is to believe in tomorrow

---

The stag looks how he would imagine perfidy to look, were it made into flesh and then given legs to walk across the earth with.

Ipomoea sits with his back to an aspen and stares, cherry red eyes watching as the creature ambles back and forth between the trees. And as Rhoeas turns to him now with eyes that are more akin to bloody rubles than poppy flowers, it strikes him:

He had betrayed the forest when he let death weave her way through the heart of Delumine. He had betrayed his country when he took for himself a crown that was not meant for him. And now he had betrayed his own bonded when he had replaced him for another. And he had refused to allow him to die — so now, it seemed, his magic was determined to live on in him as a reminder.

Spring had arrived haltingly, cautiously; like a timid bluebird, he thought, watching as the same bird flit nervously around its tree. Once he had thought he heard love songs in their singing; now he hears only their territorial cries. But he tries, oh he tries to see the lightness of them, of their songs and laughter and life. Ipomoea tries to see only the way the light is breaking through the canopy, and the leaves seem to brighten and lean towards its warmth.

He tries to not keep glancing into the shadows. And wondering how much deeper they might go.

But spring is not the time for reminiscing on the darkness.

So he is following Rhoeas through the gentler parts of the forest, where new saplings are stretching tall and thin to fill the gaps between their parents and wildflowers create a blanket of color for them to stand upon. All the trees hang over his head in crowns of budding leaves and new growth. Moss drapes itself like a verdant wreath about his shoulders, a cloak over his bonded’s bones. The earth turns to poppies gilded in gold and grasses braiding themselves into patterns and shapes. A sod ship bumps itself against the shore of his legs. A fox kit chases after it when it turns and sails through the clearing.

Ipomoea watches them go. And in his chest his heart has grown legs and is galloping along beside them. Stride after stride it slips through the saplings of his rib bones and frees itself. Step after step it chases that freedom through the forest, through the gold-and-green dappled light. And he is left there watching, bleeding magic instead of blood, and wonder instead of violence, and love instead of rage.

Wonder crosses his mind in the flicker of a shadow, how long it might be until the river of his love dries up.

But the shadow is gone when he sees the familiar shape moving through the trees, a pale figure among the colors of his spring-forest. And he is moving towards it, towards her, even before he has decided to go.

“Sereia?” he calls her name out softly.



~
"Speaking."
@Sereia

(Don't worry, Morr isn't doing anything to Moira lmao)

Elena Daray

T

hese last several days without Azrael had been harder than she had expected. Her side suddenly felt cold and empty without him there to warm her. This, she is aware, was the reality of living in two different Courts and both holding too much responsibility to leave. But she is with him now, slumbering, although fitfully beside him. Elliana is with her GiGi, probably still up, painting and drinking tea. Everything is perfect, as it should be, fairytale. But she cannot deny the way her heart is stammering in her chest. Elena knows the cause of it, she just hates to admit it. 

She leaves his side and travels down the mountains until the cold air of a spring night touches her face as it blows off the lake. The lake. This lake. 

The lake holds painful memories. She is not sure why she has come here, except that sometimes the thrill of the pain has become a draw. When she begins to feel his memory fade, when his face bleeds away in the back of her mind, she feels a panic crawl up her throat. She is no longer certain whether it is worse to forget him entirely or to live days in agony, the reminder of him a ghost along her mind's edges.

Tonight, she chooses the agony, walking along the shore of the lake with bruised eyes, the blue of them glacial with memories, they freeze and crack and fall into the water. Her empathy reaches out to those around that slumber lakeside, but she keeps it mostly pulled into herself, the magic selfishly curling into her as if she could change the very emotions that stir in her golden breast, as if it could do any good by keeping it tucked away in her mind. It was a foolish maneuver, a hopeless one, but she could not help but try.

And suddenly she is turning from that lake, the lake, this lake, and running back to the mountains, to the stars, to him. She pauses only when she sees him there, sleeping, she watches his gentle glowing, watches his face, as if memorizing it, as if it may be taken away from her at any moment. How could she ever explain to him how he became the reason for it all? How could she ever explain to him how columns within her shifted during that first meeting and he became the center of her gravity? How there is no rhyme or reason for it, but that the molecules of her life have rearranged around him?

She can’t and so she just exhales.

“Azrael,” she says when she breathes. She waits until his eyes open and places her golden head near his own. “Let’s go on an adventure, tonight,” she says like a child. “Don’t think, just say yes.” She says, laughs, because she wants to go before she changes her mind, before she feels her heart way her down too much until she can no longer soar beside him. 

“Show me the stars.”

Somewhere, a wolf howls in the distant.

And she wonders if she will ever escape her own.

It is said that to conquer one’s fear they must embrace it, accept it, and then move on from it. Only once this is complete will one be all they are meant to be: complete, whole, functioning. 


If that is so, and if that is true, then Juniper knows she is not the Priestess her sisters would wish her to be. She is not the lover that el Rey deserves. How can she give him only half of herself when there is another half, a newer half, waiting to be born, to be reunited, to burst into the world and introduce the Heirophlakes as unconquerable and unstoppable? 


Many nights she’s stayed up, gnawing on her lips, applying salve the following morning, and thought of nothing but the ocean. It is vast and it is terrifying. Its reach, unknown. Its depth, endless. She shivers in her bed and feels like she’s drowning on those nights. Only the scythe smile of the moon, the last touch of Solis’ fire, and the gloam that Vespera offers up provide any comfort to her in those moments. 


In the barracks with the Halcyon, they do not twine themselves about one another as her sect of Vespera’s priestesses do. It leaves her skin aching, lonely. Even after a year and some odd moon cycles, she is still unaccustomed to sleeping alone. There has always been someone to comfort her should she need it. Now, there is no one. 


El Rey should have been there to hold her close. 


Even he left. 


She wants to feel bitter. How she longs to detest him. 


Juniper cannot. 


All she can do is conquer her own fears one by one. So she floats from the Prastaglia cliffs on her dove-grey wings and settles into the sand as some shorebird would. Long-legged and silent, she dutifully looks anywhere but the expanse of the water. 


There are many holes that dot the cliffside, some closer to the water than others. It is to these she walks instead, fleeing from the press of foam at her heels to something safer, somewhere she’s less likely to suffocate in the open air. 


When her wings can extend and press against stone, the goddess-girl learns how to breathe. So she does, pulling down the salty tang of the air as calmly as she can. That is to say, not entirely calm at all. Her breaths are still more shallow than they should be, but Juniper does not know how to focus on anything but the sound of lapping water and dying things. Even in her head, there are krakens that slaughter even now. 


Silently, she begs them all to run.

@Caspian | "speaks" | notes: ;u; 

riest Pravda, what do you know of desire?” 

Her voice shatters the silence of the winter woods. In the twilight, everything around us is bled of true color; the light in the air is blue, shivering with our semi-opaque breaths. I do not look at her. 


“Why do you ask such a question, uchenik?”

“One of the other apprentices, Priest—he seems to be interested in me.”

“Would you not rather know of love?” 

“No, Priest. I would like to know of desire.”

We are waiting for the silence to break for other things. But the wait is a long one, and the clearing through the trees before us remains empty.

The wolves, in the distance, are howling.

“Desire will burn you. If it does not burn you immediately, in your rejection of it, then it will burn you in the pursuit.” 

“Is it—is it immoral to want, Priest?” 

“No, not necessarily.” 

“Then why does it burn?”

“Because, to want something—there is a risk. We cannot always have what we want; and the things we desire sometimes change. Especially people. And our wanting, well—it consumes us, it distracts us.”

“So should I not desire him, then?”

“That is for you to decide uchenik.” 

The deer enter the clearing, then; breaking out tenderly onto the fresh-fallen snow. We watch them in silence until I break it again, by whispering: 

“We did not come here to discuss desire, however. This is your first lesson in truth.” 

We wait. I feel Zima shivering besides me; but this is an aspect of the lesson, as well. The deer are breaking through the soft surface of the snow, attempting to graze beneath; and beyond the clearing, within the other fringe of trees, I see the glinting eyes of wolves.

The kill is swift. There had been a deer limping in the rear of the herd. On the other side of the trees we hear the deer scatter, and the guttural scream of the one killed. The pack sets about ripping it apart. 

“How—how is this truth?” Zima’s voice breaks.

“This is the truth of everything. Life, death, nature, ourselves. Never forget what you see here.”

“I—I don’t understand.”

Typically soft-spoken, my voice becomes a blade when I turn away from the feast. I meet my apprentice’s eyes and she is shaking, blanched of color. “Remember, the justice of nature is never ambiguous; black and white. Kill, or be killed. Eat to live, but not in excess. Weakness is punished, and strength is rewarded. The truth is this is the most fair judgement in the world; and we, as keepers of justice, must attempt to replicate it. We replace weakness with immorality; the need to eat with the need to improve.”

"And what about the need to kill?"

"There is a place for that, in the truth of things as well."

——

I wake in a cold sweat. 

I know when I go to the window there will be no snow. I will smell the spring flowers of Delumine, and hear the quiet whispers of the nights. When I go to the window, there will be nothing of my dream outside. 

But still, I go to the window—and once that satisfies my fears, I go to the street. Before I can stop myself, I am beyond the city’s limits and beyond, in the fields—and further still, into the Viride. 

I deceive myself into believing I go to the library, at this late hour. But on the trail there is a crossroads, and I turn the other direction. There is a meadow, just a bit beyond, and I go to it—to stand on the fringe of trees and stare at the long, swaying grasses. They are quiet tonight—and nearly identical to the one of my dream, if not for the lack of snow.

But there are no deer. There are no wolves.

There is only a girl.

I have seen her many times, now. We have shared many sideways glances in the library, between stacks of books, with golden light separating us. 

I have seen her many times. We do not speak. 

We only share glances, I think. 

I say aloud, “Good evening, Ms. Katerina. Why are you in the woods, at so late an hour?” 

You can't Hide from Who You Are, the Light peels back the Dark

I leave the island behind, with all its bones and teeth and deadly things. I leave the island behind, with its spiralling city and breathing walls and empty shops. My skin is painted with blood, which is dried to deep, deep red. I feel like a feral thing, I feel like a thing from my past come back to life.

I do not go to anywhere familiar. I walk, and I walk, and I walk. I follow the sea and listen to her sing and feel her kiss my feet, until the ground rises up and away from the ocean. Until the wind whistles in my ears and the seagulls cries become nothing more than a distant keening over the water. I can hear the waves crashing against the base of the cliffs. The air here is damp with ocean spray.

At once I am both one with the wild world around me, and nothing at all. I am a forge from which weapons are molded, a reserve from which energy is drunk. I am the doorway to greatness, and death. The grass under my hooves lives because I let it. The seagulls sing because I let them. I could just as easily make the seagulls sing louder.

I am the perfect weapon that my gods designed me to be. I am the perfect partner in war, the worst enemy.

The sea calls for me. The waves crash like a war drum. I do not stop until I am standing atop the tallest cliff, with the wind pulling on my hair like a petulant lover, like an impatient child. The ribbons in my hair flutter like banners of blood, the teeth about my neck bounce off each other and make an almost jubilant tinkling sound.

For too long I have forgotten my stripes—like a tiger’s. I am meant to be a predator. I was never meant for walls lit by magical flames and moons that judge every step I make. I was not meant for the humanity I found in Rezar. Perhaps that is why they had taken it from me.

“Speaking.”