Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Aster shivers at the doorway to the castle, not in fear but expectant thrill.
How long has it been, since she was anything other than out-of-doors? The only roofs above her head have been clouds and starlight and the intertwining arch of branches. She remembers a small cottage, full of moss and jars and smells both wild and tame, that she went into as a girl with her twin by her side. That had been the last time.
But when the slender girl steps between the stone mouth, she finds it as lush with gardens as the world she left behind.
Aster laughs with delight, a loud, bright sound like bells against the hushed and sweet-smelling darkness. Light as a candle she drifts in the slow current of other horses, bending her head to blossoms and beds of ferns until they tickle her cheeks.
She does not yet look for the little-queen, the unicorn she had met by the seaside not so long ago. She wonders what she’s dreaming now.
And Aster wonders, too (for dimly, dimly she remembers that she was born a princess) if she might have had a castle like this, or grown gardens up the walls, or looked down at a sea of others who all bent their heads to her.
But she forgets these things as she wanders this forest both false and true, bars of moonlight striping her body.
AND I KNOW THAT ROME WASN'T BURNT IN A DAY
BUT IT COULDN'T HAVE BEEN MORE THAN A WEEK
H
e would love to say he’s been staring this down, and oncoming train howling into the distance, the ghost of a machine barely visible through the fog. Maybe it is because he has his head in a well full of snakes and honey, the one soft, harmless place in the beating drum of his heart. Maybe it is the distance, Andras closed in the library until the day he is called to come back to the court for the coronation. Maybe it is that when he looks at Ipomoea he is busy seeing everything but this, like Po is a series of photographs, but none of them the king in his entirety.
Through the ceremony, Andras is quiet, and still; no crackling light, no electric hum. He feels numb, almost empty. He is unprepared to cope with the nuances of his heart (the only thing pounding in his ears louder than the celebratory drums, the only thing brighter than the poppies unfolding like palms as the morning fog burns away) so he doesn’t.
He will unpack this all later, he decides. He will choose what to feel when he knows what it is.
Later comes in minutes, then hours, when he sees Danaë in the center of the garden, just for a moment free of the throng of well-wishers and citizens only now brave enough to peek at her and Isolt now that she is their queen.
Andras swallows the rest of his drink and carries the empty glass with him toward the young unicorn, turning it over as he searches for something-- anything-- to say. He thinks, not for the first time, that her father’s faith in his diplomacy is misplaced at best, catastrophic at worst.
It is strange, after all this time, to look at someone and see so many parts of a person you love: the angle of the brow, the red eyes, and not know who this new, different version of them is. It is strange to look at a face and not know if it is the face of a friend or a stranger.
Some things are like that, he supposes. Our faces are reborn, again and again, in those of our children. It is a path paves with moments like this, in the bustle of the garden, where, for just a second, around them it is quiet-- almost too much so.
Andras stares at her one second longer, and ducks his head low. ”Congratulations,” he says. ”I am here if you need me.”
A thousand unblinking eyes watch from a group of curious white birches as the blood drips, drops, drips, drops, from a coursing black river which paints the gold-cracked shoulder of the dusky fiend. Each droplet folds into itself against the earth, and the earth accepts its sacrifice thirstily: it wells then sighs, then veins itself deep into the rich loam, wherein the worms and the beetles have hungered for countless ages. The roots feed. Cherry-white blossoms, dotted in vibrant red, bob their heads in giggling rows.
Long behind, in a thick overgrowth of thistle and thorn, curious vines gnarl beneath the weight of a body as its warmth gives and gives until there is only cold.
A lake forms at the pit of his collar bone, a boutonniere fragrant of metal and salt. Its tributaries dry and its stream is dammed, until the drips, drops, drips, drops, become patters, pats, puts, pits, then silent needle-prick blots veiled in the thickness of moss and lichen. The forest opens to him as he breaks a line of ash saplings: a garden that sways to a choir of locusts, sphagnum whispers dripping from green webs among the willows, the drumbeat of a creek paddling pebbles down its bed. In the distance, violins swell and counter the rhythm, swooning and felling into the echo of crickets and chorus frogs.
His tongue, smooth and feline, flashes to slake a gloss across the gleam of his fangs. They catch a glint of the moon reflected against smooth river-rocks, flashing impishly then gone. His horns rake the hanging moss as he passes beneath the cathedral of sallows and caress the bulbous blossoms of a blooming cherry – pinks and bone-white, their centers a blushing red. They remind him of hunger again, and of roses and hyacinth and silver lilac, but the choir calls him on.
A wall fettered with bluebells winks at him with devilish couture before nodding in the breeze. The castle, its gaping arch ghostly in its emptiness, grants him a note of ethereal pleasance. Moonflowers nestle in crags. Honeysuckle waits at the gates like lounging gargoyles, sickly sweet. Primrose buds between bricks, phlox in the eastern corners.
Though Erasmus darkens the silvery gate of the castle, the tiger-lilies dance in the weight of his shadow like sprites. He enters with all the grace and poise of a wolf in winter, feral lines and roving shoulders, lean and smooth and virile, predatory. Passing between the guests like a dark eidolon, he roams to the end of the hall, where moonlight spills into the rose-edged veranda. There, he closes his eyes as a group of blood-red roses brush against him hungrily and listens deeply to the music of the night.
Posted by: Delilah - 12-22-2020, 12:22 AM - Forum: Archives
- No Replies
with fire in my mouth I became my own goddess
I
have never wanted the world to belong to me so much as I have wanted to watch it burn. Maybe this is the difference between my siblings and I, especially the boys. Pilate and Adonai would keep the other alive if it meant they kept their riches and their titles. Miriam would sweep the ashes as they burned, swearing everything was just as it should be. Ruth would never start the fire, but neither would she put it out. And Hagar, she would argue with the flames of who was most beautiful.
Me, I like the way it sounds when flint strikes against steel. And the way the sparks erupt.
My mane blows like rust in the desert wind. I forgot how hot it is in Solterra this time of year, even here, in the gardens. I cant imagine the rest of them, out there on the street or the Mors. Hagar is painting below me as I look down the balcony I stand upon. I wonder what she is painting, probably herself. I remember how she cried when her pet was killed, big crocodile tears. I held her and kissed her cheeks as little sisters do. I wonder too, how long has it been since she has cried like that?
I turn and walk back inside my room leaving her to her painting. I pick up my Hagar doll and place it out in the garden of the doll house my father had one of our servants build a long time ago. I kiss the top of her head and smooth her hair. She really was very pretty.
I exit my room and being to walk down the halls, and I see the stairs leading to Miriam’s room. I wonder what she does in there all day. Even I do not know and I have been unable to find out from the servants. It is a strange thing being home, as it has been quite some time, but I found that a hiatus from the company is what was needed, and a bit of time back with the family would be beneficial. I am sure they have missed me after all. “Lady Delilah.” One the of the servants startles in surprise when we make to round the same corner. I smile sweetly and touch upon a piece of hair that was out of place—how unbecoming. But all better now. “Prince Adonai, I believe he is in the sun room, alone,” he says. They did so love to update me on my siblings’ whereabouts. It is as if I never even left. I smile again before skipping off in that direction.
He is sitting there, staring out the window as he plays the lyre. I wonder if he has even heard me come in. I shut the for quietly behind me as I approach, graceful like the side winders I see over the dunes. His music has always been beautiful. I think should this house ever burn, I would save that lyre and place it on a mantel.
I smile.
I smile all teeth and little warmth.
A lethal thing under any other circumstance really.
Oh, but not my eldest brother. For I love him so, so much.
I wait for a break in the music before I exhale. “That was lovely, brother,” I say with a sweeping blink of green eyes as I come to his side. I settle beside him and pluck a single string on the instrument and listen to the way it hums through the room.
“I had been meaning to ask you, how was the party?” I ask him, tucking my head underneath his chin as I had done since I was small. I am allowed certain things my siblings are not, being the youngest now. “I’m assuming Pilate planned the entire thing?” I ask with a scoff as I pull away. “Imagine how extravagant it would have been had you planned it, eldest brother.” Eldest brother, I know I he likes to be called that, it gives him that reminder that he was the first, the first made, the first loved. Though Pilate may be the first in line now, Adonai is still the eldest. No one can take that away from him.
THE CORONATION the sky appeared and disappeared
between the branches and the thickets,
From the moment the oak and cedar doors open, and the pale ivory garden gates moan in the midnight wind, it is obvious that something has changed in the city of flowers. The city, even in the warm summer solstice night, does not hum with cicadas or flicker with fireflies. There is music in the streets, and leaking through the drafty stone walls of the castle, but it is not the same music that has sung Ipomoea through the streets of his court.
Tonight there is both a hush in the wind and a weight in the silver moonlight raining from down from the full moon. The music is too dark to be a hallelujah to the new queen, too slow, too full of embers instead of infernos. In the music there is the suggestion of howling wolves, trees creaking in a north wind, skeletons rising like flowers, and the magic of stags who hold in their tines both this world and a hundred others.
It is perhaps not the magic Delumine is used to. But nevertheless it is magic and the city, the forest, the meadows full of blood-red flowers, are all full to bloating with it.
THE CELEBRATION
The ball begins with nothing more than a single step through the castle doors. It lives in each hallway, each room, and each garden like an organ in the skeleton and flower castle.
The music does not shift from north to west but rather follows like a ghost nipping at the hooves of the horses wandering through the stone corpse. It gathers in crescendos in a hallway, loudly enough that it feels like the sea has devoured all the forests only to find this garden world. It turns to whispers and lulling sonnets in the echoing throats of the forgotten palace temples. No one has found out where the band is stationed, no one has seen their faces or their instruments and perhaps that is why the party-goers whisper of ghosts more than they whisper of politics as they wander from room to room.
Each room is alive with flowers, and lichen, and sapling trees blooming through the mortar. The flowers though, as the horses linger to press their noses to the pollen and petals, smell sweeter than a freshly furled flower should. The sweetness is sometimes as overpowering as it is provocative. It waivers in the same manner as the music, as here and gone as the shimmer of a shadow in the eaves of a window.
There is no clear divide between unicorn and horse, mortal and immortal, magic-cursed and magic-blessed. There is only the rejoice of both life and the sorrowful relief of death twisted together, over and over again, like the root city of the forest. It does not matter the core of the heart but only that it beats with something: love or spore, greed or giving, hunger or need.
And tonight is not for celebration for the passing of the crown but for the way the Novus is discovering, all at once, what comes after both life and death have started to turn to memory.
About the Event
This event will take place until Jan. 31st. All threads can be claimed for the IC event experience. Please just tag your posts with (coronation). In addition the court account will be offering an 25 signos bonus for completed threads. Just toss them below this thread when completed and I’ll send the bonus over.
It’s a very open for creativity event and you can find the moodboard for it here if you would like some inspiration for the event. The celebration is not limited to the castle grounds if you have a character that would prefer to wander. I’m so excited to see what you all come up with as this aesthetic is one of my favorites.
<3 nestle.
’ve been sitting here all night being unsure of what to say besides that I love you all and being Dawn’s Sovereign has been one of my greatest honors and joys the entire time I’ve been on Novus. I have loved each and every one of you and your characters and the stories we’ve gotten to create together, and I so look forward to seeing that go on. It wasn’t an easy decision to have Po leave the Court but I think it’s one that makes sense for his arc and opens up a new arc for Delumine to explore, one that I’m really excited to see play out. So it’s with a bit of a bittersweet goodbye that I announce that @nestle and @danaë will be taking over Dawn Court from Ipomoea. ♡
I wanted to post an announcement about this because I know there may be some concerns about this moving forward. And I just wanted to say that Dawn Court is absolutely my baby and Nes has worked her butt off to be the top poster, coming up with ideas and plots and engaging with literally everyone in plots. I can think of no one more qualified or more capable of taking over this Court and I know she will do her best to do right by all of you.
When Po was chosen to lead Day Court there was an extended discussion about whether or not an IC exchange should happen for Dawn or it would proceed to auditions; in the end the staff allowed me to decide which I would prefer. As nestle has planned for this and has put in the work for it I felt it right to give her the chance, and take full responsibility for this decision. Having spoken to several of you in recent weeks about the possibility of Danaë leading (and thank you to those who offered their support in this!) I felt confident moving forward. I know she has great plot ideas and was my rock during my time as sovereign, and I’m truly excited where she takes the Court. I would encourage anyone who has questions or concerns about this process to come to me, as again I take responsibility for this decision and am prepared for it. ♡
Again thank you to everyone who has supported me in this, I hope you give nestle and Danaë the same support you have shown to myself and Ipomoea. I truly look forward to seeing where this change takes these Courts and am excited to write more stories with you all.
like a flower in the desert, I only wanted to bloom
Some mornings he wonders if he could raise the sun by himself.
He is thinking it now, as he rises in the dark and walks through the halls of the castle like another midnight shadow torn free from the rest. It feels like religion, like a new-god blinking itself awake in his marrow and chanting yes, yes, yes to every question he did not know how to ask. Like a promise written into his bones that he is only now learning the pattern to. And when he stops to look out the eastern window (always, he is looking east), it is only to wonder at the way he might hold the sun between his shoulders and rise with it.
Ipomoea knows he was made for the earth. Made for the sand and the soil and the things he might grow from them. But still — but still — there is a part of him that looks at the cold and dark horizon and thinks how much easier it might be to ferry the sun across the sky.
But he cannot look at the horizon without thinking of the desert. And he cannot think of the desert without mourning every piece of his shattered heart that he is leaving behind.
His heart breaks a little more, as he wanders the twisted roots of the castle that no longer feels like his. Now he is not sure it ever felt like his, not in the way it mattered — not in the way the desert has always felt both like and unlike his home. The ivy-and-wisteria-covered walls sigh as he walks past them, leaves and curling stems reaching out to brush against his sides like they, too, know if will be the last time they see their king of flowers.
And when they touch him leaf to skin, they whisper against him the story of a boy with flowers on his brow and wings at his heels, who had stood outside these very walls like destiny and thought himself like a tree, concerned only with sun, and wind, and water, and all the ways he might root and belong. And of a boy before him crowned with moonlight, who had learned to love the wild and left his flowers for the forest. They whisper to him of growth and becoming, of long springs and longer winters, of the wild that lives now like a seed caught between his teeth.
It feels now like he has always been that wind-caught seed, destined to never find that bit of soil to sprout in. He thinks maybe he has wandered too long, that he is doomed now to never grow into a home the way he had once wished (the way he sometimes still wishes, when he stands beneath his trees and tells himself this is enough, this should be enough, and feels more and more like it is a lie he has woven for himself. As if saying it over and over and over again can make it true.)
So now when he pulls himself from the vines tangling like chains around his legs it is with a sigh of his heart tearing itself in two.
As the horizon turns from almost-black to bruise-blue streaks of rose and gold, as the light falls on a court again-transformed into a festival, he turns at last to the fate he has been running from. He knows he is out of time when the bells begin to toll, and the morning court comes awake to witness a dawn like none before it. Blackened roses lift their heads to watch him go, and desert poppies unwind themselves like smiles raised to the dawn. He hopes he sounds still like the forest, when the doors open before him and the too-familiar paths lead him to the heart of it.
It is there in the garden (his garden, the part of the castle that will always feel like his) that Danaë waits for him. He finds her there in the bruised light, framed in almost-darkness and flowers. “Danaë,” his voice is just another sigh of the garden when he goes to her, nothing beneath the layers of music rising in the courtyard behind him.
For a moment, when there is a lull in the songs and the wind, he thinks he can hear the heartbeat of the earth running beneath their’s. He wants to sink into it, to root and grow and twist his legs into branches that stretch over the garden. He wants to be like Ellery, singing himself into a tree. For a moment he wants to stay, to run through the garden and tell every flower and leaf and vine and root to wrap itself around his heart and never again let him go. He wants — oh he wants a thousand things, but he knows he sounds more like the desert now than the flowers.
And he knows his daughter’s story will begin and end here, in a way his never can.
“I am glad —“ his lungs feel like flowers trembling in the desert sun, and when he breathes and breathes there is not enough wind to fill them. “There is no one better to be the next queen of the morning.”
Behind them the music starts again, and each note is like a hourglass counting away his seconds. So he breathes against her brow once, only once, his lips brushing the bloody spiral of his horn before he turns to face the dawn rising like a new promise over them.
“They are waiting.” He does not ask her if he is ready. He already knows he is not.
I love you all and I will greatly, greatly, greatly miss being Dawn court's sovereign. This thread will be the start to the coronation and will eventually be opened to anyone to post in, but I'd like to get a few more posts in with just Po/Danaë first. ♡
Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.
She tells herself she is looking Isolt—and maybe she is.
But first, she wants to find that grave that sat wide and gaping, ready to swallow her whole should she only ask for such a thing. She wanders through the forest, the shadows reach out to her, no longer contained to only the night, but their voices spill into the day and they whisper there, in the darkness created by the trees.
Elli is such a different thing than both her parents. They keep searching for the light, her mother the sun, her father the stars. She wonders if they have ever been brave enough to dive into the shadows. What would they do if they were cast into them? Her mother would fight, fight and fight, but Elli, she was so very different from her mother. (‘You have your mother’s eyes,’ they say, and she thinks ‘how?’ Because eyes are supposed to be windows to the soul and Elliana’s could not be more different than her mother’s own.) For she did not rage like an open ocean or pound waves upon the cresting cliffs; instead, she was large, still bodies—her depths unexplored, untouched.
It is these differences she notices, that she wears like a burden on her shadowed skin. Because she wonders (though does not cry) why am I so different? Why do I look to the darkness when she looks away? Her mother will peer up at the sun and Elli will watch her shadow slither along the grass.
And why is the darkness of that tree screaming at her from behind its leaves? What torture did they enslave you to?
And why does that flower’s shadow giggle with wiggling flower petals? What funny things did they tell you?
And why the passing cloud saying ‘shh’ ‘shh’ ‘shh’? What stories are you trying to share?
The forest goes quiet and something twists in her chest. The grave, it should be here, but there is nothing, as if it had never been dug in the first place. She can feel the death around her, the dying. She can remember the first time a flower died, and she screamed like someone was driving a knife into her chest, through her heart. Her mother told her it was just a flower, but it never really is, not truly, that is what she believed.
Blood stains these woods, but they both know that already, don’t they? “Isolt,” she gasps, not because she knows it is her, but because she hopes that it is. “I cant find it,” she says. “Did you fill it?” She asks, and if she did—what rests there—six feet under.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
S
he has become a collector of items.
Her first paintbrush that she ruined by leaving out in the rain. Tulips petals from the ones that died (her mom says they will grow new flowers in their stead, but these were her favorite, she insisted.) A pretend sword from Nic. A pebble she tossed at Aeneas’s window.
She has become a collected of more than items.
Elliana grows in both height and in friendships. These friends, these special, beautiful friends she has made. Sometimes if she thinks about them too hard, too much, her whole world ends up dizzy and she thinks she cannot breathe with how wonderful they all are.
She has invisible music to dance to. Her heart is steady amongst the songs of summer birds and new babies still testing their voices as well as their wings. The December sky blue of her eyes looks about the Court. Her mother had permitted her to go into the city for the day and she peers up at all the buildings and stores from beneath her cornsilk forelock and her blue eyes.
After the dampness of spring, she thought summer might be the escape she needed. Those silver blue eyes flitter around the city, taking everything in. In the bright sunlight of the afternoon, those shadows are slim, and she can only hear the faint murmuring of them, not loud enough to understand, and she has grown accustomed to the way she is no longer ever alone it would seem. ‘Did you hear the Halcyon will be flying out?’ Someone says. Elli overhears the conversation. Of course she had heard of the Halcyon in her history lessons, and how could she not tune in after learning of Aeneas’s family and who his mother is. It was perhaps the one time she had paid attention. She listens for where they will be training and Elli quickens her pace.
Steadily, she makes her way towards were there barracks are, keeping attune to any she might see. Elli is without paintbrush or canvas today, but if she saw them, she knows well enough of her talent that she would be able to capture it. She goes to the overlook just outside the main city and waits with the patience of an artist.
but you said, come here, my bird!
i will give you the dangerous black night
T
he dampened earth gave beneath his feet. Soft, loamy, particles of sand crunched and packed as he stood before the tide line, his eyes distant over the silhouette of what became of the island. Perhaps he should have been surprised of its changing, of its shifting, of the uncharacteristic softness of its new form: the rolling hills, the emerald greens, the jungle given way to the occasional pine and boulder, and more lifeless shapes in between. Instead, he was unsettled by the quiet. There was no hum today, no roaring of falling stars or the undulating echos of thunder from the deep. For long he stood at the shores of what was once the land bridge, contemplating the silence, until his skin shuddered of itself in ripples and static waves.
He meant to move against the shallows, but the shallows moved against him instead. There had been boats waiting at the shore, but he had despaired the last boat that carried him across the Terminus. It had little enjoyment to it – he would have rather swam, in retrospect, letting the brine crystallize in his mane and furs, feeling the current fight him like the furious beast that it is. It raised him now, though small whiteheads still brushed at his fetlocks and roared with disdain for its obedience. Each footstep was a damp clatter as if the ocean between the shore and the island was no more than a broad wet stone in which his reflection stored.
In it, his shadow had grown wild. For an entire season he had spent his vagrant life in the wilds on the brim of Denocte, in the woods between the lake and the mountains. It had been liberating, loosened from the sentry stalls and the battleground camps, Elysium chatter of hoarded gold and death in the prairie. His mane filled with burrs, his flesh with thorn-cuts, dandelion heads, pollen, his hair lengthened and sweeping in waves, dripping shadows that caressed the mirror-surface. With him no longer the smell of Night Market incense and Denoctian musk, but the smell of deep pine forests and cedar grain, of wind and earth and sky and ash, of lake water and meadow root, of stag leather and hare blood.
It was at the end of dusk when he first stepped into the world that was the island – and world indeed, for as many times as one may try to map it they would find that it stretched almost imperceptibly as they roamed, filled with notches and crooks and turns that wove and dove and upended. He did not doubt that the hills, were he to pass between them, would broaden and gape and route their valley into some treacherous gulley. The land pretended to be soft, but he knew better. (Were there not times in which rough things must pretend to be soft?)
There was little to be noted in the land of sculptures, except that when the wind settled and the calm fell in, therein became a stirring not unlike many voices at a whisper. He stopped then in a clearing surrounded by statues – some whole, some broken, one missing an ear and another with a cleft throat – and his ears flicked to gather the commune of sounds just barely comprehensible above the rustling of leaves.
