Death twitches my ear. "Live", he says, "I am coming".
It
had been three days (seventy-two hours and 14 minutes to be exact) since The Feeling had come over him like a rash picked up in the underbellied gutter of any city south of right here. It wasn't the kind of thing you could ignore; especially for someone like Raziel, with his dry idiosyncrasies and wooden habits.
There were too many rungs on the ladder of his stringency to miss how unorthodoxly the sand lay disturbed behind the outer stretch of Saudagar's perimeter wall. How damp his neck had felt returning from the capitol at dawn. How strangely his youngest cousin behaved when accosted under moonsoak in the long-disused gatehouse. He had been the top of his (albeit small, privileged) class at math and he knew something here was not adding up.
It made his blood-cracks itch a little deeper, a little longer.
Gahenna knew too. It was in her milkweed-white eyes as they dart a little too furtively back and forth. Even now, as they stood in the grand courtyard of their ancestral Nazaretian estate, her hackles hitched up just that little too high to be noted as flat. Craning down to meet her gaze, Raziel frowns. What is it? She shakes her head, the 24-carat spines needling out from her collar glinting as they swing too.
And he can't, won't, let it go. Absolutely-fucking-not. If there is malfeasance under his nose he will find it. Crush it. Rip its throat out. How many times had his mother told him to see things through? No half measures. If he had the wherewithal to see the irony in such violent dedication to Balsheva's creed he might have laughed. As it was, he didn't.
They move as one out through the high-stone gates, glancing once into the gatehouse he had sent his cousin scurrying from last night, before turning right to start tracking the boundary wall once more. There had to be a clue, some semblance of evidence that would tie their paranoia into reality. If only he could put his finger on what exactly it was that was so quietly disturbing?
Nevertheless, he walks - Gahenna in silent tow. Blood dripping like sweat beneath the undying heat of Solis' midday sun.
kissed my penny and threw it in
prayed to keep my soul
I
n the darkness, all stood still for a sweet, fleeting moment before chaos erupted. Faces flash before her, those voices taken form. (Whatever it is – sometimes it’s a clown with a Glasgow smile, sometimes it’s a tiger with no face. Sometimes it’s the smell of gasoline and a match catching fire.) She has seen a girl of skin and bone and dying eyes, with ribs like welts across her sides. “Careful, I might steal that smile from your lips.” A man told her with a blue scarf wrapped around him. It is too much, too much.
So she closes her eyes and thinks ‘go away, go away,’ but they never do. So she goes instead. ‘Bring me back, bring me back.’ ‘No, no.’ And ‘I cant, I cant.’ Elliana rises from her bed (for when the ghosts come out to play she feels so much less like Elli and like Elliana because that name is heavy, that name is weighted and all she feels is all this weight of spirits hanging on her back.)
She sidesteps inside her mother’s cabin, dancing over dead feet that grow around her like tree roots. She ducks beneath cold, dead lips that long to press into her, to feel any warmth that can lay against. She twirls with invisible dance partners as tears well up in their eyes and slide down sad, broken, dead faces. And then she is free, breaking through that door and running, running, running. She is not so unlike her mother. She closes her eyes again and thinks ‘go away, go away.’ But they never do. She thinks ‘go away, go away,’ as she runs, runs, runs.
Go away, go away. And then they do, they are gone, she cannot feel them, cannot hear them, she cannot see them. Blue (too blue) eyes see only empty air below her, and hear the whistle of wind as it rushes past her ears. The world pauses and she wonders, do they know? Those spirits? Do they know she is so close that bridge that they dare not follow her?
She thinks she should scream.
And maybe she does inside her head.
But on the outside, that scream turns into something like a smile as she hits the water below.
Posted by: Elena - 12-12-2020, 09:52 AM - Forum: Archives
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elena
I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.
Nothing good will come of this, she had thought dancing by the fires, but that part of her had flittered up and into the stars with the rest of the smoke. He baptized her first with fire and smoke. Again with salty kisses and ocean spray. And once more with lake water and starlight.
The roar of the ocean is still in her ears. She smells like salt and wildflowers. Glacier blue eyes blink against the bleary light as she walks. Despite the nights she spends in Denocte with Elli and Azrael, she is a Terrastellan girl through and through. There is lavender imprinted in her skin, eyes blue like the sky over the swamp, and the walls around her heart are as high as the cliffs.
She dances as she walks the streets of Denocte. Elena doesn't belong here, and there is something that feels so freeing with this knowledge. She walks over cobblestones the way Azrael had shown Elli to skip stones across water. But she still cannot help the way her blue eyes delicately trace the Night Court streets as if he may materialize before her. He wont, she insists, he has yet to, she has either avoided him, or he has kept away from her. She is not entirely sure which is more heartbreaking in all reality.
It is only when she reaches the monastery that her chest starts to tremble. If she were to ever see him it would be here, but Elena has a duty (“what would you choose? Duty? Or love?” She had asked Lilli. Lilli had asked her the same. She never answered, only said “Love is fickle, duty is reliable.”) Duty is reliable, as reliable as Elena in her skills of healing that she would come here of all places. ‘This way Lady Elena,’ a monk greets her. She is led to the one who lays ill in bed. Inspects his illness, asks him questions, she forgets about the monk, about everything that came after, because love was fickle. She instead thinks about the high fever, the way his limbs have grown weary, and the pounding headache behind his eyes because duty was reliable.
But where love is warm—
Duty can be so lonely. She had forgotten that part. She has also forgotten that cliff dancers never live for what is so reliable. (Where was the thrill?)
“I think,” she begins, watching him sweat, shake, fight whatever it was attacking his system. “He may need to be transported to Terrastella, so I can watch him, if it is feasible.” Elena blinks blue eyes at the monk. “I can talk to Morr about arrangements between our Courts,” she offers. There would be no conflict that she could think of. One of her soldiers is sick, Terrastella would care for him, and he would be returned, strong and as fit as ever. And hopefully, Denocte could return the favor another time, in another form. Morrighan was hardly the type to owe a debt. ‘The Regent is on his way, you can speak to him,’ one of the monks says and Elena’s eyes widen slightly and ears flitter forwards in her tangle of blonde hair. So Morrighan had picked a new Regent? She was surprised, but then again, nothing about the fire walker was slow, because who ever knew fire to spread with ease and leisure? ‘If you have the time,’ they offer her respectfully. She smiles and nods and she wonders—do they know? What happened between her and one of their own? Do they know what they created? She wants to ask them, if love was so forbidden, why would her daughter be graced with Caligo’s marking? But she doesn't ask, they don’t want to know…and neither does she.
‘Follow us,’ they say and the blonde girl of sunshine walks out of the room and into the spacious hall. ‘He is just up ahead, we will leave you now,’ they say and walk away as Elena walks ahead. There is the echo of feet on the ground, no longer the skipping of a pebble across a lake, thrown by her daughter, but it sounds like the crackle of fire when Elli was only a twinkle in the eyes of sunlight and shadows.
She was not expecting anything she realizes only when she sees it is him. Elena realizes she had no expectations, no visions, and she thinks it is because it was him all along, and maybe deep down she knew it was him, that it would be him that she saw today. She should have filled herself with an idea, with a presumption, a conjecture. Something. Because it is when she is least expecting that he comes to her, always. Be it a festival, a cliff side, a hospital, a lake, shadows, an ocean. They will find each other still when they are both six feet under and dance upon each other’s graves. (With rolling hips, rocking shoulders, and roving steps.) They are built from the bones of unassuming dance partners.
Maybe she shouldn't be surprised that it is now that she finds him, when she has forgotten that she was even looking for anything to begin with.
Because she has looked for him.
Everywhere she has gone.
Perhaps she should be ashamed of how desperately she has looked for him, when she was the one who told him to stay away. The one who was so frightened of him finding out about his daughter. She could still be nothing more than that foolish teenager with the boy too old for her, hoping to get caught sneaking back from rendezvous she should have never had.
She thought of him more than she should have.
She dreamed of the quiet moments in their story together. She dreamed so much that she almost does not believe it is him. Blue eyes brush downwards, as if not seeing him means it is not real and he is not really standing before her. She grows still, her eyes hesitant as they finally sweep up and then hungrily study his face. Trying to memorize every detail of him and commit it to memory, trying to force herself to remember it all and trying to ignore the ache that spreads in her with the want to reach out and touch him—just for a moment.
Perhaps she notices the changes in him right away.
Perhaps she doesn’t.
Perhaps she’s too distracted by the way her heart beats differently just by being around him. And maybe she would never admit it but he has reoriented her pulse, she can feel how the rhythm has changed from the little girl who thought if she ran fast enough, she would fly. She tries to not feel the cold of the distance between them and she fights against the marrow-deep need to close it, but she does not trust the way that her head swims. Steady, steady, like balancing a book atop her head. She would break this.
She would break this like she breaks everything in her life.
He is similar enough to the ghost the haunts her that it nearly wrecks her.
It nearly unravels her until she’s flung wide, the thread coming undone at such a fast pace, she cant sew herself back up before that single string is dragging at her feet.
He is here before her so quickly that she cant breathe.
She cant stop to process.
That look on his face is so similar a one he had when they first met, except those eyes, she cannot see his eyes, that her heart breaks. It shatters in her chest completely. There is the sound of her banging and clanging against her ribs, the rattle of a thousand broken pieces shifting in her flayed open chest, that let her know she is not the girl she pretends to be. She is not larger than life, but still oh so very tiny, like golden sunlight drops on a puddle left behind by spring rainfall.
She feels her heart turn to dust in her chest.
She is not the same girl he had left behind. Her heart, although it aches for him, no longer belongs to him and even standing here, with the smell of him, and his shoulder adorned with the same marking her daughter has that brings a tidal wave of emotion crashing over her, part of her is gone.
That part of her is curled up against a stallion made of stars with bright eyes and a gentle touch. She is standing with her cheek against his strong shoulder, feeling the echoes of home and love in his pulse. She is not innocent anymore, the last of her blissful innocence is at the bottom of a lake far, far away from here. But with him, with her star, she is at least, happy.
Tenebrae left her and he tore a hole right through her.
Azrael came to her and he filled it.
She wants to be, or a part of her does, wants to be a volcano. She wants to be an earthquake, and tear the world at its seams into halves. She wants to be as strong as she sounds when she said ‘Don’t come back,’ but all of her resolve so quickly turns to poison in her gut. It splits her in a bigger way than Tenebrae ever did. It splits her in a bigger way than anything ever has.
Would the constellations spell out her regret?
She wants to speak, but she cannot because there aren’t words that exist inside of her to say what she needs to say, because there aren’t words existing like that at all.
She wants to ask him what happened, but she knows it can be dangerous to ask a question when the answer is already known. Her voice is steady despite it all, despite the shivers that send earthquakes down her spine. She quirks a brow he cannot see, but there is a smile in her voice that she deliberately places there so he will hear it. “Missed me?”
I have never been afraid of the ocean, despite all the reasons I know I ought to be. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me that I was one of the first horses to step onto and across the water.
I was one of the first to step into the water and one of the last to step onto the island. The problem is, I kept looking down as I crossed the ocean. All those mournful eyes, delicate ears, leaping legs tangled up in kelp... All those unicorns, they reminded me of my mother. They reminded me of my sister. All those lips parted and unreadable-- they could have been calling to me, in greeting or warning, or maybe that was just the look people had before they turned to stone. One last, long, exhale. Easy. And then, forever, nothing.
Too often I stopped and pressed the tip of my nose to the surface of the sea, my mane cascading around my face and into the water. I stared down at those dark-eyed faces, blinkless, waiting for them to stir. "What is it? What are you trying to say?" But they didn’t move, or if they did it was always the split second when my eyes were closed. We stood within reach, but we were worlds away.
I should have been used to that feeling, but it still drove me mad.
So that is how I got sidetracked; it was late in the day when I stepped foot on dry land once more. The tall, lush grass seemed to wave as though it was happy to see me again, and I must admit returning to the island felt a little like coming home. After all, I grew up here in ways I never did in Denocte. I turned to the closest statue- I could see others scattered in the green hills before me, their stillness emphasized by the movement of the grass- and something strange happened. Although, I knew to expect strange things on the island, and I did not stir except to smile softly to myself.
When I pressed my cheek to its shoulder, the statue began to weep. And then it started to sing.
AMONG THE MONSTERS, I AM WELL HIDDEN; WHO LOOKS FOR A LEAF IN THE FOREST?
art
@Elliana I hope this works, let me know if you'd like me to change anything<3
Posted by: Charlotte - 12-11-2020, 04:58 PM - Forum: Archives
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and this is who i'd become it's all there on the tip of my tongue wish i was good enough for anyone
At first, the salt stings in the fresh wounds, but eventually the pain fades—the punctures stop bleeding. Indy, of course, waits for her every time she surfaces. There is something different between them now. A deeper bond that only predators can share. They hunt fish together, for the first time.
• • •
Charlie has to practically drag herself from the sea, the first time. The waves refuse to give her up; cling desperately to her like a mother to a growing child. It sings don’t go, don’t go, don’t go. The young soldier turns back with shifting eyes and quivering legs and says, “I will come home.”
• • •
And she does. She goes between the two enough times to remember how it feels to walk without stumbling, to fly without falling. Enough times that the feeling of magic knitting itself over her body feels less electric and more like a breeze. Until she almost learns how to hide her teeth.
Today, Charlie goes farther from the sea than usual. Far enough that she can no longer hear it calling to her but just feel it. Always; in her blood, her bones, like a ballad. Impossible to ignore.
The sky and water girl goes beyond the swamp and its dark buzzing canopy. She ends up in the place between dusk and dawn. In the loosely scattered glades of trees and the shallow offshoot creek from the Rapax.
For the first time since she can remember, she tries to stay away from the sea. Indy’s shadow above guides her eastward along the bank of the babbling Amare. Charlie’s not sure what she’s expecting to find. The ocean has given her everything that she thought she ever wanted.
he is a child of the markets, but she is a child of places like this, too, of far-reaching grasslands that feel like forever, like you can walk through for centuries and never find the other end. Standing in the prairie is like standing in history: her ghosts move ahead of her as if they are the wind, bending the sea of grasses before them with their smoke and their songs and their weary sighs, and she, choking on the way homesickness squeezes her heart, steps forward to follow the phantom trail. Her voice curls in the back of her throat, ready to call out. Instead, she replaces that dark hoof, a movement filled with much regret and the small stabbing hitch of anger, and she stops, her greeting dead there on her tongue. The caravan is gone when she blinks; it's just her, alone, rudderless. She's losing herself here, not the way she loses herself in the Market - to the Market, where the noise drowns out the memories of her father's hammer ringing bright on an anvil.
The rolling Sideralis calls to her worst fear: that she will always be homeless, and as fast as Rivane decides it was a mistake to come here, that it is time to go back to more civilized places, as quickly as she remembers, she loses the strength to return.
It's so much easier to run.
What is she running from? Nothing, everything, herself - not a one escapable - but she is galloping without realizing, racing the plains blindly, her eyes still searching another time, unfamiliar territory leaving her lurching and stumbling and grunting. The Tyrian girl runs until her skin is so dark with sweat she seems more black than violet, faintly dappled. She runs until the whites of her eyes are as red as the irises, as red as that flash of bright flesh inside the seashell curl of freckled grey nostrils. She runs until her chest is heaving and her heart beats so fast that she barely feels the way it bleeds.
Her haunches are burning when the gallop finally slows, sides flecked with white foam and thin sweetgrass seeds, and the sky is turning from its clear, smiling, blue to the slow creep of evening. A single star marks the eastern horizon, and though it leads to nowhere but the wild sea, she follows it there, follows it until the salt air breathes life into the heady perfume of sun-warmed grass and dries the sweat like sea-brine on her skin. The waves beckon as if something beyond them belongs to her, but two years of searching has taught Rivane that there is nothing to find but the hole inside herself, infinite and ever-hungry.
So close to the sea, to this place that means nothing to them, the ghosts release their hold on her memory and the white-sand beach comes into focus softened only by dusk's blue glow. Someone else has already claimed this slip of the coastline. Shadows cling to him, familiarly, fondly, and she starts to leave except that the turn of his ear says he has already heard her and she stops again.
"Ah," her voice is anything but smooth, it scratches her raw throat, "I didn't think anyone would be here. I'm sorry."
She lost everything when she jumped out that window.
She didn’t think twice, at the time, of leaping with no promise of safe landing; she just lunged in the direction of her sister’s hair and the shadow whisking her away. She hadn’t wings at the time.
Here the grass is green and soft and not dank, dark city streets with curbsides and fizzing lights. She is trapped there, though, and the sweet air is lost under the acid-hot stench of corroding flesh. Above, the sky is a blanket of baby blue, dotted with cumulus clouds. It is a gentle comfort and she is undeserving.
Sabrina does not fear, not in the way of a normal creature; but there is agitation, an unease, a burning bed of coals at the bottom of her mind that question her resolve. If she should pause and give herself to luxury-- to even the briefest of respite-- would she continue on? Or would she give up?
She could not question, nor risk. Her will was the only thing she retained. It would move her forward. There was no rest.
The first statue to speak to her caused her to pause and study it with an unimpressed eye. Such magic was commonplace in her homeland-- from living gargoyles to magic stone effigies. It was a gentle rumbling at first, but the more she listened, the clearer it became. Let me tell you the story of my birth.
“I don’t care about that.” Sabrina said, on the off chance this creature was sentient. “Tell me about my sister.”
Still it prattled on. She ducked her head and walked away.
The next one promised a tale beyond belief.
“Tell me about my sister,” she prompted. Again, it ignored her. As did the next, and the one after that. The babbling was getting annoying-- just the barest of whispers at the edge of her hearing, drawing her in; grating disappointment again and again.
Finally she came to one wedged upside-down in a hillside; originally perpendicular, gravity had pulled it down a bit. It swore to reveal the secret to life itself with a sickly, child-like smile on its face.
Sabrina lost it.
“Tell-- me-- about-- my-- sister!” Each word is punctuated by her pulling up her front hooves and crashing down on the statue’s face, splintering the speaking stone into a thousand intelligible fragments. Its babbling slows down and warps, like the forced slowness of a record being spun backward. With an angry shout, Sabrina rears, and hammers the statues head and shoulders straight off its body.
“Stupid-- useless-- piece of-- ass statue.” The expletives are muffled under her heavy breathing. hooves sore, back sore. Just sore.
She sniffs, petulant, chest forward, a challenge. Keep talking, losers. The statue has no more to say. Neither do the rest. Silence and the wind.
A shard of rock has sliced the meat of her hoof. She refuses to limp.
She lost everything when she jumped out that window.
Given the choice-- if she could go back and do it over-- she would do it again.
Posted by: Azrael - 12-10-2020, 04:17 AM - Forum: [C] Island Archives
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To be a star, you must shine your own light
God knows why he was back on this forsaken island. Maybe it was lunacy, or maybe it was because the island reminded him that life could become even more chaotic. In an ironic way, it made him feel better about his own plight in life. For on the island, Azrael became the pawn he truly was in Tempus’ game. He is reminded that his life is so insignificant on the grand scale of things – that mortals were little more than playthings for the gods. And strangely, this made him feel better. Morrighan would have called him a fool, the thought drawing a laugh from his pursed lips as he presses onward to the place where a bridge once stood, but found now only sea.
The island stood in a distance, taunting him – calling him. With resolve, he stepped upon the sea, expecting to feel the wash of waves against his legs, but finding the water strangely solid. So he takes one step, two. After a while, he finds himself on another distant shore, stepping onto the emerald hills with only a moment of hesitation before he loses himself in its magic.
He walks where others before him have run, knowing enough to be cautious as his guard flares up around him. For this world is too calm, too peaceful. In all the times he has come to this place, it has not resembled such an idyllic and restful world. In front of the shed-star, the island stretches with green as far as he can see. Hills rise like waves from the earth, some large and others just tall enough that he can crest and descend to the other side in only a few paces. Birdsong fills the air, the sunlight beaming warmly from the sky. And Azrael finds himself alone with his thoughts… alone, except for a myriad of strange statues, staring at him as he passed.
They were all shapes and sizes, some creatures which he had seen before – elk with ornate antlers, rabbits with detailed fur, looking soft enough to stroke. Others still were great mythical beasts – a fiery phoenix with wings stretched toward the sun, the fire so real it seemed like it might burst to life. A dragon, each pristine scale different from the next, some glimmering with a sheen of iridescence in the light. But Azrael presses on, appreciating the statues for their beauty but finding little calling to stop and absorb every detail of them.
He moves as if called toward something in the distance, and as he nears a taller hill, he begins to climb. Up, up, up toward the heavens, past the clouds where they kissed the earth, toward the sky. The hill becomes a mountain, the grass becomes thinner, the skies become darker. And the stars – oh the stars. They shine brightly now, calling to his vagabond soul like a lover, beckoning him further than others had dared to climb.
Until he finds himself beside a statue, twice as tall as he – a great shed-star king carved in stone. Recognition flickers for a moment, as Azrael wonders if he had walked alongside this giant or simply heard fables of him told around a bonfire, whispered by the elders in the night. His turquoise light falls over the smooth stone, washing it with stardust, bringing clarity to its intricate details.
The shed-star king has eyes of silver ore, sparkling and glittering where Azrael’s light falls onto them. They watch, as he takes in the curve of the mane, each strand lovingly carved, caressing a supple neck and muscular shoulders. There is strength in the statue’s pose, one leg poised to step toward the heavens, caught mid-stride as if climbing the mountain itself. And where the stardust shines upon it, glittering bits of metallic rock come to life, throwing prismatic light In all directions, as bright as the stars themselves.
If a woman is in one’s thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night.
The only thing Dune loves more than a day off is… well, anything that’s free. But especially booze.
That morning he eagerly shouldered his way through crowds of children in search of the best (free!) shells and (free!!) sea glass. (It was not clear if he was oblivious to the age gap between himself and the average shell hunter, or if he just didn’t care.) And as evening fell he hovered, quite brashly, near the open bar until the bartender finally began to make drinks. All of it in blissful silence and solitude, broken by only the occasional longing glance towards happy families and laughing lovers.
Suffice to say Dune is deep, deep in his cups as the night thickens. He stumbles around, restless, too buzzed to pay attention to the storytellers gathered round the flames. The dexterity required to make jewelry has long since taken flight; he doesn’t look twice at the groups hunched over their creations. He just passes with a scoff to himself- “tweens”- and a soft chuckle.
He doesn’t know exactly what happens next, or how. One moment he’s slipping between the craft tables and the bonfires, the next he’s standing, bleary-eyed, before a tall, magnificent, daybreak masterpiece of a woman. He blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. “Please take this from me,” he says louder than necessary, offering the pegasus the rest of his drink. His ears flick back as he hears how loud his own voice is, and he overcompensates with the next sentence, which comes out in an ominous whisper: “Itsa public service.”
s she stands in the ocean, ankle deep, she imagines she is one of the pirates from Uncle Mikey’s stories. She wonders how brave they had to be to transverse the oceans. What sort of things did they see? She conjures up images of sails over the horizon as they stumble upon waves large that the buildings on the citadel. She pictures them stumbling upon islands made of more than just sand and dirt and trees and shrubs. Maybe they discovered an island of the sweetest fruit. Or did they find there, out in the ocean a cave whose walls were made of their deepest fears. What did they find out there? She tries to reach out there, across the ocean, tries to reach it in her dreams, but it always comes up short, like the edge of the map. She topples over into wakefulness.
It is only when she feels a splash of water along her face that she returns to where she is, Jack chatters angrily on her shoulders at the water being splashed his way. Standing in the shallow waters of Night Court watching the grey woman wade into the water. Did they see kelpies? Did they befriend them as her mother did, or did they fear them, try to break them, try to love them. She pictures boats speeding away, pictures nets thrown over them, pictures hearts being cast overboard.
The summer sun feels like fire along her spine. This is summer: hot and blazing. But her legs feel cool as she stands in the water, looking to Anandi with wide, expectant blue eyes. “Aunt Andi, are you sure I need to learn how to swim?” She asks the kelpie woman. She should be terrified, maybe, probably, and maybe if Elli were anyone else, maybe, probably she would be. Jack clings to her shoulders fiercely, chattering his disapproval and his regret of coming along to this swimming lesson. “I can just watch you instead,” she says, staring out at the horizon. Jack clutches her blonde mane tightly in her hands. She wades out a little further, cautiously. She decides, if this is what summer brings—maybe she doesn't like it very much.
