"My heart is not in my throat.
It is pounding too hard,
secure in my chest,
no, the weight at the back of my throat
is not my heart."
Tell me your bad dreams and I will build you a man.
Tell me the things you love and hate and I will build you a man.
Tell me how all this, and everything else, matters very little when you are screaming at the void so hard your lungs pop and deflate like so many balloons on so many birthdays.
Paint him in like a thing out of a time, like a thing with a heavy head.
Paint him in like a falling star.
Paint him back out so you can forget his name and his wolf smile, his wild eyes like a trapped animal. Try to remember what it was. Try to forget what it was. None of it matters when you're screaming at the void.
He is the falling star, a thing out of time, a thing displaced. Andras is not conscious or at least not lucid. He has not been--conscious or lucid--since before... well, before. This does not change just because the crust of some other strange planet is rushing up to take him, to kiss his bones into dust and answer all of his impossibly morbid questions about death and dying with one clear, clangorous sentence: it is going to hurt.
He wakes just before the broken bones, tumbling and aching and he can't pinpoint what direction up is, just knows he has to find it. All the animal instinct Andras has left is begging him to live, live, live, here at the end. It does not need to yell for long.
There is the distinct sensation of suction, the loud crack of thunder as the air around him is suddenly pushed out of place. And then: light and color and silence. All around him is a black so dark it sings and the distinct, awful smell of stars expanding and collapsing and being born over and over again just as he is sure he is being born over and over and over again. Andras doesn't remember losing consciousness a second time but it must have happened.
Or, at the very least, he knows that he closes and opens his eyes and nothing happens. He closes and opens his eyes again, and is standing in a snowy plain surrounded by the stink of buffalo far older than he is, and a pounding in his head that he can hear over the meager but milling crowd. His first thought is "fuck this."
Paint in the bruises, paint in the seething and sizzling under his skin. Paint in the stern frown like your father used to give you and you have made some abomination that calls itself a man but not a man itself.
Andras takes off his glasses and brushes them gently with the tip of one ink-black feather.
His second thought, one that he says aloud: "Fine, I guess."
Ooc: feel free to pester him at will. or hug him. he could use both.
Time unwinds, as it can only do in dreams and fiction. Trees straighten as heavy coats of snow rise from their shoulders, thread by thread. Leaves take limp shape from the brown rot of decay, then solidify into orange and yellow, and finally they rise and embrace the limbs they once fell from. It unwinds and unwinds. Eik moves backwards, inhales turned to exhales and vice versa. Wounds dissolve, grief ignites from coals into flame then nothing at all-- waiting, as it was, for the next heartache.
It stops unwinding when the wedding is announced.
It is late summer, or maybe autumn-- he never understood how everyone else knew so certainly when one season ended and the other began. Love is still budding unspoken in his heart, the feeling at once painful and delightful. He does not think twice about leaving Solterra for a few days because everything is still right, everything is still normal and he has no idea how the world is about to flip itself upside down. He is just a boy who wants to learn how to dance so he may have another language with which to express that strange feeling taking root in his heart.
He leans forward uncertainly, hooves stopped neatly at the very edge of the dirt clearing as though to take that first step onto the dance floor was to hurtle himself towards a destiny that had not yet been fully considered.
"Mesnyi?" He has never said her name out loud before, had not thought to ask of its pronunciation in the few short letters they exchanged, and the letters all run together on his lips like a river. All he really knows about her is that on matters of dance, she is supposed to be one of the best.
E I K "The color of god is a stain
shaped to you like a grief not yet to come"
crash through the surface where they can't hurt us
T
here is peace here, even as Winter enfolds the land with its chill, leaving frost upon blades of grass, an encrusted platform where her pale hooves crunch. With each limping step, she is drawn further and further into the heart of Illuster Meadow, progressing over each gradual rise and fall of the land; then she stops. Kitt finds herself soaking in the simple beauty of this day, watching the Sun make its slow climb. With a deep breath, she inhales the cold scent of the meadow, then breathes out that solid intake, hoping to send with it her worries of the day, the thoughts that brought her distress, doubt. Always some here lately, things she could not help but hold on to, things that clung against her conscience. Progress with this adaptation seemed slow, it was much to take in, much to learn, to be born from one species to the next; it was so far her greatest challenge.
Even the simplest of task had been a learning curve, eating, drinking, what one might have given to watch her attempt to lap water from a creek. Nothing is the same.
From above, a flock of birds takes her attention, those that did not migrate to warmer climates for the season; creatures she could admire for that. Even though things were tough, not as easy, they stuck it out- she wanted to be like them. I should try harder, she thought to herself as they paraded over her. Rouge had been a welcome friend, even if she was not the best at conveying it, even if he did not realize how thankful she was for him to find her that day. Along the river, lost in her own pain and confusion, but most of all, just simply lost. If the russet male had not approached her so, Gods know what might have befallen her, in light of everything, she was still working on finding her hope. The amount she once held, unphased and unburden by the chaos around her. It could be that today, was that day, but let us not get ahead of ourselves.
Though the grass was drying, yellowed and brittle, it was still what she needed to fill her belly. Lowering her bleached head to snag several clutches of nourishment, some sticking out of her pale mouth as she chewed in slow, deliberate bites. Even now she couldn’t quite wrap her head around that fact that it tasted good, that plant matter was filling and wholesome and divine. A sigh of satisfaction takes her, amber eyes looking over the clearing, abandoned of the bright flowers that once grew, but not abandoned of bodies. The colored forms of her Kingdom mates could be seen in the distance, moving with intent, or congregating in small groups. The intent of the day was to gather supplies, plants that could be useful, why does she feel like she’s frozen then?
Several times she though to approach them, introduce herself with a smile, give her name as cheerfully as she had back home. Such bravery and confidence was hard to follow through with, so she remains still, an onlooker.
He wakes early, earlier than anyone gives him credit for.
The sky is still dark as he slips from the Scarab, and the air has a midwinter bite. But this near to the bay it is as temperate as anywhere in Denocte; tangible on the air is the sharp clean smell of pine and the almost metallic scent of a winter sea.
There is a fresh quilt of snow across the cobblestones and August relishes being the first to lay his tracks across it, though a pair of crows scolds him from a beech. He laughs back at them, then dips down an alley with a flick of his tail. His route is familiar as an alley-cats' when it steals from its mistress’s house, and his eyes are as keen; if there were any onlookers but birds it would be clear to them he knows where he’s headed.
As always August pauses when the narrow path spits him out into a wide street at the crest of a hill; it is not just the sea-breeze that suddenly whips at him that makes him catch his breath. No - it is the sight of the dock, all those jutting masts, a proud forest that rose and fell like breathing. His lungs fill like billowing sails, his eyes shine bright as the sun as it crests the horizon.
He might have stood there forever if a little jewel-bright dragon hadn’t darted up, snapping at his heels.
“Rude, Templeton,” he says, but he is grinning when the creature snorts a curl of smoke and leaps up to rest between his withers. With his passenger he walks on, down the hill between the buildings like a drop of sunlight until he stands amid the market stalls.
He is still one of the few on the streets; Denocte is a city of late nights and therefor late mornings, especially in this part of town. But the sellers are beginning to set out their wares, and another handful of dragons have joined him, multicolored jewels in the morning, following him like ducks follow a man with bread.
And it is bread he buys a moment later, exchanging a bright coin for a few loaves still warm from their clay oven. He might have spoken longer to Talan, the baker, if it hadn’t been for the clamor of the little dragons. “You’re worse than hens,” he tells them, but he crosses to a breeze-blocking tree and tears the first loaf into chunks, careful to be sure each dragon gets one.
August knows he is far from the only soft-hearted patron to feed the resident dragons - they do not know what hunger is - but he can’t begrudge them for it. He is a survivor, too, and anyway they make him laugh, they way they snarl and hiss like cats and lounge like tiny lions.
The city is starting to wake up, now, and the gulls and horses are all gabbering away, sharing the morning’s news, when he begins to wind back toward the Scarab with his basket of fresh bread. Each stride possesses the easy carelessness of a man well-comfortable in his place (and his body), and so when he freezes and swiftly turns his head it is almost startling, like a buck breaking for the treeline.
He thought he’d heard his name. That alone is not strange - August knows half the Night Court, and has his whole life - but it had sounded like his mother who’d said it.
He wishes as he stares at a blank expanse of eggshell-colored paper that he possessed any of Fiona’s talent with a pen. Asterion is no artist; he remembers how painstaking it had been to teach himself letters, the early wobbles of each line.
To turn such scratches into something beautiful feels well beyond him.
But he knows that tonight is not for perfection. It is for the fire crackling merrily in the grate, eating up cedar and pine and casting thick color and thicker shadows on the crowded hall. It is for the hum of laughter and the clatter of glasses, for cheeks warmed from wine and winter. At such events the king is always happy, but always a little uncomfortable. Never do simple pleasures seem to stay that way.
Try again, comes Cirrus’ voice, and he glances up to find her nipping her bright beak at the discarded quill. He has already attempted to draw her twice, and she has laughed, loud and rough, at each; now he huffs a breath at her and leans away from the table. “After a drink.” The big gull flicks a wing at him, but it is close enough to very well that he grins as he turns away.
For a moment his gaze drifts along those gathered, and his grin is as warm as the tapestried room. All is not well in Novus - but in here, tonight, it is close.
As he walks to a table groaning beneath the weight of casks of wine and mead a pair of pale wings catches his eye; at first he thinks Theodosia, or perhaps Israfel - but when his dark eyes regard the rest of her he finds a stranger. And yet she looks familiar, though her face is so striking he ought to have recognized it, snared in his memory the way such things were.
He finds he has drifted nearer; it would be strange, now, to suddenly turn away. So he tells himself when he closes the distance between them entirely until he is standing just over her shoulder, near enough to smell the unmistakably Terrastellan scent of her, woods and sea-wind and sweet strange smoke.
Do I know you? his eyes ask when they move to hers, but it is her paper he nods to, the last little bit of that grin still caught in the corner of his mouth. “What is that?”
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
Oh anxiety weighs heavy, heavy on her heart. Even as water rained down warm upon the gold of her skin, still it could not cleanse her of her fears as it did the dirt of the Denocte roads. Florentine is a bowstring, the tension of her muscles a plaintive note resounding through her body all the day long. It is a beautiful thing and a sorrowful thing and never has she felt older than she does this night.
Yet beneath the floor she drenches with her shower-slick body a Dusk festival continues in merry chaos. There is laughter that drifts through the tiled floor to drown out the sound of her violin-worries. There is the clank and clink of goblets and glass, a liquor-percussion to the sounds of myriad instruments singing and swelling through Terrastella’s halls.
She untangles her hair before a mirror and a girl of deepest gold but there is no phoenix girl standing there also. There is only a memory of fire and star-lit nights where that girl, Moira Tonnerre, should stand. The Dusk girl twines her hair as Moira taught her, for within its tight twines she lays dreams and hopes and vowes this year, as the previous, to stand upon the cliff-side and cast her prayers into the sea.
Yet, how much has changed!
And how much is still so strangely similar…
She is not a queen in love with a king as she once was. There is no gypsy boy who breaks her heart this year, but a fallen god instead, gone, in search of vengeance (though she fiercely wishes him well with every step he takes from her).
When she steps through the Great Hall doors, her smile tells nothing of the ghosts of tears that still glisten upon her cheeks. Flora is the girl who always leaves, the girl to run off on her adventures, she is unversed in being left. She thinks of her brother’s sad smile and his hurt touch when she told him of her leaving and oh how she never understood his pain - until now.
There is glitter in the gold of her eyelashes, snowflakes and dreams, catching the light from rippling fireplaces. She is achy and weary from travel and worry but the traveller girl smiles and laughs and drinks the warm mead passed her way. She dances because she danced when she saw him last and it feels right to dance again. As Flroentine moves, she forgets and as she forgets her smile grows brighter and warmer and her limbs so very much looser.
This girl is glitter (upon her lashes, upon her wings, upon the delicate lines of her face) and gold (over every part of her that light can touch) and her petals are a breeze, swirling about her. But then she stops and drinks some more, moving to the table of art. Her amethyst eyes glitter as she catches sight of another, “May I draw you?” She breathes with an impish smile and liquor warm breath. And she does not speak of her questionable art skills.
Michael comes back to the beach like a wave with a heart in its mouth, over and over again coughing up words he couldn’t say and things he could not put into words in the first place. Michael feeds things to the sea, first paper, then pen, sacrifice after sacrifice in the place of his body though it calls him toward the depths like a siren might. Its song is not kind and it is not beautiful but he is taken by it nonetheless. He could never say no to the waves except today when he does. Its chaos echoes loudly within him. His ribs are the boulders against which the waves crash.
There is snow even here. It lines the browning salt grass and tumbles in sheets down the dunes to its edge where high tide marked it unnecessary only hours before. Michael is ankle deep in wet sand and saltwater and the chill of it makes him dizzy.
He thinks, today of all days, he is useless.
In the end it was not Michael that was called to war, not Michael that was sent away to gather information, not Michael whose name was called to stand among his people (his people, he thinks with some softer version of bitterness, blurred at the edges and faded to gray) and pledge his heart and soul to danger, to country, to Isra.
To Isra. It rings loud, a church bell sounding in the tabernacle. It bounces back and forth in the empty room where Michael would put his heart if he knew where to find it - alas, like the sand it has been pulled out with the tide so many times that it has become displaced and unrecognizable. (An alarm, changing wildly in every cell of his body. His DNA is screaming under his gaze and it is saying what are we going to do, which is why, in the end, and as he always must, Michael returns to the sea.)
He hadn’t known that he would find her here and may not have come if he had. He is too alive right now, singing with every centimeter of his body. Michael’s fetlocks have long gone numb but still, he stands, searching the white crests of the waves for—he doesn’t know. He is struck again by just how often he doesn’t know.
@isra here is a starter that kind of got away from me?
There is a singing, a humming, a wailing that fills up the whole desert.
At first Abel thinks that he is going mad. It must be a curse from Caligo or from Solis - for surely he has sinned against both. Or perhaps it is only a result of his own grief, his own black and bloody hands, a pearl of sin that grew and grew into a black stone that sits in his mind and drags him down. It would not surprise him, to be cursed or to be mad.
It is not until he is nearly to the canyons that he remembers the stories of the Mors’ singing dunes. He’d thought them no more than the fairy-tales of Denocte - witches in the mountains, mermaids in the sea. Now, with a last bleary glance at the dunes falling away behind him, he shivers to think that those must be real, too.
And then he steps into the pathway that cuts through the canyons and he is swallowed up by silence.
But the wailing still echoes in his heart, in his blood. It beats with the words of the Ghost’s letter, ordering him to destroy the food stores of his home. It is winter, and the land is still recovering from saltwater floods and long-ago dragon-fire; to burn the food is to sentence the people to starve. His people, and Raum’s.
Dread fills up the hollows of his bones, sinks low his soul. He does not know the three he is to meet, but he distrusts them (he distrusts everyone, even himself). But he knows Denocte well, knows every shortcut and shadowed alley, knows the rounds of the guards and the ones easy enough to bribe.
Already he is walking down those paths in his mind, as his hooves echo on the red stone of the canyon. There is no wind here, and no shadow in the flat winter sunlight; it is an alien world, a tan and crimson tomb, ragged monoliths for long-dead gods.
At last he finds the cave, a yawning mouth with cool stale breath. He is the first to arrive and he stands just inside the black of the place, breathing slow, tense with disquiet, his heart closing up like a fist, like a dead baleful winter sun.
It is fitting, perhaps, that the first snowstorm comes upon Denocte riding upon a furious gale-wind. The morning brings the snow with it and suddenly the world goes from a soft, golden frost to a blanket of white that devours up every color the sun has painted with. Wind howls through the trees and the streets and it sounds like a pack of wolves has turned their hollow, hungry eyes to the city.
Were it any other court the wind would have found in the streets a hundred warm bodies to chill and a hundred merchants to terrorize. It's a blessing that most of the court has just laid down to rest and the streets are mostly silent below that howling, bitter wind. The few that were left in the streets can already be seen turning towards the alleys and any door that might open for them. Fires are blazing in hearths but the smoke can barely be seen through the snow falling thick and heavy.
For hours the snow falls. Soon it's reaching up toward the bottom of all the doors shut tight against the wind. Every remnant of the bonfires from the night before is buried under snow deep enough to prevent anyone less than a hardened warrior from finding them.
The snow falls....
and falls....
and falls...
And just when it seems the snow might fall forever it stops. One moment there is nothing but white in sight and the next there is all the bright colors of Denocte peaking out from the mountains of snow. The wind stops it's howling and the world is almost alive with the sounds of the city opening their homes to see what damage the storm has brought.
At first everyone sees only piles of snow that will make travel near impossible for days. Then they see the promise of another storm boiling towards them from the mountains. Everyone starts to turn back to their fires and their beds. Each hopes that by the night the snow will stop falling so that they might take once more to dancing in the streets on stages of white.
Everyone turns back to their homes but one---
There is in the center of the market a yearling trapped at the base of a statue. When the storm came he was sleeping in the streets with the other orphans. They left him behind when the storm came, for he is as gray as the stone on which he lays. He's hiding between the legs of the Caligo sculpture, tucked in with what flags and merchant wares he could find left over from a night of revelry. His fire is burning out. He doesn't have a single drop of energy left to fuel the flames after fighting to keep them alive during the snow. He looks cold, so very cold.
Night is starting to set and the storm over the mountains is starting to creep over distant lake. The yearling barely has the willpower to look at all the horses closing their doors; he does not want his heart to break again. Winter is creeping over his legs, his hips and he imagines he can feel it reaching out to blanket each of his ribs.
He does not think anyone has seen him. He think he's going to die with snow too deep for him to move around in all around him like a sea of white. Fat flakes of snow are starting to fall again and he thinks they will be the ice flowers that mark his grave.
He does not know that a single set of eyes has spotted him and his small, fading fire. But will those eyes decide to save him?
@Morrighan is among the horses looking out from houses to see just how much snow the storm has dropped in the streets. Where others fail to see the boy hiding at the stone hooves of his goddess Morrighan spots him. The yearling was caught unaware by the storm and he barely managed to wake soon enough to keep a small fire blazing throughout the storm. But now his fire is dying and winter is creeping through his body like acid.
Will Morrighan be able to get through the shoulder deep snow in time to save him? Or will she turn away and let fate do what it will to the trapped yearling?
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