The tower sits boldly amongst bracken cliff and Albatross-birds: an idol, piercing the quiet blue of sky, glittering in lantern light and begging you to worship it. It exists as a stark, palpable comparison to his worlds of old – the indiscriminate ruins of the Rift, home to things dead and others dying, and now, gone entirely – so much so that he is shaken by it, and brought to a solicitous halt.
The steeple is humbling; and splendid; and magnanimous: and a warmth settles at the very pit of his gut, with it a warbling hum of gratitude that he still exists to witness beauty, let alone roam amongst it.
He presses on towards the Citadel, quiet in thought, light-footed. The horizon is bright, embellished: he pursues it with purpose, head ducked low beneath everglade branches, limbs of bleached willow. His feet move less sluggishly than they once did, and less did his knees stumble, gnarled and creaking like old staircases – he is renewed, here, reborn: the Gods of this place grasping him in the ancient palms of their hands and tenderly, benevolently, piecing together his parts.
His newfound gifts of healing ripple sympathetically beneath the surfaces of him, idling in wait, yearning for use. The irony does not escape him, broken as he is, to be gifted the power of life – albeit weak, and amateurish, it inspires in him a determinism to do better; to be greater.
He might not flourish – but he will survive.
He is ready, now, to unbury himself from the grave, to wander amongst the willow trees of brackish woodlands – to meander amongst the living – to dance with them, bursting with the infinite possibilities of rebirth.
He settles peaceably on the outskirts the capital, content to watch, to wonder. The dark arms of oak and elms encase him – and he is safe, here, amongst lilies and golden thistle, hydrangea leaving violet imprints on the knotted bones of his hocks. He is home amongst them; home here; home already, his diminutive, underdeveloped wings shifting strangely at the strident lines of his shoulders, and his eyes to the sky, flying, flying, flying.
“We’ll be okay,” Erd found himself muttering softly, speaking more for Ard’s benefit than his own. His younger twin was pressed tightly against his side, hiding his face away from the prying eyes of those who had also sought refuge within the Dusk Court Citadel. “We’ll be okay.”
He understood. Ard was nervous. Scared. There were too many bodies piled into one place, everyone hoping to stay dry amidst the downpour and the flash flooding. Occasionally Erd would lip at his brother’s dripping hair or nuzzle at his crown before letting his eyes wander, vivid turquoise eyes taking in the other inhabitants of the large, spacious room. Equines and beasts alike had, forgive the pun, flooded the hallways in a desperate attempt to find someplace dry and warm, leading to overcrowding and poor moods.
Regrettably, he recognized only a very few of them. Atreus, Florentine, and Marisol were vacant. Perhaps they were helping in the relief efforts? The thought caused the young warlock to shift from hoof to hoof, uncertain. They should be helping. Standing idle, doing nothing… It just didn’t sit well with him. He wanted to help. While small, Erd was strong and capable, a quick and nimble bullet in the air. There was so much he could do, and yet…
Turquoise eyes focused on Ard, taking in his brother’s cowering, trembling form with a sympathetic frown. He would not leave him. Still, they had to do something.
“… We should help,” he whispered softly, nosing at Ard’s taupe curls fondly, “Try and find Marisol, or Miss Florentine. I’m sure they would appreciate our help.” It was a long shot, bringing it up. It was those words that caused a reaction out of Ard, and his brother lifted his head only high enough to send him a fierce glare. He did not speak, but Erd could hear his displeasure loud and clear in his head, could feel it wrap around his very being.
’No.’
“Ard…” He did not try and hide the disappointment from his own voice, even though it was interlaced with a familiar sympathy. “What if she needs us? We have to do something.”
It is in the quiet following the summit—after Florentine has come upon their group from behind, informing them that the regimes are free; after the crush of weary, curious horses has swept its way back down the mountainside toward the four courts—that Indra seeks out the painted mare.
I remember you, the mare had whispered, and the hair along Indra’s spine had risen, and her mind had filled with ghosts. Here, in the sunlit forest clearing, the paint could not be anything but real. But the last time the unicorn had seen her, wrapped in smoke and moonlight—
A different lifetime. A different horse, Indra might have thought, were the blood-marks on the pale mare not so impossible to forget.
There had been no time, then, to respond. Indra’s golden eyes had lifted to meet those of the not-quite-stranger, and only their fraction’s widening had betrayed her recognition. Then it was back to straining against boulders, back to sharpening her blade.
Now, though—Indra goes to where the mare stands on a small rise amidst the rubble, surveying what remains of the crowd. Even in silence the paint looks like a battle-cry, her mane streaming behind her. The dark blazes across her eyes make her seem fierce, and watchful, though Indra doubts she would be any less so without them.
“Your friends did well,” Indra says, her voice low as she steps up to take a place beside her. She does not know the lightning unicorn, or the blood-colored stallion with his tail like a scythe, but she had seen the kinship between the three of them, the invisible net of gestures and glances that bound them close. She does not need to ask whether they, too, had come through from the rift. “The gods might play their games with us, but they will know, now, that we are ready for them. They will not forget that we are waiting, and we are angry, and we are strong.”
Her gaze drifts over the last few remaining horses winding their way down along the mountain, and she cannot help but wonder where each one is headed, what each one must think. Did the regimes reach an accord here, under the thumb of the gods? Would the courts have peace?
Or was this just one more injustice, one more act of violence, one more catalyst for suffering and strife?
The unicorn glances again at her companion, at the powerful stillness of the mare. Indra wonders what has brought her here—what purpose she might chase. She herself has been so lacking in direction, lately, and she gives a restless stamp of a hoof, the iron drawing sparks from the stone beneath them. “What will you do now?”
Isra of the silent snow
the snow fell like death, silent and full of a sorrow too painful to be made into prayer
The night when it settles is a cold thing. It's black and frozen with crystals of starlight that make the softly falling flakes of snow shine. The snow glitters around her, glowing in the moonlight and she imagines it's stardust and wishes brushing against her smile when she tilts it up, up, up towards the frozen night sky. Around her the world is muted in snow, hushed and sleepy and the soft, distant breathing of the bison herd sounds like nothing more than a frail echo of her own lungs.
Isra feels as if she is the only thing left in the world, a single thing made of heart and heat, that melts the snow when it drifts lazily down and lands upon her back. And when she walks the tall grasses sound like tiny shards of glass beneath her hooves where she walks across the places they bend beneath a layer of ice left over from the long gone dawn.
What do the stars see when they look down? Isra wonders in breaths of smoke that rise up from her smile that is still angled up, up, up towards the falling snow that glitters in the silver night lights. Do I look like a dark furrow of snow against the white, a shadow of the snow that might be ash flaking off from their light? Her smiles feels like fire on her skin as she watches the heat of her rise up like her gaze and dissipate into the winter.
Oh! how small she feels in the snowfall, dark as the ground where the snow grows thick enough to swallow the blackness into a white that almost looks blindingly bright under the moon. Even her hoof-steps as she walks though the thickening snow feel like no more than the movent of a ghost. Isra feels like a unicorn made not of the sea but of the snow and the stillness and all the things that melt away and evaporate when the sun creeps closer to the earth.
She hums to the sound of her hooves on the snow and ice, a soft gentle song of dreaming, of words too fantastic to be made into the mere language of mortals. Tonight in the snow her song feels heavier for the stillness around it, a shadow of sound in the strange white glow.
And it's not until she stops near enough to the slumbering bison herd (all tucked together into one great expanse of darkness in the snow) that she realizes it's no song of fable that lives on the edge of her lips and the hollow of her jaw.
It's a lullaby of sadness and sorrow. It's the song of a unicorn who feels as if she's the only thing that's alone in the slow, lazy snowfalls.
The world was cold, even more than usual. Orion had once held warmth and joy in his heart, a steady heat that got him through the days, but now? Now he felt as if some part of him was missing, was broken.
Burying Rigel hadn't been easy, nor was raising Pyxis alone. It felt like a massive weight on his shoulders, pressing on to his spine, and the Emissary no longer felt like he belonged in his role. How could he? He couldn't do his duties when he was raising his son on his own, and he couldn't much take the young boy anywhere, not when he was sick. Not when he was scared of losing his son now more than ever, just as he had one of his closest friends.
So a choice had to be made, and a heavy one. A difficult one.
Orion walked slowly, the young foal at his side, and reaching the rooms, he was glad to nudge the small boy to the pillows, watching as he tottered toward them and finally slumped in them, bright eyes closing as his head dropped and he tucked in against the comfort. The grullo let out a breath, his chest expanding before his body relaxed, and he blinked a little, turning milky eyes toward where the others would normally be.
Weariness wore on his features, and he looked exhausted, even as his hooves led him toward the two with uneven steps, and he dropped his horned head, looking at the two of them. "...I need to talk to you.. both of you." His voice was hoarse from unuse, and he swallowed, his eyes stinging, his body feeling awkward and heavy. Lack of sleep wore on him as much as anything else, and he exhaled.
"Forgive me for interrupting."
@Somnus @Ipomoea || Pyx may come in with his own posts later but for now I have him as a mention haha
As the frozen white substance blanketed all of Solterra and the impending blizzard loomed angrily on the horizon, the little fennec sat shivering underneath an outcropping of rocks. The snow had piled high on the roof of his makeshift cave and was starting to creep into the mouth of it as well. Dark brown eyes stared apathetically out into the whitewashed landscape before him, a hard shiver wracking his body.
A warm puff of breath escaped his tiny maw, and large ears flattened back against his head. Naiosé tucked his tail up against his cold body, and his gaze shifted down. Clumps of snow had matted locks of his fur together, and he spent the next couple of minutes angrily chewing them out... desert dwellers certainly were not made for a life of snow and cold. Naiosé stared off into the desert before him, quietly wondering if this was what Solterra was destined to. Bleakly, he questioned how long he could survive in such an environment... his fur was not made to protect him from the cold. His senses weren't nearly as sharp in this type of environment, either.
His mind wandered briefly to Kauri, and his nose twitched as he stared out over the desert. Where was the striped Andalusian now, and how was he fairing through all of this?
After many long minutes of staring off into the landscape that looked so foreign to him now, the small fennec tucked his nose under his tail. Gaze instead shifted to the inside of his miniature cave, focused on a small crack in the rock that lay to his right. His stomach growled angrily as the wind howled outside, and a sigh pushed past his muzzle. He'd have to go out into the whiteout sometime, for there was nothing for him here in this small cave... not food, not Kauri - there was only the inevitability that he would be snowed in and trapped, destined to starve alone under the small outcropping.
And while he was certain the outcome of this situation, this blizzard, was not at all bright.. he was destined not to let this be his fate. With a growl pitched under his breath, the fox stood up and dug feverishly at the snow that had almost sealed off the entrance. Within a few moments, he burst forth from the snow, which was now piled high up to his chest.
Large ears stayed pinned to his head as Naiosé stared around him. He could see nothing... no landmarks in the distance, no people, no bushes nor other wildlife. For a split second, he contemplated where to go... and then decided that there was no better option than what was directly in front of him. After all, before the blizzard washed out the landscape in a blanket of white, he had been heading towards a large building in the distance..
And so he ran. Bounding through the snow in tall leaps, his short legs burst him up from the thick blanket below. He could feel the snow clumping to his fur - balling up and pulling against his skin... feel the sharp pain in his side as exhaustion and hunger wore him down... feel his breath hot against his muzzle as it labored, wafting up in frosty breaths to disappear into the frozen sky. His vision grew bleary, his breath rasping hard and his muscles aching.
He truly questioned if he would make it through this blizzard, or if he would die out in this hellish place, frozen and buried like all the other wildlife.... All he saw before him was a landscape that wanted nothing more than to snuff out his existence and snow that wanted nothing more than to smother him.
Until he saw something else.... something not quite large enough to be a landmark, yet not quite small enough to rival his own size. In his weary mind, he quietly hoped it was @Kauri... but knew that the chances of that were so slim, so minute, that he was more likely to be lost to the snow than find him once more.
Naiosé is stuck in the blizzard that plagues the Mors Desert. He briefly hides under an outcropping of rocks to pick away at the snow that has been clumping onto his fur, and then considers staying there. It's only after realizing that staying there would mean his death that he digs his way out and forges forward, straight ahead into the whiteout. However, his hunger and exhaustion begins taking a toll on him... the snow, growing taller by the minute, forces him to leap instead of walk, and his small body begins to tire. He bleakly wonders if this is how he'll meet his end - frozen and buried in this hellscape - as he sees nothing ahead other than white snow. It's only after questioning his mortality that he sees a figure ahead... even though he doubts it, there's a small hope that takes hold in his mind, wondering if it could it be @Kauri.
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Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
Raymond had not yet washed the flower maiden's blood out of his red coat. It stood out in dark, ruddy brown streaks matted through the hair of his face and body where he'd had to get directly engaged. Not that he liked being bloody - it itched, foreign and unpleasant as a needle pressing into the slope of his back - but there simply had not been time.
Time is precious; the ranger had always known that. Lately, though, its value seemed unquantifiable.
It would be nice to learn how to sleep again.
He had stolen through Denocte under cover of darkness, passing like a shadow where normally he would strut, his progress marked only by the slow tumble of the stars and moon far overhead. Where he went, he'd left bread crumbs - small, meaningless scribbles, not even fit to turn a crow's head - tracing an obscure path, decipherable only by two pairs of eyes, to where he waited now.
Not far from here, to the south, he had run across the young Hydra injured by a hungry catamount. Not far in the other direction, the Arma mountains loomed dark and indistinct to the north in the pre-dawn light. He kept watch now in the rolling foothills between both of those worlds, the purple mirror of Vitreus lake laid out in almost sinister silence across the empty distance between him and the capitol. His red coat, dull brown in the twilight gloom and broken up as it was by the shadow of someone else's misery painted into its surface, made him for once nearly invisible against the scrubby backdrop.
But what he awaited would not be hunting by sight alone.
She would hunt with her heart, and by the unwavering grip of a life well-shared.
@Calliope | Set after Raymond's reunion with Ruth and before the disastrous weather event.
[[ Note: This event takes place before the flooding rains of Terrastella. ]]
It was a crisp day, the dew frozen onto the blades of grass in the early morning hours. The swamp loomed quietly in the distance, in the far corner of the endless Susurro fields. The mornings were always pleasant on the field - come summer, however, this haven would eventually turn into a wet meadow with all the rain. Equally as fun to play in, albeit significantly... muddier.
But for now, all the wildlife and inhabitants basked in the chilled dawn hours. In particular, one lone red fox lay curled up and sleeping soundly under a cluster of short trees. As the morning light crested overhead and broke through the small canopy they created, nature dutifully attempted to wake her up.
But even as pleasant of a morning as it was... why couldn't the birds and sun just let her sleep a little longer? was the thought rolling through her dreary mind. There was an unpleasant whine that bubbled from her throat as one eye peeled open, both of her fluffy ears flattened back and nearly disappearing in the thick, plush fur of her neck. She rolled from one side to the other, and tucked her face back under her equally as plush tail, trying to block out the sun for ... just... five more minutes.
But nature, as it often does, wasn't having any of it. A large, chilly gust of wind swept through the small cluster of trees, knocked her tail right off her snout and ruffling her fur in all the wrong ways. The whine that had died off earlier kicked up full force, startling the couple of birds nesting in the trees above, causing them to take flight and flee.
Eventually, Acantha rolled over and peeled both of her eyes open, using her small paws to rub the sleep right out of them. Lithe, limber limbs popped her up with 100% times more energy than she had two seconds ago, her elegant but small body stretching and a yawn tearing from her mouth.
As she surveyed the meadows and wondered what was in store for her today, she saw something in the distance. It was tiny - like her! - and she felt instinctually drawn towards it... and not just in a "curious fox" kind of way. She couldn't really explain the feeling.
But she knew it was important, so she bounded towards the figure in the distance, parting the tall grasses easily and jumping up above them whenever she felt the need to check how much closer she was. The chittering from her maw was nonstop, bright eyes trained on them as she neared. Most others, she knew she couldn't talk to - they hardly understood her, if at all. But this one... somehow she knew they could.
When she was just barely close enough, she called out. Her endless fox yammering translated roughly to something like Hi! I don't know how you can understand me, but I think you can!
Acantha sleeps lazily underneath some trees, whining when the morning light tries to wake her up. She rolls over in an attempt to go back to sleep, only to be disturbed by a chilly gust of wind that insisted she get up. She whines as she does, and surveys the rest of the Susurro fields. Eventually, she sees @Ulysses and feels herself drawn towards his unknown figure in the distance. She bounds through the tall grass (occasionally jumping up before disappearing in the grass once more) towards him. Somehow, she knows that he can understand her, and calls out to him when she's close enough to.
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PULL ME CLOSER, KISS ME HARD
I'M GONNA POP YOUR BUBBLEGUM HEART
❀
"HEY!"
A drink is sloshed from Bexley’s grip as someone goes whizzing by her, and she gasps incredulously as it goes careening onto the floor. "Hey, asshole -" but whoever bumped into her is already gone, swallowed by the huge crowd inside the citadel, and all she can do is frown and let it go, no matter how unlike her that is.
Besides, there’s more wine to be found. More of everything, really - more food, more music, more new bodies. Though the storm outside those sandstone walls is raging with incessant force, inside the Day Court’s buildings there’s nothing but festivity and socialization to be found, with swarms of people placing bets, holding loud conversations and dancing in ignorance of the howling wind outside. What else can they do to pass the time cooped up indoors? What are they supposed to do about anything that’s happened? If this is simply freak weather, it must pass eventually; if it’s the work of the gods, not a soul in Novus can change it.
Might as well party, as long as they’re alive.
Time for a new drink, then. Bexley squeezes herself smaller and goes slinking through the crowd as easily as she can, sidestepping here, leaping there, wriggling like a fish through the crush of bodies in an effort not to disturb the dancing and (slightly off-key) singing of the partygoers around her. She can’t help smiling as she watches them - sheltered from the storm, more careless than ever - people after her own heart. Something in her is proud that she’s been able to take people’s minds off the blizzard; another part worries more than a little about how Seraphina will react, but, thankfully, that’s a worry for the future.
Reinvigorated, Bexley continues her path through the crowds.
