the divine will curl its way through your veins and take you over, and it will not leave you quietly. i feel divinity in my bones like aching; like fire.
When Vercingtorix finds the chestnut stallion dead in the desert, he is struck by morbid curiosity. It is a soldier’s old habit that ensures he catalogues the dead; he searches for identification and, when he does not find it, he reads instead for the story written in the soft sand. At first glance, there is nothing but chaos and the dark crimson stain of blood (nearly black, baked into the sand). Vultures, too, have found the corpse. The flurry of their activity has masked the signs of the chestnut’s death at first glance.
But, with patience, Vercingtorix’s eyes track the tale. Turning to follow the direction the tracks had come, Torix finds three pairs of hoof-prints. But when he turns around to follow the journey as it transpired—forward—he discovers there is a transition where one pair of prints seems to disappear. They are replaced by a large cat’s soft pads.
Yes, Vercingtorix thinks. There is a monster in this story.
He observes the corpse again. The second time Torix glances over the scene, he sees something he hadn’t before; a fine spray of silver liquid. It is dried now, down into the sand, but something about it strikes him as odd.
It is magic.
Damascus’s voice is unbidden in his mind. Torix, internally, does everything but snarl. He begins to turn away, but already the light of the sun is gone and the dragon, in a flurry of sand, has landed a small distance from him.
“Don’t you want to find it?” Damascus asks.
“Why would I?”
Even as Torix says it, tensely, he begins to realise all the reasons he would want to. Clearly, the scene is an unnatural one; a magic one. Everything seems more a hallucination than a reality; Damascus has stooped his massive head to appraise his Bonded. Torix refuses to look the great beast in the eyes.
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
The dragon sighs, heavily, and stares at the chestnut corpse.
“It doesn’t work like that.” The dragon nearly sounds hurt. “I can’t just hypnotise you. You’re… you’re… mine." It comes out broken, possessive, deep. The voice of the devil claiming sin.
Vercingtorix turns away, and begins to follow the trail of silver blood. Behind him, in a sound of horrendous crunching, Damascus devours the chestnut corpse.
Perhaps, Vercingtorix thinks, there is more than one monster in this story.
He hears the sound of Damascus’s wings beating the air; a sound like a hurricane. And then the dragon is above him, in the sky, higher and higher. They follow the trail of blood, together, through the Mors—with Damascus informing Torix of the canyon in the distance—and the sun beginning to rise on the distant horizon. Their journey is lit by the stars and moon, everything cool silver.
The trail leads them to the canyon; and deeper, deeper.
Vercingtorix is surprised with the prints (they are often wiped by sand, now, and if not for the blood he would have lost the trail entirely) transition from paws to hooves again.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Everything around them is walled. Everything around them holds the memory of vicious water, carving through the earth. The trail twists and turns and Vercingtorix smells water, now, in earnest. The desert spring is surrounded by foliage, although it is far too small to be considered an oasis.
This, he thinks, is where the trail ends.
This, he thinks, is where the chapter changes.
Damascus lands on the precipice of the canyon above. Beneath his weight, rocks and sand give way and cascade to the bottom. Vercingtorix turns his eyes upon the Pegasus sheltered there."You’re hurt.” Vercingtorix says. And then, in a voice distrustful and guilting, “You killed that man.”
There is a monster in this story.
Sometimes, though, he comes gilded in gold.
Sometimes, though, he comes with words.
"Speech." || @Warset
stories are wild creatures. when you let them loose who knows what kind of havoc they might wreak?
There is a story they tell the young boys of Oresziah of the magic inherent in all women’s souls, and how the sea sings to them; they tell a story of a mother leaving her son to the waves. They say that when she touched the sea she became salt, and dissolved.
Torix has never been one for fables and wives’ tales. But something about it speaks to him as he prowls along the Denocte’s coast, along the cove that reaches inward toward the Arma Mountains. He has studied, quite religiously, the map of Novus’s terrain. He likes this place despite the fact it is all so unfamiliar, despite the sea is so volatile against the jagged rocks of the cliffsides.
Further out, Damascus is flying above the waves. He is hunting; dolphins; whales. The silhouette is massive, and dark, and strange.
Torix is still uncertain what to think of a creature he might have hunted, once. But when the dragon screams out over the sea, the sound feels like his own soul crying out, fracturing. When he closes his eyes, he can fear the wind, the spray of water, the rush.
