Caligo sighs when she relinquishes the darkness, Oriens smiles as he takes to the sky, and Solis is quick behind. Even the fog on the great sea, full of mystery and intrigue, cannot stand against the fire that daylight brings. And beneath their watchful eye burns the beaches of Denocte. Shells from when last Caligo pressed her dark feet upon the sands still lay half buried, half resurrected in glittering gold and black striped shores.
There are streamers and stalls, the markets’ vendors extending to the beaches, stalls set up and foods of all flavors permeating the air.
Between the bodies and the scents, titillating activities pull crowds. Children hunt shells with their parents and friends, eagerly piling them into discarded buckets not used for the sand castles. Others still build their towering castles higher and higher, black and gold streaming together into the sky to see who would win. Those with more competitive natures still are found on the volleyball courts. Teams of two pair up and face off against opponents: here, the last one standing wins.
Laughter rips over the softly rolling waves. Little dragons often found haunting the streets above instead roll in the seafoam. It is a day of community and a day of peace.
(You may choose to write this prompt as a whole or separate events- volleyball, sand castles or shell hunting)
« ☼ »
By the time night falls, the beach has calmed down from the day festivities. The shells and sea glass that have been collected from the shores are then used to craft special jewelry. There is no real competition here, although some may wish to make the flashiest necklace or bracelet.
A sweetheart smiles to their lover, secretly weaving pearls in the middle both dark and light. Bonfires are lit in typical Denocte fashion and a crowd gathers around. Smoke fills the air and people settle in, moving closer, the gentle lapping of water behind them. Entertainers and visitors have stories to tell the young and old if you stay and listen - they sing and they laugh and they cry. Always, always, there is friendship among the fire.
For those who prefer to sit back and watch from afar, an outdoor bar has been set up with various cocktails to choose from. Some make you bold. Some make you more open to love. Everything seems a bit more magical tonight.
(You may choose to write this prompt as a whole or separate events- bonfires & storytelling, seashell jewelry crafting or cocktail party)
All are welcome to attend! Any event threads following these prompts that are completed by the end of the season (January 31st) qualify for a +20 signos bonus per character per thread. Just make sure the thread is labeled as "summer" and DM @Layla to claim your signos once you're ready! This event also counts towards participation in an IC event for EXP!
But he's not rueful; he doesn't know how to be. His life, this pitted half-life, is as large as he's ever wanted it. It doesn't matter that his mother had wanted more for the House, that his father had needed more for himself: she was dead and he might as well be dead too. What matters is that Raziel had lived and his heart had grown smaller in the absence of a world that had not.
Perhaps as a boy he'd dreamt of castles under a kaleidoscope sky and promised wilderness all the while cocooned in the safety of his brother's shadow. But could dreams carry grief? Were they strong enough? Raziel could tell you, if you wanted to ask. He would say it depended on a number of things: who you were, what those dreams meant to you, how desperate was your loss? In his case he had been a bulb without filament, they had meant nothing and his loss had been everything.
Alone, the world transformed into a valley he could not navigate: it deepened and darkened and tunnelled into the very nucleus of his despair. Alone, it grew too large and too fast and he was faced with the realisation that he didn't want to see it: the cliffs of Praistigia, the mountains over Denocte, the warmth of a Deluminian sun, if it meant he had to see them alone.
And wasn't that just as bad? That he'd lost something of himself, too, even if it had been an illusion. The way his cowardice bled as yellow as the sun, to find his weakness a skin he could not shed. In vain he prayed Gahenna hadn't seen the way his fingers had fumbled over the knife he'd once pressed to his throat, hoped she would not see his fear; he could not bear it if she should leave him too.
So his world had swallowed itself over and over again until it became small enough to fit into the palm of his once-shaking-now-paralysed hand. It became docile. Here he had been okay; nothing more or less. Always-drunk and ever-callous but still, somehow, okay.
Years on and now-sober, the desert has since become his graveyard. He walks over its bones, a pilgrimage he cannot abandon, until he is deafened by the sound of the dead crunching under his feet. He wonders, with their skeletons broken into pieces, if they will follow him still.
Her grief, her endless grief, waivers before her like a lamp of moonlight in the dawn. Trees are turned silver as she turns her gaze towards them. Roots, when she images the moonlight has turned to a basilisk stare, turn to stone that presses up hard as a spire against her hooves. Her wings feel lighter, light enough to eat of the clouds, when she feels how hard, how cold even in the spring, the world feels.
It is a wonder, or no wonder at all, that mortals must sleep away the pull of gravity in a sea of silk every night.
But for a star there is no rest in the day. For a leopard there is no rest in the night either when hunger is as driving a force as a whip laid to flank. Her feathers flutter against her sides, catching the spring wind promising a storm, as she tries to lift her hooves from the hard touch of earth bloated with rock. Even the wheat-grass and willow branches do not comfort her as she passes through.
She was not made for this, she thinks, and she casts her mournful and baleful quicksilver gaze to the sun. All the parts of me, deeper than flesh, were not made for this world. And like all trapped things, all cursed things, all torn-out and lost things, the thought is a fleeting as her memories of the taste of star-tears running cool down her glowing throat as she and her sister's had licked tears of sorrow from their cheeks.
Like everything else that is slipping away from her.
All she has left is a song, a song made of a hundred discordant notes of a greater history. No note makes a story on its own and she does knot have enough of them thundering behind her eyes to remember the beginning and end of that tale. All she has are slivers of a middle, faded and bitter, to comfort her when her own tears cool to frost behind her gaze instead of down the throat of another star.
All she has is discord when she hums and a star does not come down to greet her but to die.
But she does not fall to her knees, not even with the sound of someone else joining her to watch the star fall, and there is in that (and that alone) a small victory that is not as bright in her heart as victory had once been.
It all seems like a horrible tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
When it rains she remembers how full of gloom the night had sometimes seemed. She remembers how the moonlight had turned the black to gray. How the light of all the stars had dappled that grayness with bits of dust that glimmered a little like rain as they fell onto a hundred moons and a thousand planets. Her wings remember the weight of that grayness when they raise out at her sides and flick the water from their feathers before she has even thought of doing such a thing.
Warset watches each droplet fall into the lake. She watches all the ripples spread out further, and further, and further from her reflection like planetary rings around her form. She watches and she remembers again how the night, her beloved night, was not always joyous with the adoration of stars.
She remembers the war when the wind whistles around the sharp edges of her ruby moon. Even her marrow remembers when she steps deeper and deeper into the waters just to cool the fever of it, of a leopard looking out and seeing the gray not as rain but a night. There is a song on her tongue, not a memory of one but an ode to one.
And somewhere, where the rain brings it back to her, Warset knows that if she started to hum more stars than one would come crashing through the clouds and the mist. She knows it just as she knows the mist would hide the tears that would pool crystalline in her eyes. She knows it just like she knows the sound of him (the leopard reminds her with a snarl in the middle of her soul) as he approaches.
Every inch of her wants to turn, to see the judgment in his eyes, the judgment she had been trapped and bled for. Warset wants to turn and feel hate in her belly like a fire in a star at just the sight at him.
But all she feels is sorrow as her wings collapse into the water, and her shine dulls to a gray so that the gloom of the mist might hide away her scars. “You ran.” She says and there is not an ounce of that hate she craves to be found in it, in her, in the shine of her eyes that is as waterlogged as a reed. There is only a brittle and frail sort of rage when she lifts her neck so that in the pale light of the mist-buried sun he might see how silver and slick her scars can shine.
Almost like constellation lines on the mortal corpse of a star.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
The market feels like a creature tonight. It has a weight to it that reminds me of flesh, and fur, and claw. The noise it makes, a hundred voices layered on top of each other like the night sky, sounds more like the lumbering roars of a monster’s hunger than the sounds of life. If there is music I cannot pluck it loose from the din enough to make out a single word of it.
But I do not need to hear the words, or the chorus, to know that the sound of the song is one of joy. A joy so bright and vibrant that I wonder how the moon and all her pale and silver glory can hold it. I think perhaps I should linger in the crowds and lose myself to that song so that I might rediscover how it feels to be too bright for the night to carry.
I should. But I don’t.
I don’t think I want to be bright anymore. I don’t think I want to be gold, or silver, or any other color that this fragile city can name. I want to be the market with a hundred voices, a hundred songs, layered over my bones so that I am both as terrifying as a god and as unknowable as one. Perhaps then those that watched my mother sail off to war, with a child at her side and a dragon above her head, would not see Isra each time they looked at me.
It has been a very long time since I have been anything like my mother. None of my stories, when I whisper them into Foras’s ear, have endings like hers. All of my stories end with the sea.
Tonight though, I am in the belly of the market creature, and their fur is a warm shield around me. The market makes me forget that I began and ended with the sea in the story Foras is still remembering as he walks at my shoulder. We are still remembering it when we pull that fur around us and press close to the fires and the song of joy (the one that I can hear echoes of love in as I draw closer).
Firelight halos my horn and I do not need to look up to know how wicked, how like my mother’s it seems, when a boy lingers too long on the tip of it. Nor do I need to know how each step my wolf and I take as we dance has no echo of the song in it. I do not need to watch my shadow know that when I dance it is like a tide pressing up against the icy shoreline of a wolf.
I do not need to look to see my soul draped across the outside of me when I dance.
Every night she had not been haunting in the wake of her sister’s hunt had brought her a dream.
Last night she had dreamed of the sea beneath the fat moon. The night before she had dreamed of wandering a root system, her hooves had carried her in pulse from tree, to moss, to worm twisting in between the two. Tonight, in the hour right before the settling of dawn, she had dreamed of monsters.
Danaë had dreamt that she was the monster and that another monster had run shoulder to shoulder with her. Their tines had towered above the boughs of ancient trees and gathered up moonlight like a net cast into a silver sea. Miles had trembled like ants beneath the reach of their paws and foxes as tucked their heads down at claw and tooth as if it had been crown instead of death. Their eyes, because she knew instinctively that the other monster saw through the same black eyes upon her head, had seen in between the cracks of realities that lay hidden from mortals where the trees grew so closely together that there was no telling pine from oak or birch from pine.
And when she woke and looked to the moon bare of a sickle of brightness, she has looked away and saw a crack of that same reality waiting between one spiral of her sister’s horn and the next. But when she blinked it was gone. She woke her sister with a kiss upon her horn, a press of her lips to the bone in just the right place so that vanished reality, for a moment, sat between her lips instead of horn.
“Isolt.” Her heart’s name is a prayer upon her lips, an echo of the moonlight caught on that dreamt silver sea. In the pause of it, in the tremble of it as the flowers on their mantle wilt as her sister awakens, Danaë shivers with every flower as the dream starts to wilt too.
But she holds on to it with her soul’s teeth, and she pulls hard enough that the memory of a reality caught in a horn moves too, and it does not wilt again when Isolt meets her gaze. “The forest is calling again.” She does not explain, knows she will not need to explain when Isolt feels the way her heart rattles like a cage in her chest. She knows Isolt will see every inch of her straining for the dark, moonlit woods the way she strains to grow a flower (just a single flower) in her father’s garden.
Tonight, she has promised that monster in her heart she will not fear it. And the monster howls in response and echoes that same mark of the beast through her throat when she lifts the sound of it to Isolt’s ear so that she might hear it too.
"I can feel it mounting; a dark wave - upon the night of my soul”
a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred. oil on canvas.
The
dawn is deeper than the night and twilight had been when he found her that first time. The breeze is not ripe with the smell of fresh-bloomed roses and the bitter sweetness of fermented tulips. Rain is a promise on the breeze that whistles mournfully down her horn (just as she had known it would). At her belly the remains of meadow-grass, and wildflowers, are bowing in the wind and making her skin twitch with the feel of the earth, the forest, the root and stone, begging entrance into her body.
Danaë blinks the lingering dew from her eyelashes and it the first drop of the spring rain to water the earth.
She does not beg the hour to quicken, or the dawn to grow deeper into the dark blue of a storm-day. And she does not beg her heart to slow it's race towards the next hour as she keeps her gaze strained towards the forest he will need to cross to find her.
Each of her poppies, and black roses, and willow-tree saplings, wave like small and frail banners as they led the way to her (instead of to a war as banners often lead). She can feel their eagerness as they rise from the dirt and char left behind from the festival. Each root had thought itself dead or suffering on the race to death. Below them a fox blinks with cornflower eyes and a hare flicks his wisteria ears back to brush the dirt of his spine as magic too weak to lift him from the dirt strains as hard as the pale unicorn is straining towards the woods.
But Danaë does not see the beauty of her garden of grotesqueness or the shimmer of the grass where her dawn-tears had fallen. She does not see the rain cloud drawing wounds through the pale-blue of the deep dawn. All she can see is darkness upon darkness and tree brushing against tree in the forest as the wind starts to howl.
All she can see is the emptiness of the hour as the dawn deepens into death and her magic rises in her heart to try to grow flowers in that too.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
Posted by: Charlotte - 11-30-2020, 04:25 PM - Forum: Archives
- No Replies
i'm born to run down rocky cliffs; give me grace, bury my sins.
shattered glass and black holes can't hold me back from where i need to go.
yellow hills and valleys deep, i watch them move under my feet.
Charlie has been staying away from the sea. Or staying away from it the best that she can, in the only way she knows how. Not going down to the beaches, not looking too long into its depths. She had visited the port in Denocte once, two seasons ago, and had regretted the way she hoped, and hoped, and hoped to see that woman with the red eyes and the curling horns.
The punctures on her neck had long, long since healed over, but sometimes it feels like they itch, and burn, and ache. Sometimes, it feels like they are trying to tell Charlie something she has been avoiding, since that day more than a year ago.
Has it really been so long?
Her life has felt like a blur, underscored by the buzzing always present in the back of her mind ever since she had found out she’d become fatherless. She’s grown up, no longer just a girl, though barely older than one. She’s moved into the barracks, become a Halcyon, begun her official training as a soldier. And yet, nothing has quieted the hum, nothing has filled the emptiness inside her left behind by the abandonment of her parents.
Charlie flies in wide, leisurely loops over the court. She catalogues everything that she sees and hears on the ground below. Against her better judgement—under the pressure of the burning, and the buzzing—she veers east, turning wide over the south part of Susurro Fields.
The powerful flaps of her wings startle a flock of eurasian curlews, who take to the air. Charlie follows, coasting beneath the birds for a short time. Their shadows dot the marshy ground below, headed toward the cliffs and the sea. Indy is somewhere behind her, she knows. She can feel her bonded’s constant presence across their link.
The pegasus surges upward, tipping her wings to guide the small flock into an upward spiral. She spies Indy among their browns and whites taking over the front of the group. Shockingly, they do not seem to fear her, and take her suggestions as though she is one of their own. She turns south, and with ease Charlie guides them into a descent, down and down and down toward the strip of beach at the base of the cliffs.
The curlews land and Charlie continues past them a short distance, until the small outcropping of rock she had been swept off of comes into view. “Charlie… I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Indy’s voice filters through the droning, through her thoughts. The pegasus can sense the osprey’s concern. “I can't stop thinking about her, Indy.”
Indy knows this, of course, but is still concerned for the safety of her bondmate. Charlie lands gracefully upon the outcrop, which is damp with sea spray. A few loose stones roll off the edge of the rock and into the water. Her footing is much more sure now, as she begins her wait. Charlie can only hope that the woman is here. She’s not certain how else to find her.
but the night was dark / and love was a burning fence around my house.
Bexley looks down at herself in the mirror-clean surface of the glass streets.
From under her feet, her reflection stares back. Her golden face is clean; the scar that runs through her white blaze is thin and pale, almost invisible from a certain angle; her eyes are blue as moonstones, but clouded by a lack of focus, shifting from side to side so rapidly she has ceased to notice it happening. The thin gold chain around her neck is tight and ice-cold. Where the light glints off it, it turns pure white, and as Bexley raises her head she sees in the reflection that her throat has briefly become a high-beam.
Everything here is so bright, so intense. There isn’t a place to look that doesn’t dazzle. The streets are metallic, or mirrored, or iridescent; in some places it somehow manages to be all those things, while in other places it’s sectioned like a patchwork quilt. Gemstones are buried in the sidewalk: rubies, sapphires, topaz. And trees in this city are not trees at all but strange sculptures, made of iron and glass. The buildings that rise up on either side are long, narrow things that spear into the sky—taller even than Veneror, their spires swathed in clouds that float through the pale blue sky.
There isn’t a place to look that doesn’t dazzle. But it all dazzles so brightly that Bexley thinks there must be something very, very wrong with this place.
There are no birds here, no squirrels or mice either. And no plants—just metal shaved into the shape of bushes, flowers made of paper-thin gems. There is no noise, either: nothing but the sound of her own breath whooshing in and out, the roar of blood in her ears as her pulse rises.
As far as she knows, Bexley is the only living thing in the city. It could be a blessing or a curse.
Finally, she tears her ghost-blue eyes from the glass streets, up toward the city that rises around her like a welt. There is a storm brewing overhead: faint gray like the wing of a wedding dove. A cloud of white hair floats open behind her, coasting in the soundless breeze that emanates from the castle at the middle of the road-spiral.
And Bexley starts to walk toward the sovereign, who she’s heard might be a monster.
The island had been as cruel to Thana as she to it.
For every mile of it she consumed there had been an inch taken from her flesh. But her pain had been nothing in the face of the hunger of a made thing, of a magic thing, of a thing made to devour every pound of broken magic in the world. And so she had eaten of the island, and drank of the star-blood river, and tasted of the innards of a monster-god.
Her belly is still full of it and her magic still bloated with the ichor of a king’s stomach. There is salt-water in her veins, so much that it stings as it pools in all the wounds running map-line and rune-like across her skin. A burn pulls against her shoulder, smoldering even after a week of cold embers. Lines from sharp lapis stone run in grids across her ribcage. Even her eyes, normally so full of furious lilac, are as pale and faded as the first twilight hour.
But Thana, as she walks through the castle, feels like something has settled in her for the first time. There is no ache but that of exhaustion. Her belly does not snarl in hunger. Her horn does not sing like a whip-o-will in a storm. Thunder does not live between her teeth and her heart is only a steady lub-dub in her chest instead of a snarling, haunting timbre.
Every ounce of her magic, her furious beast of magic that lives between her heart and soul, is nothing more than a quiet stone in her chest. There is no inferno that makes her feel like she must roar, and roar, and roar loud enough to shake down the stars just so that she might get a moment of silence.
Thana is--
Just Thana. Just Thana in a way that she has never been before.
Thana who loves Ipomoea. Thana who is regent in a city full of gardens. Thana who has two daughters who must only live with a sliver of the hunger that makes up every cell of her body. Thana who is walking into her room, into their room, across a threshold as golden with mossy growth as it is black with decay.
It is better, she thinks, in the quiet.
Then, it is better to be empty than to kill another one of his flowers.
And when she curls up in their bed of silk, and tucks her horn to her bloody knees, there is not a single thread in the drapes that fades and all the bright flowers stay bright as her eyelids flutter closed. Had she been able to think anything in the silence of her dead hunger it would have been this is better, over and over again like a poem of love she had never understood.
