It showed up first as a speck of light, a trick of the eye forming a glowing orb that hovered in midair. It winked in and out of existence, there one moment and gone the next, hazy and dull at best, teasing anyone who might catch a glimpse of it. But slowly, with every recurrence, it gained strength and color. It didn’t take long before an orb of light was shining brazenly in the midst of the Court, waiting.
They show up all around the Court: orbs of light that hover in the air, seeming to thrum and shiver with a hidden energy. They grow and shrink in size, floating into Delumine in ones, twos, threes, and packs. Every color of the rainbow fills their center, a shifting myriad that changes to reflect their environment.
And when they come in contact with one of the Deluminian natives, their color changes to reflect their soul.
The orbs will nudge at the equines of the Dawn Court, playfully weaving through their manes and tails and tugging at them as if in a bid to say follow me. Those that choose to will find themselves led to the Viride Forest, following old trails that have long been forgotten and overgrown by shrubs and bushes.
At the end of these trails lies a building of trees, their bark forming walls and their canopy ceilings. The orbs will disperse, flying quickly through the dusty halls and lighting lanterns as they go, prompting the charges they’ve led to explore for themselves, to see for themselves the many rooms and their hidden treasures.
Welcome to the Library, an ancient piece of Delumine’s history.
The Library is officially open!
Your character is welcome to be led to the Library in pursuit of these little lights, as they pester the Dawn Court and seem to lead directly to the Viride Forest.
You can reply to this thread anytime before July 31st to claim partial participation in a SWP, but one post max per character if you choose!
His return to Novus was sudden and unforeseen. So long had they all remained absent and oblivious to the world they’d ruled over, the world they’d loved. It was beyond strange to have returned to this mortal form, especially to have functioning lungs and be more than a sleeping consciousness inside a damn statue. It briefly occurred to him to slaughter all the pigeons that had ever dared to poop on him.
The grass in the field felt peculiar against his golden colored hooves, but incredible. The air in his lungs was fresh and pure. He wondered if his siblings had yet awoken, and where their travels had taken them. Were they seeking out Tempus, or wandering as he did, taking their time to explore present day Novus.
There had been few mortals that he’d crossed paths with. He was thankful, for he didn’t feel much like fraternizing and condescending to have a chat about their petty, fleeting lives. At least not yet. The one or two he’d deigned to speak with had been so shocked that not even a command for them to speak could lift them from their stupor. Solis had simply groaned in annoyance and continued on his way.
You may approach solis and talk to him! Hopefully he’ll want to talk back....
If you have already replied to this thread, please let others interact with Solis. c:
Phrixus flew over this new island. History, he’d found, was doomed to repeat itself. It was an eternal cycle of disappointment. Everywhere he went, he found himself incomplete. He hadn’t felt comfortable in his own skin since he couldn’t remember when. He beat his wings harshly against the fall winds, the brisk chill not even enough to stop him from flying. Phrixus climbed higher and higher into the sky, his breath coming short, eyes tingling with tears as the oxygen began to deplete from his body. Just when the water droplets that had accumulated on his wings began to freeze, he stopped.
Plummeting back down to earth, he closed his eyes. The ground was still far enough away that he was comfortable. Upside down and back to the earth, he let himself fall. One of these days he wouldn’t be able to catch himself, but the man doubted that today was one of those days. The wind whipped his hair around his face and he barrel rolled, twisting up and pushing his wings out to catch the winds once more. A rush of adrenaline flooded his body, and the warrior smiled. Adrenaline helped him feel normal again, helped him feel the rush that he so craved. He’d yet to have really found himself a home somewhere, the soldier in him constantly on edge and begging for a good scrap.
Phrixus had found that freefalling from dangerous heights gave him the rush he needed. The giant ocean themed Pegasus yelled into the winds, frustrated. He grit his teeth, his one good eye searching for a good place to land. As was his nature, he found himself landing upon a cliff, the wind still howling at his back. Standing at the very edge, teetering there, he inhaled deeply. He was so lost these days, unsure of what to do with himself anymore. A lot of times he was filled with so much emotion that he felt like he’d explode. Other times, he felt like a blank canvas, open to suggestions. He was a soldier at heart, and needed to be one once again. His foolish pride would have no other way.
Watching out of the new kingdom that he’d happened upon, Phrixus folded his wings tightly to his sides. He wondered if any people who lived here were around? He knew that this was going to be his home now, and in fact, knew that if he wanted a challenge, he’d have to live in a terrain so unlike any other he’d lived in. Time to move from mountains and snow, to desert caves and sun. He nodded, thinking about how he’d try to make it work. Feeling more at peace with himself after his freefall, Phrixus closed his eyes, enjoying the feeling of the wind pushing and pulling at him as he stood at the cliff’s edge.
ooc: Open to all! First post on the site! <3 This is mostly just ramblings, but God bless whoever replies lol.
t was a quiet early morning, the sun barely lighting the eastern horizon, the stars and the inky night lingering above. Jezanna had been up for some hours, again finding herself trapped in the motions of a past life. Her silver eyes were bright in the dimness, the midnight color of her coat blending into the shadows, morphing her into a shadow herself; living, breathing.
The young moon rose from her place in Denocte's library, looking at the books that had become scattered on the floor about her as she had read. There was so much she wanted to know, so much she could learn, and she had immersed herself among the words written by scholars who had come and gone long before her arrival here. It had been peaceful, relaxing, even, giving her a chance to reflect and to think.
One by one, Jezanna placed the books back where they belonged with care, her gaze gently looking over every spine as she did so. There would be more long nights, more early mornings, for her to spend here among the stacks and shelves, and she knew she would be back before too long.
It was a comfortable place, where she could be herself without worry and get lost in the words on the pages she read. Oh, how she would have loved to meet some of the authors, to pick their brains, to dig further into their thoughts. The midnight woman wondered what great stories and history would be penned in her time on Novus, wondered if she might somehow contribute to such things. It was a dream, but perhaps an obtainable one.
After ensuring that everything was back to the way it had been when she first arrived, Jezanna stood before the entrance with one more glance at all the things she was leaving for another time. She could spend days in here, that much she knew for sure. At last, with a soft smle turning up the corners of her lips, she pushed through the doors to begin her day, wondering just would it would have in store.
what tho' the moon—the white moon
shed all the splendor of her noon
Jezanna weaved her way through the streets of the court and couldn't help the sense of deja vu that she felt. Torches lined the walls and their flickering, warm light cast strangely shaped shadows over the area around her. The scene was so similar to the first time she had set foot in this place, new and so unsure, and yet the differences were so plain to see. How long ago had that been, she wondered. It felt so much longer ago than it had actually been.
So much had changed, in such little time.
In the few months she had been here she had made friends, found a home, seen the jailing of a nation, heard tales of a god-sent raven, seen the gates opened and felt the earth shake beneath her feet. The opening of the gates was like a lightness in her chest, like suddenly so many more possibilities were once more available to her. Although Jezanna had yet to travel outside Denocte, she felt she finally could if that was something she wanted. And maybe she would.
The most important thing to her, though, was just that it was an option for her. She had time enough to make a decision if she wished to go out and explore. There was nothing holding her back, nothing preventing her. She thought that perhaps it was a similar feeling throughout all of Denocte. So many had, after all, been against the closing of the gates in the first place.
The young moon paused, lifting her head to look around her, silver eyes seeming to search. For what, Jezanna could not say, just that she had a feeling like something was off... like something was wrong. Maybe it was just the rumors and stories of the gods she was hearing. She had not been one of the ones to travel to the mountains, so she did not know what had transpired there. Maybe it was just worry that left a creeping, crawling feeling on her skin, but her intuition had never lead her wrong.
Perhaps, though, it was change that she was feeling. In the air, in the ground, in her very being. What was going to change, the midnight girl could not guess but if she had come to understand anything it was that change was inevitible. You could not run from it, nor stop it from coming. Just accept it and prepare yourself for it.
The note had been an untidy scrawl, the messenger-bird windblown and weary. But Lysander did not need the words to tell him the news; he already knew it, in the deep-dark of his heart. He’d known it since the first shudder that had rolled through the city, knocking vases from tables and rattling pictures in their frames.
He had not believed in the gods of this place. If they’d ever lived, he’d thought them long since faded to dust and bones and silent monuments.
But it seemed they were awake, and their appetites for praise were all the sharper after their long slumber. And Florentine was not made for bowing.
Nor were those gilded and guilty horses of the night court, though they were as hungry for it as the gods themselves, and Lysander did not like to think of the golden girl encaged with such a group. He did not, in fact, want to think at all –
And so instead he ran, heedless and harried through the long grasses that whispered against his legs, his sides. It was easier to run, to feel the stretch and burn of muscle and sinew and ignore the world but for the burn of his lungs and the wind in his hair.
It was easier because he knew even as he did it that he was helpless to do anything else.
When he arrives at the temple it is dusk, and the fireflies mirror the stars above, little guidelights in the gathering dark.
The building is long-abandoned, and nearly consumed by weeds. Vines trail up one side, a living wall with leaves that whisper like a secret in the breeze. Its walls, once smooth, are bleached to the color of bone and chipped and worn with time.
His hooves echo on the marble as he steps inside.
Once a place like this was a home to him, too. Now it’s with a stranger’s eye that he appraises it: a long, low offering table with withered flowers and polished stones, empty thurible with the ghost of incense drifting through the empty space.
A gleam in a dim corner catches his eye; a rough-hewn face, a horse head cut from stone with blank and staring eyes of marble. Lysander crosses to it slowly, his shadow slanting across the dusty floor, his antlers curved like scythes.
It is autumn and his antlers are once again shedding their velvet. It hangs in bloody strips, just as it had when he’d first arrived; born into blood on Novus’s soil. All the blood he’d smelled since his arrival here had been his own, salt and iron and sin.
Florentine had saved him before, but he can do nothing for her. He is not a man accustomed to feeling helpless. He is not a man accustomed to the kind of rage, of dark wrath, that unwinds within him as he stares at that impassive stone face in the near-black.
Now he leans forward, scraping first one arc of bloody bone and then the other across the statue of the god. His antlers clatter and rattle against the bust, striping it dark and wet and gruesome, and at last he steps back, grimly satisfied.
Vespera is a frightening, feral thing with her cheeks and eyes streaked red-black in the dim. Surely this is more in her image.
Men were sinners, but men could change. Gods –
He thinks of the black unicorn, then, her voice acrid and black as gunpowder. Blood is to be paid in blood. He thinks of what had been written at the bottom of the summons the bird had brought to Terrastella.
“Go in peace,” he murmurs, and then he shoves his shoulder against the bust, harder and harder until it topples off its column to splinter on the floor with a shattering crash.
The temple seems to shiver and moan, but it is nothing like when the whole of the world shook as stones from the summit crumbled in.
Afterward, there is only silence.
we wake with bright eyes now
all welcome! come share in his blasphemy or accost him over it
we're never done with killing time can I kill it with you?
In a strictly technical sense, Pandora had the feeling that she wasn’t really supposed to be there – Terrastella wasn’t her Court, after all. However, she knew that Dusk and Dawn were on friendly terms, and she was a wanderer by heart besides, impossible to pin down in one place or another. Delumine, with its stuffy (though sometimes intriguing) scholars and seemingly-endless rows of bookshelves (Also sometimes intriguing, but not as interactive as she liked; she was very much the type who valued experience before research.) couldn’t keep her contained for long if they tried. With that in mind, she’d departed the wildflower meadows and verdant reaches that were her temporary home and set out for strange, almost-mystical (if stories were to be believed) wilderness that was Terrastella. She hadn’t had a clue what she intended to do when she arrived, but there wasn’t much fun to be found in planning, and, considering that she was living on limited time, now, she intended to wring every ounce of joy out of the lifespan she had left.
With that in mind, she arrived in a sea of green.
The meadow was massive – a vast expanse that stretched out all along the horizon in every direction, as far as the eye could see. It wasn’t like the great stretches of wildflowers that seemed ever-present in Delumine, and it was far less colorful, but she thought that the almost unnatural uniformity of the green, the sheer, overwhelming, endlessness of it all was invigoratingly beautiful in and of itself. (For a moment, anyways. For a moment, she could feel like it was a place that was completely new, completely unknown - but she’d seen seas of green before, endless fields of grass. She had to savor that one moment, drag it out like a piece of chocolate and make it last. Even so, it was gone in a blink, and suddenly she saw all the places that she had ever been before in some great collage, falling into place in front of her like the pieces of a puzzle. Nowhere she went, it seemed, was really new, and she heaved a sigh at the thought. The only interesting things that were left for her to discover were people, and they could be ever so troublesome. So temporary- but she was temporary too, now.) She strode out into the grasses, the tips of their blades almost high enough to brush against her stomach, and simply stood, allowing her eyes to flicker to a close. The cool breeze blew through her coat, ruffling the vibrant red-orange of her tail and sending it to dance behind her like a flame, and the sun beat down on her golden scales, sending waves of heat running up her spine.
It was nice. Comfortable, even – and that was what most of life seemed to be. Tepid. Warm.
(But she liked it hot.)
Calliope kept far from the roads connecting Terrastella and Denocte. Instead she stuck to the sea, the cliffs the places ruthless and dangerous enough that few horses linger in such places. She reveled in the sea-spray that would dust her skin, the rumble of the waves against the rocks that promised a storm was coming, that dared to try to sweep her out to sea.
It feels like a battle of a journey, a challenge, a becoming.
It's not until she reaches the mountain passes that she stops to linger, to carve symbols of justice into the charred gravestones of trees. Calliope is covered in soot as she pressed her nose to scattered bone. She's frozen with hate as she feels the smaller bones of birds crunch like sand under her hooves.
By the time she passes the remnants of the once wilds, she's full of rage again. But understanding just starts to eat way the sharp, violent edges of her anger.
There are more payments than one that she journeys to Denote to collect. They are different sins, each terrible and only one feels like a knife cutting through her heart with a broken, dull edge. One is as red as the setting sun or a blood moon. One has broken Calliope as much as she can ever been broken by a thing such as love.
The city is quiet before her when she finally alights on flat soil again and the road in echoes like a hollow thing beneath her hooves. Ahead there is a flash of red, foolish enough to be so easily found when he surely knew she was coming for him.
Calliope feels like a dragon, a thing that might breathe fire and turn him to ash for leaving her behind. Surely no other unicorn but her might have this sorrow and heartbreak raging inside them. It feels like a mortal wound. She moves to walk against a wall of stone that makes some structure she has little use for. The shadows feel like salvation when they cool her sweat.
She's close enough that he might see the rage sparking in her eyes like comets. There is no smile on her face as she taps her horn four times against the stone. One time for each step she must take to close the distance between them. Each of those taps sounds like a word, a war-drum, a eulogy. How lovely her horn sounds when it talks in her rage.
What.
The first echoes, bouncing off her skin, sharp enough to make her grind her teeth together.
Have.
The second rings like a gong and rises over them like thunder.
You.
The third sounds like an end, a peel of a church bell as it tolls the death of an era and the start of something else.
Done.
The last feels like a touch of lightning, a shriek of a storm, as she drags her blade against stone. Her ears lash back against her skull for the sound of her own rage is stinging and too shrill to bear with mortal hearts.
She feels like she might run him through if she pulls her horn off that wall at her side, so she leaves it there and watches him with rage and demand.
Calliope isn't sure she's even breathing as she waits for him to say anything all. The bones and the beach seem like nothing more than a half-remembered dream. Perhaps she's still stuck in the rabid, hateful rift and Novus is a place that doesn't exist at all.
But this, watching him and feeling like her soul is caving in, feels to real to be nothing more than a nightmare.
BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crowns
when the man comes around
Satisfaction was not the word of the hour as the red stallion left the Steppes behind him. His righteous fury smoldered black and ugly like a brand upon his chest, its thirst unquenched and its need for retribution unfulfilled. Reichenbach had refused to answer for his reticence in the face of injustice.
His silence was as deafening as the silence hanging over the court itself.
But if he had truly fled, taking the tyranny of dragons and terror on the wing with him, then silence too could be a perfectly serviceable answer.
Raymond had reached the scar of dragonbreath blighting the pass through the Arma mountains. However many times he passed through the desolation, the sight sickened him - not because he was particularly fond of nature, for as with anything else in reality the natural world could be friend or foe and often both at once, but because of what the scar represented and the senseless harm it had caused in the name of shock and awe. That blight represented the things against which he had maneuvered for his entire life. Perhaps now that the silence was accompanied by an exit, the land could heal. The people could heal.
He did not regret his decision to leave Terrastella. Was it traitorous to be honest about one's allegiance? Was it traitorous to defend the defenseless? Raymond looked up, eyeing the looming silhouette of the Raven Gates in the gathering shadow of dusk, and imagined a world in which he could tear them down as easily as they had been used to imprison the people of Denocte. Freedom would never - could never - suffer such an edifice to endure.
The dim rustle of wings disturbed the nighttime stillness and a familiar raven landed at his feet, beak gaping with exhausted breaths. Around its twiggy leg was fastened a scrap - literally a scrap - of parchment, all that remained of the note he had sent to Calliope. He frowned and freed the laboring creature of its burden. In his own writing, Calliope's rage roared back at him from the parchment: "yr obdt svt"; it stung more than he would have liked.
"Thank you, my friend," he said, then gingerly offered his tail to the bird. It climbed up, allowing him to transfer it to the slope of his back where it settled into a puddle of inky feathers to rest.
Booker would have never noticed them in the sharp fold of the great canyon unless the light had been right.Most horses traveledin the other direction, with the glare of the desert sun in their eyes.
They were simple, to be sure. And who knew how old they were. But they depicted dancing horses, decked out in some kind of costume,around something that was either a fire or a plant. He couldn't tell, and a good bit of it had been weathered away by wind and scouring sand. Perhaps a drawing of worship, done to celebrate a god. Or a record of some important event from long ago, by horses long gone to dust.
Booker mixed his paints carefully. He wanted to capture the lines just as they appeared. He had a little ink with him; he could make some notes. Maybe somewhere out there a horse would pay for his discovery. Rich idiots, who liked thinking that because they owned fine things it meant they made them. Booker didn't much care, but it would be better off in an archive than in his satchel.
