REFLECTIONS MAY CHISEL ITS STRANGE SONG / BUT THINK OG SKIN / WORN DOWN UNDER / THE MASS OF / ITS PANIC (OR PURPOSE) ☼
When I pry my eyes open from an afternoon nap, the sky is hazy and lurid red from a sunset that is like blood. I shake a rattlesnake from where it lies crooked between the curve of my thigh and my stomach, ignoring its dull and sleep-mussed hissing, and I slowly stumble until I am standing on unsteady hooves, staring out at the low hang of the sun as it slips from the horizon like a drop of blood from the tip of a blade. The dunes ripple beneath it, tense with heat; their edges melt into the sky, as though there is no distinction between the two at all.
I dreamed, I think, of monsters beyond imagining. I can still see them dancing behind the dark of my eyelids, worse than anything Mother could dream up in her folktales or fairy stories – but kinder by measures and measures than the stories she tells of men. I yawn, my tongue sliding serpentine across the ridges of my teeth, and I draw myself out of the darkness of the den I’d crept into to sleep, stretching out the wide expanse of my wings. (The gold tips of my feathers seem to dance in the light; they seem to reflect, and then to stain.) I study the sky for a moment, arching my neck to meet a gust of passing, dry wind, and I decide that, sure as the clip of a rattlesnake’s tail, this will be an angry night. One with teeth.
Maybe it will storm – one of those flash floods. Wash families away from each other, lose them to the dunes. Maybe a caravan will be eaten whole by teryrs in the Elatus. Maybe one of the tribes will burn the city to the ground again. (The sky already looks like fire.) I don’t know; it’s not up to me to know. Still, I can feel the tension like a livewire in the air, like the moment before lightning strikes, but always and everywhere.
I settle up onto the dunes with a clink of gold and the slow sift of silk. Ereshkigal hasn’t found me yet, or I haven’t strayed far enough from home to warrant Mother sending her after me; that means she might show lenience if I sneak out for just a while longer. The tension in the desert runs my spine like a shiver, and it makes me want to run – it makes me want to drown in the dunes until I become them and never come out, but I can’t do that.
I’ll settle for jackals.
I like jackals. They sing with me, with their mourning, war-cry barks and wails; I can nearly mimic them, now. I stride off across the dunes, barely even kicking up sand in my passing, and it is not so long until I find what I am looking for. (It never is.) There is a dark den worn into the sand, sheltered beneath a rough outcrop of rocks, and, when I lower my muzzle to stare into it, small faces with marble-dark and glossy eyes stare back. Pups. A few of them, by the look of it – I’m sure that their parents will return soon.
I settle near the entrance to the den, and the pups pay me little mind, and I have nearly drifted back into my thoughts of monsters with No Name when a cacophony of agitated, panicked yelps breaks out from the den. I blink back to myself, and I slowly turn to stare at what has so troubled the jackals-
I tilt my head, nearly like a jackal myself, and I watch him in silence for what might be a very long time.
@El Toro|| she's goddamned weird I don't even know what to say || "the terror of flight," adam clay Speech
Posted by: Diana - 10-31-2020, 12:00 AM - Forum: Archives
- No Replies
BUT YOU KNOW THIS ALREADY you and the others who think / you live for truth and, by extension, love / all that is cold.
I am knee-deep in a sea of flowers.
(They want to eat me alive. I know it, I know it, I know it – but their mouths aren’t big enough.)
I think that it is probably – most likely – normal for girls to like flowers. I look at them, and I think of all the ways that their roots are knotted beneath the ground, feeding on dead things. I don’t think that I like them or hate them, but these are not the desert roses and cactus blossoms that grow on the edge of the oasis. Those love me; but these bloom bloodred with malevolence, coil grass knots beneath my hooves as I make my way through the fields, and I do not think that they are lovely, or anything else. I wanted to see them regardless.
There are crowds of people scattered across the field, but I ignore them; the young lovers, and the playing children, and the two-parent households weaving crowns to put on their children’s foreheads, and the ever-so watchful guards, which blend so easily into the crowd that you might miss them if you aren’t looking. (I am always looking. It was the first lesson my mother ever taught me – or, at the very least, it was the first one I remember.) I do not weave crowns, and I am more sculpture than child, and I do not wander about the fields with anyone else for company. I linger near the outskirts of the field, unsure of what to do but observe. The tall grass rubs at me the wrong way, a small offense. It leaves my legs itching.
Mother taught me better than to talk to strangers, or to stray too close to them. Mother knows better than to trust people, and she regards the world with the expectation that it will be cruel, if not the promise – and all the parts of me that are desert and little bright-shard-of-light know well enough to agree with her, and they do not much care for the near-absence of company (but for Mother, and Ambrose, and Ereshkigal, and the desert and all the things that occupy it) in my day-to-day life. When I am at home, I am never lonely. It is only when I cross the threshold into the outside world that I find myself curious, wondering upon wondering things I know better than to think or to ask.
I wonder how long it will take for those feelings to wither and rot and decay altogether – how long it will take me to grind them to sand. I don't want them.
I give a shake of my veiled head, gold clasps clicking against my horns, and I begin to prowl the edge of the field, just as though I am standing on another threshold. The wind bites against my cheeks in a sudden uproar, colder and crueler than it would ever be in the desert – but reeking of nothing but afterbirth of winter or new-flush of early spring -, and I twist my head against it, keeping the coiled masses of my hair from straying into my eyes. The field presses and tangles against my hooves, and the flowers, in their precious new-bloom, beg to keep me out.
(I wonder, like my father's daughter, if I wouldn’t like to grind them to sand, too.)
Solterra is remarkably peaceful for a kingdom with no leader.
Martell has heard of its bloody history in passing. It is a credit to Orestes, perhaps, that the streets aren’t erupting in violence now; from what he’s been told all the desert-born are prone to quick tempers and the love of a fight. Maybe they are all cowards underneath, though - maybe they have no interest in a throne whose previous holders had brief reigns that ended in death or disappearance.
It is hard not to wonder of his own city, his own people. Isra had left them with the rebels in charge, but how well would newly-freed slaves govern? It would not surprise him if they, too, had been slaughtered in the streets. Perhaps one of the lesser dukes had seized control; perhaps chaos gripped Elettra still.
His thoughts chase themselves down darker paths like dogs on rats as he moves through the narrow shelves of the royal library. He calls them to heel and out of habit they obey, but only just; he can still feel their breath, their teeth worrying their lips, when he stops before a book that lays open on a table. One of the attendants had pointed him here, to pages of history where the ink was still fresh enough to carry a scent. Still being written.
Martell turns each page, the papyrus so thin that sunlight shines through. He stops at the year marked 503.
But he cannot read the words.
Foreign markings, black-eyed, look up at him, sinuous as snakes and sharp as barbed arrows. The script is different than what he’d studied on the ship, by dim candlelight in the hold, by sunlight on the deck. He can only make out the names: Raum. Seraphina. Isra. Isra. Isra.
Inwardly he seethes. The letters swim before him, darkening, as a wasps-nest hum rises in his mind. The unicorn lifts his head before he can plunge his horn through the heart of the pages and swallows, hard. Out of the corner of his eye there is movement - a buckskin with spots of white, a dangerous-looking woman. Martell forces his voice to be calm as the surface of a mirror, his expression to be pliant.
“Excuse me,” he says to her, belly hot with fury and humiliation, a burning in his emerald eyes. “Could you tell me what this says, please? I - I can’t read it. But I need to know.”
If there is a story to be found in the flames, I do not see it. I see only the way the fire eats, and eats, and eats, and does not care what it consumes. Wood, herbs, paper wishes —
horses. Fires are for sacrifices, and the only one that matters is that borne of flesh.
Isolt is looking for her sister in between the flames.
The smoke is burning her eyes as she steps closer, and closer, and closer — pressing in until she can see the fires dancing across the backs of her eyelids every time she closes her eyes. And every time the fire changes colors she opens her eyes again and looks — and looks and looks and looks.
But she does not find her.
There are shadows in the fires, and other shapes, things that are weighted with deeper meanings she does not understand. None of it makes sense to her, and none of it matters without her twin beside her. She does not understand why the fire is so hungry, or why the people around her stop to feed it with wood as often as with herbs. She does not stop to ask it.
She does not stop at all as she weaves between the fires, close enough to feel the heat of them singing her hair. And she is not listening to the singing, or the cheering, or the music that weaves like smoke between them all. She is lost, lost, lost, and with every second that passes she feels the ache inside of her chest grow. It feels like —
oh, it feels like her heart is being torn apart, like the other half of it is floating away somewhere on the smoke that spirals up into the sky, somewhere she cannot reach or follow.
She sets her jaw, feels her teeth grind together. And when she sees the storm-colored girl from before, the one with death draped around her shoulders and hanging in the shape of a crow from her brow, she does not hesitate. All her aching is growing teeth, and claws, and desperation, and if she cannot find her sister to ease it — then this, this will do.
“Why are you here?” The words sound like an accusation hanging from her teeth. And her blade begins to tap, tap, tap against her hip as her tail curls up and rests there on her flank.
Isolt wonders if it bothers her as much now as it did in the forest.
and those gardens became a dark carnival of unseen dangers, a bottomless sea of unspeakable grotesqueries.
Tonight the world is more colorful beneath the flickering stars than it had been the night before. Tulips of bone-white and blood-red glitter in the sickle moon as they tap against her legs in the breeze. Each tap is a mockery of a flicker, of the darkness left behind when a star slips between one world and the gap-jaw of a monster’s throat leading the way to the next. And the mockery of light is the only reason she lingers knee deep in the field of tulips when the fog starts to roll in.
Around her the twilight has turned into bruise-black night and it’s citizens have long since started to think of silk, and pillows, and four walls a unicorn has no need for. The music has turned into low laments running in vesper frail whispers between the baskets tossed around as haphazardly as a hundred promises. To her, as she angles the tip of her horn towards the sickle moon, it all seems a very mortal sort of slumber.
Perhaps it is because the hour is one of mortal slumber, and dreams spitting on silk pillows, that Danaë finds herself lingering between the tulips too rotten to be plucked.
And perhaps it is why out of each dead and broken stem of a tulip another bottom-of-the-ocean-black petal unfurls. Each of those dark-as-night flowers unfurls towards her and in each center there is a rotten and porous pollen egg that seems more eye than honey. She thinks of her sister’s gardens, ripe with ruin and the bent backward spines of birches bowing for their god, and how this place is so far removed from it.
Even the fog rolling in, thick enough to dust her lashes in dew (as if she is a garden instead of a unicorn), does little to turn this meadow into an altar. But her lips still lick at the moisture like holy water and her tail still cleaves the head of the tulips from their spines when a pack of coyotes howls in the distance. She anoints and becomes anointed because she does not know, as all made things do not know, how be anything else but god.
Isolt, and mother, have taught her well.
When she turns and casts her eyes, as bright and bloody as a cleaved out moon, onto the stallion as he joins her, there is that made look (that god-look) still echoing like a roar in her gaze. Danaë blinks and the fog billows up into crowning spirals through her horn with she lifts her nose from the throat of a cleaved off tulip.
And she has never felt more like a thing biding her time than she does now as a smile turns her teeth into a moon shorn violently from the gloaming fog and darkness.
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
His magic ascends the stairs ahead of him, rising up each step slowly, slowly, waiting for its master who climbs slowly. He places each foot upon the next step only after pressing his toe to the edges of the stone, knowing where was safe to stand and where was not.
It is a long time before Tenebrae feels the rush of cool air sweeping down the spiral steps. He has heard the view is magnificent here, but it will be wasted upon his sightless eyes. Yet never once has the monk questioned whether his slow, laborious climb is worth it. He thinks it is, for up there, at the peak of the tower, he will hear words of awe, descriptions of her beauty of the flowers. He will hear Elena’s vision in reality.
Why does he come, when this is her festival? He knows he is not justified to be more furious with her than she with him. And none are more justified than Boudika. Instead the warrior monk longs to know the earth again, to hear of its beauty and imagine the sight that might meet the festival goers. The air is so full the scent of delicate tulips. Children cry out in awe, grown ups laugh, breathy, the sight stealing the air from their very lungs. Tenebrae stands amidst them, near the high wall over which keen onlookers gaze.
Tenebrae does not look out (what point is there?) but he listens and he knows the flowers are winter and spring and summer and autumn. They are a sea of colour painting the meadow more beautiful than ever before. He smiles, a quiet smile, small and happy, even through its deep sadness.
He listens for so long that in his mind the spectators create for him a masterpiece of beauty with their words. Of course it is a beautiful sight, it was made by Elena. He would not doubt it for a moment. It is why he has come, why he climbed with bruised knees and an aching, repentant heart.
He might have been content to leave then, he even turns to go, except that a woman speaks and says, Azrael. Tenebrae’s head moves toward her voice and hears the murmuring answer. “Azrael.” He says aloud, enough to draw the other man’s attention. Tenebrae’s smile becomes a stranger thing, a darker thing. It is no smile at all, but a cut of pain across the black eternity of his mouth. “I might have guessed you would be here.” The monk does not say he is pleased to meet him atop the tower, before Elena’s flowers.
ephisto walked among the flowers, feeling clumsy where she is usually graceful, not nearly as delicate as the blooms which surround her. A whimsical part of her stops to smell the blooms, burying her face in their colors with a secret smile, taking pleasure in the beauty of them as she purrs contentedly before continuing on her way. All around her, Terrestella is ablaze with new life. Fuzzy foals nuzzle close to their mothers, bleating as they nursed and raced after one another. Trees budded with unfurling leaves, birds rose to the skies with song, and through it all, the sun shone warmly upon them.
Elena’s festival was well underway, strangers coming from all corners of Novus, and the warg smiled congenially at them as they passed. While she wasn’t usually in the welcome party, Mephisto saw her duty now to serve the court more than ever, trying to atone for her absence over the last few months. She had recommitted to Marisol that she would play an active role in the politics here, and so she finds herself murmuring greetings to those who pass and doing her best to be welcoming and show the best face to their visitors.
When their company grows tiresome, she took pause and turned to the castle, winding through its familiar halls and toward its tallest peak. In the stone tower, she had often found peace, stargazing and daydreaming. Now, she peers upon the view – rows of color leading to the sea, enjoying the beauty of it and the order to the rows. From this vantage point, she can also see pictures in the blossoms, which the gardners had left for only the most curious to find.
And as she turns toward a knock on the door, her eyes fall on a stranger, one of their visitors. Halfheartedly, she shifts to allow him to see the fields below, not entirely displeased at the disruption but reluctant to abandon her view. "It’s beautiful, the Spring.” Her voice is low and smooth, like whiskey on a summer’s night. "I haven’t seen you in Terrestella before…” She turns, regarding the stranger with a quiet smile. "What brings you to our festival?”
There was something almost poetic about the emptiness of this place. If he thought about it, Pan might have seen the town somewhere in a dream – somewhere which might have explained its vacant desolation. Perhaps in his dream, there had been bustling life here. There had been shopkeepers and patrons. Girls dancing in the square to a musician’s lute. Boys dipping their braids into inkwells in a classroom while ignoring a teacher’s lecture. But this was not a dream. It was magic, pure and simple, raw and empty. The dreamer in him was pragmatic enough to know that life was a delicate thing, and that it could be erased in an instant, leaving only the bones of an abandoned city in its wake.
He walks alone, down the alleys which might have been frightening to some but to Pan every twisting turn in the road offered more chances at adventure. Shadows hug his sides, humming of magic as they brushed past and left him again in quiet curiosity. And Pan presses onward, finding his way to the abandoned castle and stepping unabashedly across the threshold and into its darkened halls.
Following the rust-hued stone, he passes all wonders of places. To his left, a door swings open, revealing a room filled from top to bottom with water. Curiosity has Pan stepping into it, a bubble surrounding him as he sinks deep into the blue hues but is never touched by its wetness. Where he walks, the carrier bubble simply rolls him along in the tide as he passes all manner of strange plants and fishes. Along the far wall, he sees another door, reaching to open it and falling into a room built entirely from ribbons of mist.
He walks across them, incredulously wondering how he doesn’t simply fall through the cloud-like floor, turning to watch the way light and shadows play across the illusion. When he walks and should move forward, instead his steps take him up, up, up, until at the top of the room, the ceiling simply gives way to another illusion.
Here, he finds a room entirely made of mirrors, each a window into another place or dimension. He gazes through one to find a snowy wonderland, the glass melting at his touch to brush him with a touch of cold. In the next, a desert stretches far as the eye can see, unforgiving and harsh with heat. Another window shows a world built entirely of food – with cotton candy clouds and broccoli trees, a river of cider and tiny houses built from nuts and berries. He turns once more, finding a world not unlike this one, but built entirely upside down – with roads where the skies should be, and endless sky filling the space where the ground would sit.
As he sits and contemplates which world to enter first, the floor parts once more, giving way to a second creature. Pan grins widely at his new companion, a spark of interest meeting his eye as he gives the male a quick study. Some might have questioned where the stranger had come from, but the boy simply shivers excitedly and asks “Well, which way should we go next?”
Azrael swore he wouldn’t return to this place. There were just too many memories – memories of the night he’d met Tenebrae (the creature who would come to haunt his dreams), memories of reuniting with Elena in the hall of mirrors. Admissions of guilt. Forgiveness given. It was a place of magic and of intrigue, a place from which he couldn’t seem to stay away. For just as he knew he should avoid the island, it is the magic which draws him back, the thirst for change and for things he cannot understand. With his life in chaos, it seemed that the confusion of the island made him feel strangely at peace. If anything, it reminded him that life was unpredictable, that his own circumstances were far from unique in this crazy world.
And so he walks along the magic-forged streets, clearing his mind and focusing on the stillness around him. The village was eerily quiet, as if its inhabitants had simply up and vanished, reminding him of another village… his home… far in the mountains where it kissed the sky. There had been life in his home once too, vibrant and thriving as the People worshipped Caligo’s stars. But just as civilization here seemed to have fallen, his own homeland had been left for ruin, structures lasting far longer than fragile lives, burned to the ground.
He shivered, remembering. Though it was spring, there was a bite to the air, whether magic or a chill, which left him somewhat unsettled and always on guard. Past empty shop and empty shop he walked, daring to peek into one or two, marveling at the way they seemed to paint a picture of bustling life despite their emptiness. Goods lay scattered on check-out counters, baskets left unattended in the aisles, still brimming with selections. Bread still sat in windows, baked and unspoiled (surely touched by the magic). Fruit still weighed heavily in the trees.
But not even a bird dared to sing in this strange and empty place, each step leading him further from reality as he weaved through empty streets.
Azrael couldn’t be certain how long he’d wandered through the sun-soaked town – it could have been minutes or hours. Time seemed to lose all affects on the island, holding little consequence to Tempus’ ire. But the more he wandered, the only thing he felt certain of is that he roamed this world alone.
Or did he?
With a gasp, he turns toward motion at his left, shrewd eyes peeking into a shadowed alley and catching a brief glimpse of white and gold. With intrigue in his chest, he follows, rounding the corner and nearly colliding with Morrighan. For a moment, his breath simply catches in his throat, before he clears it and addresses her quizzically.
“I thought I was alone… what do you think of this place?” His voice is an incredulous murmur, as he slowly takes in her form, eyes landing on her agate pendant for a moment before finding her brown and blue gaze. “You’re from Denocte.” It was more a statement than a question. “I think I’ve seen you there, from a distance… I am Azrael.”
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
Spring had come to Novus, and with it came a rebirth of sorts. For Solstice, the season was largely symbolic of her own transformation, from oppression to freedom. She’d been here now for the better part of a year, and with every passing day, she found her confidence growing and her fear subsiding. Granted, it hadn’t gone away completely – but the Pegasus was truly coming into her own, blossoming as Ipomoea’s flowers did, their faces shining brightly in the sun.
She wandered through the blossoms, oblivious to the world around her, though there were children running gaily through the gardens with brightly colored flags and make-believe stories as they went. Not far from her, soulful strains of music rose from a golden mare playing a harp, and Solstice offered her a warm smile as she passed. The harpist simply nodded in acknowledgement, returning the smile without missing a beat, her melody sweet and harmonic as it serenaded the passerbys.
Something drew her out today, among the people, a luxury she so seldomly allowed for herself. The sky-hued Pegasus was painfully shy, though she was beginning to find her voice more and more. Forcing herself out of the comfort of her bubble and the few acquaintances she’d made so far, Solstice walks through the garden and tries to keep her head high. The false confidence boost is enough, as she offers timid smiles to strangers, pleased when they fail to address her and simply pass her with a quiet greeting.
It seemed that the day would simply pass with such pleasantries, until Solstice finds herself deeper in the garden, further than she’d ever ventured to wander before. She steps brazenly into a hedge maze, curiosity edging out caution as she takes the first turn, then the second. Deeper and deeper into the bushes she presses, until she finds herself sufficiently lost and alone.
She turns left and right, looking for the way she’d come, but finding only leafy brush around her. “H… hello?” The bushes whisper around her, dancing in the wind but offering no other voices. Her heart beats louder in her chest, tinges of fear setting in as she turns toward a passage on her left, racing forward into a large clearing in the maze, and finding little more than a marble bench with a flowered arch beside it. Even the sky above seemed foreboding now, anxiety locking her wings to her sides, fear keeping her from simply flying to her freedom as her eyes wildly scan the surroundings for life or for an excape.
Not finding any, anxiety bubbles in her even more, to the point where she could no longer maintain her composure, lowering herself to the ground and dragging ragged breaths into her chest to steady herself. One. Two. Three. She counts them, trying to control her racing heartbeat and breathing, but the calming procedure did little to soothe her fraying nerves.
And so the girl wraps her large wings around herself, a silver tear edging at her eyes as she whispers to the strange maze, begging to be found. “Help me… will anyone find me?”
As if answering the quiet prayer, her ears prick to a hushed mew in the distance, tawny eyes scanning to find the source as hope flickers within her… perhaps she wasn’t truly alone after all… and perhaps help could take more than one form, relief washing over her as another soul steps into the clearing. With a sigh of relief, she turns to the stranger and manages a sad sort of smile, the quiet mew forgotten for the moment as she addresses him. “Are you lost too?”
