The sun beat down with the heat of a forge, and it felt so much like Solterra that Cyrene hurried to seek solace under the leaves of a weeping willow tree. Bark grazed her back as she slid softly to the blessedly cool grass underfoot. Crimson wings splayed out around her like a canopy, the heat sinking so fully into her bones that she was too drowsy to tuck them properly in.
Idly, she watched as dappled sunlight streamed through her scars in a desolate impression of a cathedral’s stained glass. Feathers stretched and folded as Cyrene marveled at the pinpricks of golden light shining like tiny stars on the grass, and she would’ve kept the little game up for the entire afternoon if her gaze had not traveled higher.
The constellation of Cygnus glimmered from her wing joint like fireflies, and Cyrene snapped her wings shut at the sight of it.
A glass of sparkling water floated haphazardly above her head, and she brought it to her parched lips with a fleeting sigh. The cup, drained, sat besides her in the grass, as empty and alone as she.
The Davke attack had split the cracks of her heart wide open, a crevice running through it that would never heal.
She had never told Florentine what she had done, nor would she ever; the secret would accompany her until death. Her actions had been certain betrayal, to Seraphina as well as to her own Queen — it should’ve ate at her to no end. And it had. But only because she knew she would not hesitate to do it again, and again, and again.
Where did her loyalty lie? She had always been so sure. So sure of herself, so sure in her own devotion to goodness and healing and light. Yet she had wavered, she had fallen, and a seed of corruption had bloomed like oleander in her heart.
All along, it had only been a matter of time.
She had not been able to find Florentine nor Asterion; though if she’d managed to find one, then the other could not have been far behind. The half-siblings shared a bond that was so deep, so full, that Cyrene could feel only pain when she encountered them together. Pain, and the terrible, terrible claws of jealousy. And so the Emissary had buried herself in her work, spending more time in the newly-built hospital than her own bedchambers.
Drifting leonine eyes scanned the milling crowd for someone she recognized, her heart stilling every time she caught a flash of gold or chrome. She was not a fool — she knew he would never come.
But when a sound rang out from behind her, the slip of a hoof against grass, hope still sang like a phoenix in her chest.
@Rhoswen @Calliope @everyone
btw, cyrene's distress stems from the fact that she snuck out and healed Davke soldiers even though they are Solterra's (and therefore Dusk's) enemies
Fight Type: BATTLE Prize: Nothing besides your standard exp/signos rewards Contact Made: Yes
Character #1: @Raymond Bonded: No Magic: No Armor: No Weapons: No Stats: 10 EXP | 8 HP | 12 ATK
Character #2: @Pavetta Bonded: No Magic: No Armor: No Weapons: No Stats: 10 EXP | 7 HP | 13 ATK
Raymond. and at his feet they'll cast their golden crown
when the man comes around
It was two days' walk from the Dawn Court festival grounds to the steppes. Pavetta must have had time to sober up, but the red stallion had a hunch that even a 1-year sobriety chip would not have been sufficient to sway her decision. He wasn't worried about hurting her - if he'd ever had any misplaced notions of chauvinistic false chivalry, they had long since crumbled under Calliope's tempestuous gaze - but he wasn't quite ready to be accused of assault yet either.
Raymond chose an arena that would be as fair as possible for both of them. The ground was level and as clear of debris as one could reasonably hope, and they had arrived on the battlefiled sometime around mid-morning with the sun already well-advanced in a bright, cloudless sky. Summer was nearing its end, a fact felt more than seen as a vigorous breeze blew in from the east. The cool comfort of the late-summer morning promised dry heat later - but this would not take so long as that.
The red stallion stood now with his back to the wind, sunlight casting a bright coppery sheen across his hide. He had already limbered up for the fight and his bruised chest from the clash with Asterion had long since healed, leaving him hale and healthy for another bout.
Tipping his head towards the grey-striped mare, he called out, "Are you certain of this?"
His voice rang of steely confidence and a stormy sort of calm.
Summary: It's a cool mid-morning with a strong breeze from the east (not like gusty/windy levels of strong), with clear skies overhead. The battlefield is relatively level and free of obstacles to the benefit of both characters involved. Raymond is standing facing west with the wind at his back, warmed up and ready for shenanigans, and hails Pavetta before the battle begins.
he found the colors to paint her, where the world had left her grey.
H
ad the stars always looked so lovely? Like diamonds atop a black mink stole, wrapped like a ribbon around Mother’s milky white throat. Mother. I wonder… where she is. Under a spill of soft moonlight, Messalina stood as still as a doll, lashes fluttering closed as she tilted her head towards the midnight sky.
The world spun, spun like it did when she’d twirl too many pirouettes in a row — yet when she counted to three and opened her eyes, the world did not stop spinning. Blurs of silver, streaks of yellow. Music — a harp, as soft as a lullaby — drifted from a faraway corner. The festival at night was like a dream, and Messa wished for it to last forever.
A delicate throat angled upwards as she swallowed the remnants of her drink, the glass goblet twinkling like a chandelier. The mead tingled as it traveled languidly down her throat, leaving a trail of warmth and sweetness behind. Delicious, she hummed, as she licked her lips clean and set the goblet aside on a passing tray.
It was her second glass, drained in dizzying succession after the first. She had not been able to refuse when Eros had offered it to her, a half-empty glass already floating by his side — and she was glad, so glad, to have accepted. The drink was delicious, far better than the bitter wine she’d sipped with a stiff smile in front of Mother’s guests. Far stronger, too, though the girl had realized that fact perhaps a little too late.
Cerulean eyes, bright as a lark’s, swept the moonlit glade around her. There was no gold in her vision anymore. Somewhere between the first drink and the second, she’d lost sight of Eros’ gleaming tail in the crowd. By then, Messalina had been too enraptured by her own fading inhibition to care.
The dancer’s hooves felt as light as air as she followed idly behind a trio of giggling girls, their vibrant silks drifting like gossamer in the evening breeze. An ivory curl drifted in front of her eyes, and she blew it back with a puff of air. She’d started off the morning with a head of beautiful braids, and with each toll of the castle’s clocktower they had unraveled like unfurling petals. Now, her hair cascaded in white curls down her back, tangled in flowers and scented with the smells of the forest.
“Look, over there — the Regent!” Messalina’s head snapped up, quicker than lightning, as one of the girls motioned towards a cream-and-crimson figure standing a few paces away. “We should go and greet him, tell him how wonderful Delumine’s festival is. I’ve heard that he was the one who planned the entire affair,” the same one babbled, and Messa wondered with a frown how one could sound so much like a chittering bird. Blue eyes narrowed, as she realized just how much she didn’t want them to tell Ipomoea how wonderful the festival was.
Ivory hooves moved of their own accord as she brushed past them without so much as a mumbled apology. The alcohol in her blood scoffed at the word ‘reputation.’ Her heart raced to a crescendo as she neared, though she paid no mind to it as she halted a hairsbreadth away from his mottled back.
“I — po — moea,” Messa whispered, leaning towards his ear as she dragged out the syllables of his name until they tasted like honey on her tongue. “Were you hiding from me? Ah, but it’s useless — I shall find you every time.” Her eyes shone as bright and blue as sapphires when he turned. A second’s hesitation, and the words fell from her lips like a song. “Will you dance with me?”
@Ipomoea | "speaks" | notes: (takes place after this thread) get ready po she's comin for ya
It had been years since Rhos had prowled the plains of Eluetheria. Upon her travels between Solterra and Denocte, she'd had no reason to drift this far east toward Delumine - until now. Until the hands of time and fate had twisted the world into an unrecognisable painting with strokes of colour she could barely read. Dawn had begun to break overhead, brushing the muted blue sky with colourful promises of the coming day, and as the red woman traced a winding path carved into the ancient earth by generations of bison, she felt the memories unfolding like paper planes in the cortex of her mind.
Appearing first, pale and sure, was the desert queen she had left behind. Seraphina was a woman Rhoswen knew so little of, truly, but knew regardless that she would choose to trust her all the same. There were not many who might have won the respect and allegiance of such a spitfire - they instead have burned beneath her ire - but the child-solider-turned-empress was a creature of different ilk. There had been something measured in that steadying gaze, something bearing truth, and in Rhoswen's hour of need, Sera had been there. Rhos owed her the life of her child - could a stronger testimony exist? Feelings of uncertainty spread like ripples from a stone dropped in water: so many questions yet answered. Would the Sun queen trust her in return? Would she see past a heady girl's errors?
Behind Seraphina there lurked a spectre, as wraithlike as the very mist that formed these visions in her mind. Blue eyes blinked; blue to drown the fire in her heart. Raum was an inescapable force that she had come to reckon with in more ways than one. How could she love someone as hard as this, and yet want, still, to rip him from her life like a plaster left too long on the skin. What was she hiding beneath that bandaid? A cut, a broken bone, a shard of shrapnel wedged deep into her flesh? Their affair had been wrought with complexity and conflict from the very first instance, culminating in bitter words and crimes she was working hard to unravel. A love like this was enough to shatter worlds.
But Raum was not the last memory to spin like a bottletop round and round and round - there was another left to show its hand. One shrouded in a mire of guilt that Rhoswen had sidestepped for too long. Bexley Briar. She wondered what the scar looked like - whether it had altered her friend beyond repair. Was it bright and garish, or dark and ominous? Soon, the sun girl would see for herself. Her association with Acton's violation had born many sleepless nights, for there was something evil in the knowing - knowing she could have prevented this, and knowing her inertia had cost so very much.
At last, Rhoswen reached the highest point of the plain, coming to a halt upon the swelling ground. She was a flickering flame over a sea of grass, like gasoline upon an oil-slicked ocean - a ballerina lost behind swathes of auburn hair and sharp, sharp lines. She knew the Deluminian owl had reached Bexley, for it would not otherwise have returned so soon, but upon it's descent it had carried not a word of reply. Rhoswen had come to the halfway land between Dawn and Day all the same - she owed Bexley that much, and so here she stood - a sanguine sentry against the backdrop of a new sky.
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
Oh the horizon ripples like water. And she thirsts.
Sand dusted lashes close, pressing coarse against her cheek. Florentine has come to glitter here. She gleams like polished gold, made bright by the way the sun catches upon the damp of her skin. How long ago had she begun to dream of cool pools – she knows an oasis is here, she knows the cold of its water’s touch.
But how long had she been straying in search? How many times might a mirage have pushed her off course? Such devilry lay in the fantasy of a mirage and soon, too soon the flower girl is lost.
Her tongue is as dry as the sands she steps over. Her body is turned to molten gold beneath the furnace of a sun that will not relent. Florentine burns and melts – she will be remolded here melted into sand and reborn as something different.
Here, in the darkness of her mind, where sand does not kiss the sky and the blue sky does not reach the ends of the earth, oh here she sees the green of her home. In the quiet behind her lashes she feels the shade of woodlands and feel the sway of grasses upon her slender limbs.
The Dusk queen thirsts and at last lifts her dagger. It glints, proud and dangerous in the gaze of the Solterran sun. Florentine watches it, wonders and begs. Thirst would drive her mad, thirst would make her weak – were the flower queen anything but herself.
Yet this is the girl born of the Rift forged in fetid magic and time that went on as endless as the ends of the universe. She has lived worse lives than this and with a drunken air (for delirium was sweet), she drops the blade and it sings against her breast.
Florentine opens her eyes at last and laughs. For there, oh there, is an oasis – beautiful and cool and shrouded in trees. Its water is a siren song and upon her slender, fae-limbs the girl flutters closer and wonders when this might turn out to be a mere fantasy too.
Are you using any items? Twins Pass (@Somnus), Choose Gender (@rommy)
If the parents are of separate Courts, what parent will the foal live with? N/A
If the conception is successful, do you have an RPer for the foal(s)? Yep! @Dingo and @rommy will be playing the foals @Regis and @Anemone
Is there anything else you'd like us to know? On the off chance that the stats aren’t rolled in our favor and the pregnancy roll fails, we will buy a Guaranteed Pregnancy item!
Side note: We are requesting that Regis be born unhealthy. He will be stunted at birth, and be smaller and weaker than his sister.
If there’s anything else I didn’t touch on when stats are rolled, feel free to let us know!
i'm a pretty flower girl
check out my pretty flower curls
Darkness fell silent and thick. It might have been the first time she didn’t watch the sky as day tumbled into night with a sky full of bruises.
Flora’s heart is a slow, slow beat within her chest. The music pushes her and pulls. It drifts, light and enchanting, from the stage and slips through the crowds that press and sway together like grasses in a meadow.
Children run by her, sticky sweet and breathless with joy. Florentine watches them go. A part of her timeless soul, the part not yet fully grown, is tugged and pulled loose by their smiles. It is a flag upon a pole, pulled by the winds of childish abandon.
Florentine thinks of Raymond, of Calliope who have found their way from the Riftlands to here. It was only ever supposed to be Florentine’s mistake, but the Rift magic was a wily thing. It heeded Fate not at all. It had no need for Gods. Rift was its own master and a chaotic blend of magic and time.
Their presence here was warming and yet to look at them was to feel a blade in her heart. A part of her has waited, has woken each morning waiting, wondering if her parents too might find their way from the Rift… But they don’t.
The Riftlands are ending.
Lysander, Lysander.
All at once, Florentine is no longer a slow, serene stream meandering through the crowds. Instead she turns into the rush of a river approaching rapids. She weaves faster through the crowds with eyes that search and look and peer beyond the crowds.
She said he would tell her more and he told her he would, if she kept him alive. Florentine had, with blood upon her skin and a jagged piece of a dagger pulled from behind his ribs. She had tied that boy more firmly to the earth, to mortality.
Anger bubbles within her, it urges her steady heart to beat faster, faster. She pushed through the crowds like water through rapids and stops only when she sees a glint of antlers.
She breaks from the masses like an electron from an atom. There is no part of her that does not stalk. Those eyes of amethyst and tiger orange do not stray from him. Of course she would find him here, upon the fringes of the festival, watching. Always watching.
Every time Florentine turns to him, he is watching, from the edges, the corners. Always he is relaxed, drinking in the world as though it is whiskey from a crystal glass.
Florentine might have been hesitant in her approach had she known the gods of Ravos her brother told her of, included Lysander. Maybe she would have stood and regarded him, wondering where the darkness lay in him, like a pot of ink waiting to be dipped. Ah, but wasn’t Florentine just as likely to be the girl to hold the feathered quill and draw carelessly upon her skin with that black, black ink?
For once she does not go to him, does not start their encounter with a touch. It feels strange to stand away from him, but she does, for this moment. “You owe me, Lysander.” His anthousai breathes. But it is not his life she wants payback for, it would never be that. His life was a gift she would forever give him, if she could. Florentine is not selfish, but she is about losing her flower boy.
“Why did you come to Novus?” The fae girl asks and steps towards him. There is more than one answer that might please her, but many, many more that would leave her unsatisfied. Yet, above all, she simply wants to know. It is her time to know.
Summer was a beast she loved: it did not question nor beseech her, did not feather the darkness with deceit and disappointment and upon a cloud of blistering heat it had not once failed to gild her dreams in gold leaf. Rhoswen was aureate beneath the burning eye of the sun; it suited the woman - this incandescence. Her body rolled and coiled in waves of amber, silver, red and the earth cracked beneath her feet. It was not happiness, it was not Solterra, but it was something: a nameless, faceless sensation in the hollow space between her lungs that breathed with them too and split a smile behind her own when she turned to face the sky. Was this the end? The beginning? The part where she clutched the climax of her story with a firm grasp and ripped victory from the jaws of defeat? It was not Solis to whom she turned for answers, but herself. She was the architect of her own future, and like all great artists she intended to draw blood.
Rhoswen could not tell if she was imagining the clamouring taste of ash in her throat, still, for perhaps the memory of it remained too strong to shake. That blue fire upon the mountain - it wasn't an easy sight to forget. Her own fire still raged within; it had not been quelled by the distance that stretched on with each step they made toward Delumine and away from Denocte, if anything it had been stoked. She had been a volcano laid dormant within the borders of Night, bubbling and hissing, but latent beneath a cloak of despair that had sheltered her for too long. A thousand questions to consider - a lifetime of choices to catch and dismember with a rusted scalpel. Loyalty, family, betrayal, forgiveness: what was life without such conditions? But what, then, did her heart desire? Such a fickle thing it was, to snarl like a lioness and howl like a wolf, with nothing but the pull of the wind to guide her due north.
Finally, she knew: it desired the truth, and the truth was not Raum.
One, two, three, four - the sound of her hooves against the earth, a warbeat to hail the fray. Rhoswen had been leading them for hours now, cutting ahead like an arrow through flesh, her skin set alight like a house on fire beneath Solis golden gift; she was not alone now, He was watching his prodigal daughter through molten eyes. Behind the red woman trailed a small travelling party - three shadows cast behind her flame - and to them now she looked (a brief glance, sharp and torrid). Sabine seemed to grow every time she looked away: her daughter's willowy legs had already begun to curve into femininity, her roseate narrow hips deviating between child and woman - it would not be long now before she would hook the eyes of men. Sabine's horns glinted in the white light, casting specks of aquamarine against her adjacent father's skin. Raum, in perfect step with Acton. Rhoswen's chest burned, and back to the path her cheek turned.
Words unsaid, thoughts unfurled - a volcano cannot lie dormant forever.
@Bexley I suppose the scenario is he just quite suddenly comes out of a false wall, thrashing ... shrieking ... just ugly and old. Eventually he yells for help .. this is why drugs are bad.
he sun hung low in the lavender sky, round and full like an orange on a limber branch. Golden dots swam across Messa’s vision as she stared as long as she could at that sun, until at last she heaved a breath and closed her aching cerulean eyes.
And fell backwards against a carpet of plush, green grass. Ivory curls fanned around her like a halo, and white lashes fluttered as she took in the sights and smells from a wholly new perspective. How surprisingly pleasant it was. A bumblebee hummed from flower to fragrant flower, and she watched as pollen fell in golden clumps from its fur.
The sparrow-boned dancer was a nymph of flowers and curls, her braids awry and flowers askew. The change was so drastic, she hardly recognized herself. She wouldn’t be surprised if no one recognized her as she was, as unkept as the children who scampered like deer through the legs of the crowd.
“What am I doing?” she sighed, flipping onto her stomach to prop her chin upon her limbs. The sun was setting on the second day of the festival. The eve of the second day, and Messalina had yet to indulge in any of the festivities put on; yet to meet anyone she knew well enough to greet; yet to even speak to the flower-wreathed Regent, before he’d been claimed by one festival goer after the other. Instead, she’d wandered the venue like a wraith, floating from one booth to the next as she’d examined their wares with a polite smile, considered their offers with a graceful curtsy.
It was exactly how she’d acted at Mother’s side, and she despised herself for it. Come fall, it will be a year since my departure. How has time flowed so fast? The blood-red rose, stark amongst the carnations, glowed like a ruby behind her ear.
Where is Eros, I wonder? A dandelion twirled in the air as blue eyes scanned the distant crowd for a flash of ivory and gold. She had seen him for only a moment the day before, a hurried hello all she could spare before she’d dashed off to her performance. Had he seen it? Idly, she remembered the flowers he’d braided into his tail the first time they’d met — more than ever, she wished he were besides her so she could ask him to do the same to hers.
Ivory and gold. Ivory and — gold. Eros! In an instant, Messa was up on her hooves in a swirl of leaves and petals, barely pausing to brush the grass from her mane before rushing from her tree towards his silken tail. A glass of sparkling drink trailed after him as he made his way delicately across the glade.
Weaving through limbs like vines, she emerged breathless on the other side. “There you are, Eros.”
