The twilight does not come quietly with a whisper of humid summer breezes. The dying day does not go gently into the night with rosy pinks and dusky blues. The meadow does not seem sweetly scented with fresh blooming, night flowers.
In that between time where the world sky and time haven't yet changed over, there is a scent of fermented wine, bitter grapes and crystallized sugars. Instead of rose-golds and silver-purples there is a flash of white light that comes and goes as quickly as a shooting star and feels just as hot. All the long, tender grasses smoke and smolder in the aftermath.
There are tendrils of smoke that spiral up, up, up in patterns that once (long, long ago) might have signaled the start of war. And between all those hazy pillars of smoke there lays a unicorn with skin the color of watered down blood, almost crimson, almost mahogany, almost red enough to burn. Her horn is the only thing about her that catches the last molten and weak golden tones of the dying done. That spiral of bone almost seems alive in that between light, almost as it waivers and sways between the thick dreads of her mane like a snake that hasn't yet learned to detach it's jaw.
The unicorn starts to wake and suddenly her horn seems more like a sword than a snake when she lifts her long, curved neck from the bed of grasses. Everything about her moves strangely as she rises, her limbs like a river, her eyes like sharp talons, her tail like a storm, and her eyes like a moon. She stands as still as a deer and her teeth grind against each other like a wolf standing guard over the first kill of the winter. Her gaze flickers between afraid and enraged and her muscles tighten and loosen like a cobra waiting to spring an a bird waiting to flee.
“Thana.” She says, wondering briefly if that is her name or a world (and if she's a unicorn or a universe). The sound of her voice is nothing more than a dusky whisper, sharp as salt. She chews at the taste of her own voice, wondering why her lips taste like brine and rot and fire. She wonders too at the way she feels as if she has never really existed outside this moment under the twilight sky.
What she doesn't wonder at is the way all the grass she rose from turns black and dies.
“She was beautiful and terrifying, savage and pure.”
C
alliope finds herself at the lake not because it's beautiful or because it glints like steel on either side of those glass walls. She's knee deep in the marsh grass as far from the gold and wood pathway as one can possible be.
The lioness could care less about beauty or about the way fish flit like birds and other horses gasp and wonder at the secrets of the deep. She's here because of the glass feather that's clasped tight between her lips and the drops of blood it steal from her tight lips.
Here there was a war here that never came to a end. Here there is the almost dead trail of an immortal who still has secrets to spill (by blood or tongue). Calliope is here to hunt and hunting has never had anything to do with beauty and wealth. It has everything to do with black unicorns and white mares who live by vengeance and by blood.
The feather splashes into the water and sinks when she catches the scents lingering on a summer wind. Her eyes eyes spark with a storm and her lips clench like a lion's, as if there are fangs behind her smile instead of flat, rough teeth. Along her back lightning licks across her skin like a monster that lives only inside the scarred skin of Calliope.
Tonight she feels reckless and wild with the way parts of her skin don't feel like they belong to her anymore. She itches and she burns and she wants rivers of blood. Blood enough to drown a hundred gods in.
And so she's not surprised when Shrike joins her, surely they both feel the same hunger rumbling in their hearts-- the hunger of a bear and the fury of a lion. Calliope doesn't doubt that Shrike needs no words to read that spark and dance in her dark eyes to know what it is she has come here for.
Calliope, the black unicorn, the last of her kind, has come to hunt.
She was not quite perceptive enough (still too young, burning with hotter things) to notice when the maze-mare’s eyes switched from pleasure to pity. It wasn’t until the heat built and built and the smoke began to billow that Elif’s eagerness passed into unease. It was not until the guide began to choke on soot and her flowers sprout into flame that the pegasus’s eagerness slid into fear.
By then it was too late anyway, and there was nothing left to do but run, and singe her wing-tips, and swear below her breath until the maze spit her out into the cool evening air.
-
She still feels like swearing as she stands outside the maze, but her curiosity has her too fully caught to leave the area entirely. For the moment Elif only drifts outside the dark hedges, wondering what strange magic is occurring within those whispering leaves. She had been the only one to choose her path; were the others more successful? Oh, her blood still runs as hot as that burned-up passageway, and her skin still feels the bask of the sun on it despite the deepening evening.
So when she sees a familiar figure prowling the edges of the maze, separate from the pairs and groups of wandering-folk, it seems only natural to approach. Elif does not quite smile as she approaches Apolonia, but the look in her eye is appreciative when she spots the last of the sunlight glinting off the girl’s hurl-bat.
When she draws alongside, she tucks her chin toward her chest and glances side-long at her fellow Solterran, the expression in her green eyes marking her as more open and curious than her severely-short mane or tightly folded wings suggest. Elif still looks something of a hawk - but a fledgling one, smelling darkly of soot and magic.
“No luck for you, either?” she asks, and flicks a wingtip toward the hedge whose shadow they stand in. From somewhere within there is a terrific noise, an explosion or a scream, and Elif raises a brow. “Apolonia, isn’t it?”
This time there is no white winter storm, no monster behind a veil of clouds and lightning. This time there is no blood on birch-leaves, no ribs pressed against roots, no taste of copper and iron on his tongue or tight feel of pain in his lungs.
This time he knows he stands within one of Isra’s stories.
Oh, it is lovely and strange, and he welcomes these things into his heart with a feeling soft and heavy as sorrow. Against his breast rests a silver dagger, twined with vines; he knows he will not wear it much longer. It seems to know, too - the way it kisses cold against his skin like it remembers the taste of his blood, the way it seems almost to hum as though eager to be used again.
But not yet. It is early evening, the sun still bright across the plains below. Here in the mountains, it is not quite dark; the last rays of light are caught and tangled in the boughs of the trees. The pass looks nothing like what he remembers. Instead it has become a labyrinth.
Lysander makes his way beneath the summer branches and the murmur of green leaves. He strolls past gardens of gilt and gold, clearings where flowers nod their heads in a riot of color, past fountains and carvings and hedges. From somewhere out of sight there is the sound of music, the delicate soprano of a flute. He does not need to close his eyes to feel like he is caught in a memory of home; the smile that rises to his mouth is unbidden and true.
It is tucked into a quiet corner that he finds her, a bower of trailing vines and dusk-colored flowers. The summer sunlight is all golden, and it dapples her as it might the surface of the sea, glancing brightest at all off her horn.
“Queen Isra,” he says, and his smile curls into a grin. She looks far different than the flighty, fragile story-teller who had not wanted to meet his eye at a festival a year ago - different, even, than the unicorn who had bound his words and whispered him another story more recently still. Lysander does not hesitate when he closes the space between them, or touches his muzzle to her shoulder in greeting. When his glance passes over the chain wrapped around her leg, he is almost surprised - but perhaps more queens should wear reminders of what they had survived. “You have woven such a story tonight.”
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
Florentine stands amidst the long grasses. Her wing is a curious thing at her side. It is still all odd angles and yet more elegant than it had been before. More right.
Oh healing was a long, slow, slow process. The knitting of bone ached like needles in the deepest parts of the night. In brightest day it was a whisper, a twinge when her wing flexed, when the feathers extended out, out, out to catch the air.
Florentine looks up, her eyes closed as the breeze rushes forward. It comes to the girl of gold as if to encourage her up into the skies. Here, with eyes closed, the grasses are but clouds, the rustle of trees the rush of wind in her ears. In this moment a Pegasus can remember what it is to fly…
Yet this girl of twilight is so utterly grounded. Gravity laughs as it weaves its roots about her slender ankles. Her skull tilts, eyes opening to behold her brother’s castle. The last she looked upon the keep, she had been a queen. But now she stands, learning what it was to be a citizen once more.
Her blood is fire in her veins, it cries for freedom, for something other than what it has become. Florentine is running with the earth trembling at her feet, her heart lifts where her body cannot. The citadel looms, in shadow and beauty and candlelit gold. Its door is great and vast and gazes on her with a familiarity that is both warmth and ice.
To open it is nothing, to stand in its atrium is to stand amidst ghosts. Voices, memories, shadowed encounters, oh they fill each inch of the tiled floor. Slowly Florentine steps through every one of them, a ship parting the seas, she does not stop, not until she steps within the throne room and there her lips tip into a smile that hurts more acutely than her wing ever has. Before her stands a corporal being, flesh and bone where her memories (so newly regained) are not.
“Asterion.” His sister says all light and life and hidden sorrow.
Stalking across the wide-spread world of Novus was bearing no fruits for the efforts of the huntress. The daughter of the new sun trudged through the familiar stone surrounding that made up the Day Court. Efphion was a foreigner, and she was quickly losing patience with her hunt for her traitorous sister. She was as faithless as the mare who had defied Solis in the peaks on that day. The encounter had not amounted to much more than heated words between the two. Efphion did not bear the magic of her homeland, and she could not set Bexley albaze no matter how hot her fury burned. The fact that her wrath terrified a god spoke volumes to the violent creature. "Someone? Anyone who is a native of Solterra?" Efphion called out into the empty streets of the heart of Solterra. She needed to hire additional hands to find her sister and bring her justice.
Perhaps it would suit her to venture to the other courts, but she had no such luck in the free lands. If Noctiilucent was not in the Day Court, there was no real place Effy could think that she would be. This was her reason for being here, and wreaking havoc and burning those withing her gravity. They would be pulled into her orbit, and she would show her fury. As hot as the representation that Reth's god of the Sun had. Xamis had never spoken to Effy, and she felt bitter jealousy for the god that put forth effort into saving the blasphemous one. The comparison of the two daughters of the sun was one that would last an eternity. Her rage boiled through her as she lost patience in the heat of summer. "I'm willing to offer a trade for a service. Name your price!" Efphion roared once more into stillness and waves of heat.
my spirit's veering flight
like swallows under evening skies.
She woke up screaming with the sound of air still rushing past her ears like a haunting memory. But she was not falling, not plummeting toward the earth and the inevitable destruction of her. She woke up in the night, with the moonlight spilling silver pools across the wet ground and shadows growing in closer around her and she could not remember what had happened after the arrow entered her wing. The scream had died off her lips as her chest heaved with breath and her heart still raced as she pushed herself to more of an upright position.
Both of her wings were sprawled out at her sides and as she reflexively moved to press them against her a sharp pang radiated through the right one. Her wing crooked awkwardly—almost lazily—outward, with the arrow still pierced through the elbow joint. Unable to bend it, it was too far from her reach to properly inspect it. The pain was a throbbing sort of ache if she kept it still, but more than that she worried about permanent damage. What if they had managed to take her wings from her without actually removing them? She couldn't imagine which fate was worse, to have them and not be able to use them or not to have them at all.
Samaira turned her attention from the wing with a heavy breath, and got her first good look around. She hadn't a clue where she was or where the guards had gone. Perhaps she'd been abandoned someplace, but would they just leave her here to die? Surely they would not leave her with a chance of escape, regardless of her injury. Maybe, she thought, she was being observed, and her silver eyes warily flickered over the forest around her. Over the years her family had lived in many expansive, remote forests but this swamp was completely unfamiliar. It was humid, and alive with the sound of bugs. Where had she ended up?
A part of her said that she was taking this too well, that there was not enough flight instinct inside her. The pegasus wondered if she was still in shock, and she half expected another arrow to come flying toward her from the shadows. But it all seemed quiet, almost too quiet. Her heart still raced at the memory of being hunted, of being chased down like a criminal. To them she had been. It had been a crime for her to live at all, despite the fact that she had never bothered anyone. For her to simply breathe and walk was a felony.
Samaira remembered the dark look on Cassius' face as he turned her in to the guards searching her home. She had been foolish to let him in, but even still did her heart remember how it had felt for him. Her skin felt flushed, but from fever or emotion she did not know. Then she had a sudden thought: what if he was here, hiding, waiting, just beyond her sight? There was no way she could know what sort of deal he had struck when he went to the Warden about her location. Then she thought she heard a sound, and all of her muscles stiffened. "Who is there?" she asked to the trees, more bravely than she felt.
She is looking for him in the sea of people like a drowning man looks for air underwater - but what else is new?
The desperation she feels like a little knot in her chest is so familiar she almost doesn’t mind it. It’s stupid, it’s embarrassing, she hates it a little, in the half-hearted kind of way someone wants to hate something they need, but it’s hers. That is more than Bexley can say of almost anything. Even Apolonia.
Above her the vaulted ceiling twinkles with a thousand little lights, dark against the brick, like stars; an orchestra playing in the other room filters in through tiny spaces in the wall and the door, easy and quiet. Bexley cannot decide if it is beautiful or terrifying. She stands close to the wall, stalking the corners of the room like a predator, swishing that bright-white tail in uncontained agitation. Maybe it’s the press of bodies, maybe it’s the fact that she doesn’t know any of them. But something gnaws anxiety deep into her stomach.
She wears a mask made of gold and bone, which would be awfully morbid if it didn’t fit her as well it does, literally and metaphorically. The skull of some long-dead thing with sharp teeth, bleached pure white now from soap and sun, lays across the bridge of her face and covers everything but her eyes; the cracks in the bone are repaired with an inlay of gold, so that thing aureate threads go twisting and turning everywhere like a thousand streams criss-crossing a field. It is an almost-perfect mimicry of the circlet around Bexley's throat and the pale white marking that stretches over her face.
Some part of her, as always, begs to be recognized.
The orchestra picks up and the wail of a string instrument pierces through the walls. Bexley thinks she might know the song, but can’t think too much on it; she’s distracted immediately by a familiar flash of orange across the room and fixates on it with an instant grin.
Marisol does not wear a mask, other than the look of complacency always turning down her lips. It is an irreparable wrong, she thinks, to lie like that - to put one face over the next - never mind that she does it on a daily basis to protect herself, her cadets, her king.
There is a difference in lying for fun and lying for necessity. There has to be. Right?
She tries not to pay too much attention to the part of her that says no, and under that, even smaller, even darker, the part of her that looks for Isra in the sea of tens like a drowning sailor seeks a shore. The look in her eyes is forlorn, almost desperate. The crowd and the lights and the masquerade itself is insufferable to Marisol and yet she stays.
There is a little voice in her that waits patiently for the Night queen to emerge, a little part that begs to stay just a minute longer, look just a degree closer: she has to be here, she has to, or what is the point?
A soft song plays through the air and Marisol twitches in response. It is the same shudder that hits her when she spends too long alone, when she meets Asterion’s eyes in any kind of darkness, when she stands in the solitude of Dusk’s library and casts her eyes on the glowing spines of hundreds and thousands of books. It gnaws at her stomach and prickles at the spaces between the vertebrae in her spine. It burns and burns and burns against her skin.
Her wings spread a little and the feathers flutter against her skin in a nervous tic; it would take a keen eye to see it, though, or the way her slate-gray eyes watch the room like she’s looking for a god.
Normally that wouldn’t have stopped him from putting on another one tonight - something over-the-top and fantastic, something bold and red and loud loud loud. But for the moment he hasn’t done it; worry keeps him from it.
It was a concern that gnawed at his stomach like a rat or a virus, something awful and fatal. Somewhere out there, he knew, was Raum - but he did not know what the Ghost wanted. He only knew it was dangerous, and terrible, and maybe his responsibility to stop. Oh, but the buckskin had always hated to bear the weight of anything, and now it was his brother-in-arms, the only Crow left of the whole sharp-beaked, black-hearted flock.
So for once Acton didn’t feel like partying. For once he was sober, weaving among a crowd of silk and whispers and laughter and touch and letting it all bounce off him like nothing more than torchlight. For all the magic of the evening, for all the strange beauty that Isra had bestowed among the Keep, Acton might as well have been making his way through the crooked back alleys of Denocte.
He wasn’t grinning, then, when he slipped into a new room (this one all black and white, save for the costumes, save for himself) and cast his gaze across it, searching the shadows as much as the masks. They all looked like strangers, done up as they were, but then his bright eyes snagged on a silver mare all done up in gold. At last he did smile, and step toward her. His dark hair was an unbound cloud around him, his burnished coat unadorned; he was naked among the many, but for the mask he forever bore.
“Is that supposed to be a disguise?” he said in her ear, his own voice low and rough as gunpowder. There was music around them, a pounding beat from a drummer he couldn’t see, a female voice smokier than his own.
