"your body, a drug for mine; two bodies moving in space and time"
Stars wink down on them when they step from the grandiose masquerade hall. Eros is alight with music, with moonlight. His breath is hot on Aion’s neck as he giggles into his ear—”Let’s explore.” So he stumbles down the steps toward the markets, leaning into his fiancé for support. Underneath the silver-studded sky, it’s just them; the songs and voices around the lovers fade into the hum of cicadas, and the lights seem dimmer when they could be looking at each other instead.
Tonight liquid fire runs in his veins, something wild. His heart thrums with the essence of summer. The air is warm on their skin, but Eros’ searing kisses down Aion’s jaw and throat are warmer. Only the roaring bonfires that bracket a singular tent at the market’s edge can rival his heat. He’s drawn to them, to their energy, to their sinuous tendrils. “What’s in here?,” he asks of the glittering cloth. @aion
He stands in the sea, the waves crashing against his chest. It makes him feel alive and there is a sort of calling that he cannot deny from the water. Something calls to him, it beckons him to step further into the sea so the current might take him out to sea. If he were having depressive thoughts, he might have headed the calling of the sea. But Rhone does not wish to die today. He wishes for life and purpose. He wants to learn more about this new place – Novus. It’s a strange and interesting place, one that he wishes he could understand. It would take time, he supposed.
There’s a sound that echos behind him and Rhone flicks his ears to capture the sound. Perhaps it is just the echo of the sea against the wall of rocks to his back. Perhaps, even it’s the sound of another coming to make sure that he is quite alright. Or just maybe, it is someone who wishes to die…someone that he is here to save.
Slowly his body turns towards the shore, his eyes searching for the source of the noise. He doesn’t find anyone lurking there, starting at him or watching him from afar. Instead, he is greeted by a seagull who sits on a rock, the bird’s eyes watching him as if he’s trying to predict where the stallion will go next.
Rhone offers the bird a smile as the bird takes flight and flies away. He remembers Ariannah and her affinity for the air. He remembers watching her fly above him in the Northern Kingdom of Hoof Prince. He remembers he love he had for her…and the pain he felt when she left.
But Rhone does not let these thoughts dampen his mood. Instead he takes a step forward, closing the distance between himself and the shore until the water rest just above his hocks. Tail flicks at the sea water, the spray entering his eyes and making them burn. He blinks once or twice, his breath exhaled in a sigh. Still no one awaits him on the shore.
There came a point, with his new and gnawing worry, where the press and noise of the castle became too much for Acton.
This was a new and foreboding development in his character. Normally he thrived in the center of the chaos (thrived even moreso as the cause of it), loved the limelight like a moth loved the flame. The chaos of a good party - and this was setting up to be a good one - was usually his ambrosia.
But tonight, with the Ghost still heavy on his mind, he slipped out the castle doors and welcomed the dark of the night, its cooler touch on his burning skin. He followed his feet to the Marketplace, his favorite haunt, returned to its former glory. Not even this bought him full solace; the buckskin kept expecting to see a flicker of silver beyond each tent-flap, eyes like blue ice just on the other side of each crowd.
Luckily for all parties it was not Raum he eventually spotted, but Pavetta.
With a last glance around (not wary, he hoped, so much as cunning the way a fox must be cunning) he cut across the crowd toward her, navigating the stream of people with the ease of familiarity.
She looked resplendent, as she always did, even when he wasn’t already three sheets to the wind. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he told her as he reached her, but of course he didn’t mean it. It didn’t take his gunpowder grin or the way he pressed his shoulder against hers as he stepped alongside to see that.
Maybe the third time would be the charm, and this time he could finish the night without spilling embarrassing secrets or winding up with a particularly nasty hangover.
The candy floss starts like a dusting of snow. Each flake of it floats lazily down and each flake is drastically different from the last. In some places the sugar changes from pink, to white, to licorice. Other times the flakes of sugar seem to stop falling and it seems as if this path has led to nowhere at all.
The path turns a corner and soon the flurry of sugar is a blizzard. There is nothing but sugar floss flakes and air that seems more and more precious as the storm of confectionery sugar continues. It piles into great mounds on the ground and soon everything is sticky where water from the outside world has leaked through the walls of this strange maze.
It seems as if this path might become a pit of quick-sand like sugar.
Walking though the drifts of sugar will certainly be no easy take for in some place they are shoulder height and the ceiling seems so very low. Perhaps a sweet tooth isn't all it was meant to be?
Only when the path starts to slope downwards does the blizzard abate back to flurries of spindled sugar. When the air finally clears and all the sugar settles there are two directions left to go.
The first path leads straight into the earth. It's not dark as a tunnel should be but lit strangely with insects that glow and pulse as they crawl in and out of the packed dirt walls. Precious stones jut out form the walls, as sharp and deadly as they are lovely. They shimmer like stars and constellations. It's easy to wonder how deep this tunnel might lead.
The second pathway leads back up over one of the hills the maze has been built over. Stairs have been cut into the dirt and they loop back and forth like ribbon candy. It seems strange that there are stairs at all, the slope is not that steep. But despite the low grade of the hill it is still impossible to see where that tangle of stairs might lead.
@Caine
RULES
This part of the maze will break off into two choices. The first is a tunnel underground. The second path is a pathway of stairs. Please pick one and post it at the end of your reply. Replies are due by 1/12
For this path I've send each participant 20 signos since it's still continuing.
At first it seems as if the mirror path will be nothing more than another clever, cruel trick of the maze. The way turns in upon itself over and over again. For a while there are only left turns to take, and then just as suddenly there are only right turns to take.
On and on and goes like this, aimless circles where the only companions to be found are reflections, glass-song and between that strange periods of a silence thick enough to drown.
In one area there are crooked, waving mirrors in every direction but left. They make the body appear look and short, stooped and crippled. Another place has mirrors that reflect back strange things: dragons and birds float and fly where horse legs should move.
Finally though the pathway straightens out and then divides into a forked ended. There is left and right and nothing else.
To the right the mirrors are swallowed up by a darkness so thick that nothing shines. And at first it might look as if this pathway is nothing more than a way back to the beginning. But! Further down something starts to glow blue and when that glowing orb travels up the wall and spins around and around and around a trail of light follows it like a the tail of a comet.
At first the left path is nothing but light, bright enough to blind. It looks like the center of the sun. But, this path changes too. The light dims to something soft and almost sweet and grass starts to grow thick and bright where the glass ends. Down the path mushrooms start to bloom in the grass. Each is larger than the last (and more brightly colored) and it's easy to wonder how large these mushrooms might grow as the path travels deeper into the maze.
@Shrike @Toulouse
RULES
This part of the maze will break off into two choices. The first is comet and galaxy path. The second path is full of mushrooms. Please pick one and post it at the end of your reply. Replies are due by 1/12
For this path I've send each participant 20 signos since it's still continuing.
The skull mask is pearl upon her face. Its teeth sharp as they curl about her slim nose (that emerges like a tongue from the mask’s bone maw). The skull is alabaster to her obsidian skin. All across its smooth surface painted and carved stars and moons gleam in gold and black. The mask is night, the mask is bone and its skull is fierce. Feathers plume like a spiked crown from its poll and beads hang to clack and clink with the rhythm of her steps. The sounds they make are the snap of jaws unseen.
Each step is slow, as Leto drinks in the court. There is nothing about this girl that belongs here. She is a creature of the fringes, one born to sleep with stars as her roof and trees as her walls. She makes her beds in swamps and upon mountains. She dances to the beat of animal skin drums and the music of stars. Chants are upon her tongue all the night long. The stars and the earth are her gods.
Leto is not made for the silk and glitter of a ball. All that adorns her is earth born and sky fallen. Pearls gleam within the twines of her ebony mane. Their light dances across gold painted leaves that lie like daggers against the soft of her throat. Across her skin is a ritual display of litanies and blessings. Each is drawn in gold by Ilati hand, they curl like shining serpents and silver stars scratch their fires into the very substance of her obsidian skin.
Leto is the shadow of the night, her black is the endless, falling spaces between stars. She is the black star, the darkness that pulls you in, in, in. And she stands upon the edges of the vibrant ballroom, both ancient and young. She is as endless as the stars, as old as the earth. She is knit together with stardust and ancient magic.
From the black orbits of her skull mask her eyes gleam, silver and bright. Those eyes are starfire burning, bright and fierce. Galaxies twist and turn within that gaze and nebulae gleam with light as old as time. Starfire roars in Leto’s ears and in her blood. Her heartbeat is a tattoo against the curve of her breastbone, beating ivory blood about her body harder and harder still.
The violin music tugs and begs and weaves like ribbons about her slender torso and just, just when she may succumb to this softer sound (softer than drums and the shattering of stars), Leto looks up, up, up. Feathers arch back with grace to touch along the curve of her spine. The tattoos weave up her throat, her jaw and on they go, endless and bright and savage. But none are as savage as her eyes that light the ceilings and watch the window that draws in Denocte’s night and stars.
Upon her lips is a chant, fearsome and wonderful, soft as song, terrible as supernovas. But suddenly she turns, pressing, weaving and dancing into the throng. Her limbs are the drums of the deep, her bones the rattle of percussion, her blood the keening of starfire. The violins will do, but for tonight alone, for above, so very high above, the stars are shifting.
@Asterion - finally! i get to write someone else with him - i think its always been Flora! (bc Raum would just be disgustingly mean to him lbh)
hen he closes his eyes, he can still see the trees burning.
Every breath brings new smoke into his lungs, coating his throat with ash; the taste is bitter and acrid on his tongue.
He can't help but feel as if he's standing in a skeleton, looking at a sea of burned bodies that extend as far as he can see around him. Their trunks were twisted and warped, their branches broken and burned. Everything around him is black, black and sooty and charred to a crisp. A shiver goes up the Regent’s spine. Unable to look any more, his eyes tremble shut.
His sigh is lost in the wind whispering through the dry, dead, blackened branches of the trees.
For a minute, he's still. Only his mind wanders, opening, expanding, probing the dead blades of grass for life, for meaning. The magic trickles out of him, subtly at first, like a seasonal spring after the first rain, hardly perceptible.
But slowly, gradually, it begins to flow more naturally.
Flowers bloom around his hooves, tiny blades of grass sprouting and growing in an instant. The colors are bright amidst the ash of the destroyed forest floor, creating a vibrant spot of life in a desolate land. Slowly, slowly the flowers and grass begin to expand around him, turning the blackened soil into new life.
When Ipomoea opens his eyes it's as if he’s standing in a miniature meadow, tired but happy. A smile quirks at the corner of his lips as he looks over his handiwork.
It’s a small start - but it’s something.
A twig snaps somewhere in the distance, breaking his concentration. The magic stutters to a stop, slipping through his grasp like water - and then it’s gone. He frowns as the circle of flowers stops growing, disappointment blossoming in his chest. He had hoped to do more, to grow more -
He hadn’t expected to see someone else wandering the empty shell of a forest - maybe they hadn’t yet heard of the tragedy that had taken place here, didn’t yet know that this part of the forest was restricted. ’Go away,’ he cries in his mind, ’there’s nothing left to see here, it’s ruined, the beauty is all gone.’
But he doesn’t say the words out loud. He turns to the source of the noise instead, cerise eyes scanning the shadows.
“Hello?” he calls, his voice and skin alike trembling. The summer air was warm, the sun bright overhead, but the magic had left him feeling feeble and cold. “Is someone there?”
Amaroq is a shadow in the deeper colors of the night, almost invisible against the whitecaps that race to thrust themselves against the shore. The silver flecks across his withers might be nothing more than moonlight, his pale hair only trailing eelgrass far beneath the surface.
The hunger in his eyes is the liveliest thing about him. But for it he might be flotsam washed from some distant wreck, unremarkable. Except, that is, for the wrongness of his color, and the frigid sea around him when all the saltwater should be warm with summer. There is no mistaking him in this landscape, as unnatural as a polar bear in a pine forest. That is why he waits well beyond the breakers.
He has been watching the citadel. Amaroq has never seen anything like it, those sheer walls of bleached stone, set with lanterns like eyes aglow. He has never seen anything like the scale of the docks, the number of horses and the clamor they make. He wonders how soft they are.
For now they are too many, and he alone, weary and thin from his weeks of swimming. There had been no moonlight when he began; the ice was thin and splintered and the sun did not set for days. Now there are stars above him again, cold as the pinpricks of his eyes, unblinking as he dips below the surface smooth as a seal and vanishes from view.
It is cool beneath the waves. In the darkness of the summer sea he returns to the island south of the city, where he has made his temporary home. It is thick with silver-barked oak and they watch like sentinels as he steps from the sea, streaming with water, his breath spilling cold silver into the air. His horn juts from his brow like a mast of bone.
Amaroq paces like a tiger down the shore, his prints crackling into frost and rime on the sand. His tail lashes behind him, and his eyes do not leave the shining city on the distant shore.
ooc: to any interested he's on the big island south of Denocte here map!
The Night Court is bustling with activity. The mascaraed has started and it took some time for Katniss to want to attend. Things were done so differently here. Never had she been to a party as grand as this one. Never had such wordly goods ever been important to her. Tables with sweets and punches were something straight out of a fairy tale for Katniss. Horses dressed in cloaks and masks was something that seemed to stem from imagination. Surely such beauty cannot be real? But it is real. This is real and Katniss needs to face that things are different here. Instead of instinct fighting the changes, maybe she should just embrace them.
She steps into the Night Court Keep, her eyes dancing over the decorations and the people. She comes up to the first table and peers at the masks that are laid out before her. Many have always seen the mare as a fighter, a warrior who only knows battle and death. But many do not know the true mare behind the mask, and so, she opts for a mask adorned in peacock feathers. It embraces happiness and joy, something she hopes to one day find here in Novus.
Once her mask is on, she steps into the masquerade and listens as the music strums loudly in the background. She can see the performers and for a moment, her eyes are captivated and yet, something across the room catches her attention. She cannot help the way a smile crosses her lips, the way his presence seems to just alleviate any sort of worry. How he has this power over her is still a mystery.
Her steps are purposeful as she makes her way towards him, bypassing the tables of refreshments and others who seem like they want to chat with her tonight. Something else is on her mind and only he can ease it. She comes to stand alongside him, her eyes slowly turning to look at him. “Why did you not tell me you were a king?” She supposed in the grand scheme of things it didn’t matter, but when she found out the secret he had simply failed to mention, she saw more of herself in him. He ruled his kingdom much like she had once done – as their equal (or at least that is what it appeared to be). She could admire him for that.
He stands just outside of the court, his eyes heavy, his heart broken. Already he misses his family, the lovers he has left behind and the children that will never know where he is. And yet, there is something freeing about being here now. He feels almost unencumbered. It is as if a heavy weight has lifted from his shoulders at the knowledge that no one here knew him. No one here knew that he was once a king, a failed king at that. Here, he was a nobody. He was just another individual who had wandered into this court seeking sanctuary.
His chest heaves with breath as he comes to a halt. Eyes scan horizon and he can see the rising of the sun. A new day as begun and for even just a moment, he closes his eyes to say a small prayer to Brighton. He knows the god does not rule here, but he still worships the god as much now as he did when he was nothing but a boy. He owes his magic to Brighton and that is a gift he can never repay.
When his prayer comes to a close, he takes a step forward his head held high. His body exudes confidence, even if he is worried he will not find acceptance here. He supposes that any form of welcome might be better than a straight up rejection. Anything was better than wandering for a lifetime.
Stars wink down on them when they step from the grandiose masquerade hall. Eros is alight with music, with moonlight. His breath is hot on Aion’s neck as he giggles into his ear—
