it's the parasite eve
got a feeling in your stomach
cause you know that it's coming for ya
Is this what death feels like?
At least, it's what death looks like. Everything here either looks or smells dead and it's really creeping me out. I've never been so terrified before- maybe when I first saw Momma get angry and her fire flared up all around us. Honestly, I would much prefer to be around fire right now and not all this.
I've been lost for what feels like forever. Momma and I were separated and I haven't been able to find her since. I've tried asking some people walking around this weird marketplace if they've seen Momma, but they either haven't or ignore me.
I feel like an ant and this place is the big hoof that's going to come by and squash me. My chest gets tighter and tighter and it's been getting hard to breathe. When I do manage to breathe, it's between sobs and my eyes hurt from crying so much. I want to be strong like Momma is, but this place is making it so hard. It was supposed to be this cool jungle with grass as tall as trees, but there's nothing green here, only darkness and decay.
I've tried retracing my steps and I keep coming back to the cave we came in from, but Momma and Bram aren't here. When I call out for them, there is only an echo of my own voice. When I wander to the marketplace, I'm reminded of home. I miss the way my hooves sound on the cobblestone roads and my favorite bakery. There are no sweet smells or apple cider here. It's a ghost town with all merchant goods laid out for the taking. Maybe someone would want to take all of this stuff, but I don't care about it. I just want Momma.
I let my tired legs give out and sink into the ground with dirt that smells like ash. "Someone help me…" I mumble to anyone who might be listening. Momma's told me a lot about Caligo, but I'm not sure even she can help me here.
Arkhandirr ""rich kid, asshole, paint me like a villain""
His encounter with the Regent had left him a little shaken up - though he would not admit to it. It was one thing to have his intentions doubted, it was another thing in its own right to have them doubted when he had been truthful for once in his life filled with more lies and deceits he cared to admit. At least he was not immediately thrown out, that was a definite win in his books. He did need to calm down his slight heightened heart rate though. Luckily he had passed a lake when he had traveled towards the court, it wasn't terribly far away and it would find him much needed refreshment before he found a place to rest - wherever that might be.
It indeed did not take him as long to arrive there, the gentle breeze that had picked up as he walked making him shiver just slightly. Coming from hotter climates, it would definitely take him a while to get used to the change, nothing impossible - just an inconvenience. It was also why he didn't immediately bathe himself inside the lake, instead opting to just resting his tired feet at the edge. The cold water working miracles on them. So much so he didn't really pay attention to his surroundings. It wasn't like his day would get even more eventful, right?
SUCH A SADNESS: EVERYTHING TRYING TO / BREAK THROUGH INTO / BLOSSOM. / EVERY DAY SHOULD BE A MIRACLE INSTEAD / OF A MACHINATION. ☙❧
The sun is setting, and the air smells like salt, but in a good way. In the best way.
I have been here since late autumn, but, I think, as I settle down into the crisp, bright green grass clinging precariously to the dark and jagged rocks of the cliff, that I still have not gotten used to waking up and seeing the sea. Most days I blink the sleep out of my eyes in the morning and I still expect to smell cinnamon and woodsmoke and drying herbs, not Elena’s flowers and the salt water. I hear the rhythm of wind and I expect the sound of it through branches, not crashing against the coast. Most days, when I step out onto the beach and look out across the sea, I still feel like it is my first time seeing it, really seeing it.
I ruffle my feathers, settling my wings in comfortably at my sides, and I swirl my drink in front of me, observing the way that the dying sunlight refracts through its pale center. I have picked a glass decorated with red petals, which match half of the blooms that compose the woven crown (half-wilted and crooked from a day of frolicking) on my forehead, but I’ve barely drunk any of it yet, because the evening has only just begun, and I don’t want to waste a single good thing. I am trying to savor every moment of the festival, which seems to me to be as much of a commemoration of spring as it is of my first spring.
I take a sip of my drink. It slides down my throat, honey-sweet and easy, and I close my eyes, taking a deep breath of sea salt and flowers. Almost immediately, I think better of it and snap them open again, because I do not want to miss a single moment of the sunset, which is painting the horizon lush violet, run through with ribbons of orange like the outer layers of a fire or the rich skin of a peach.
I don’t know what possesses me, exactly, to go looking for company. Maybe it is because I’ve had a few sips of my drink by then, which is enough to make, I’d think, any strange girl in a mostly-strange land long for a friendly face; maybe it is because the sunset is terribly lovely, and I’d like to share it; or maybe, and this is most likely, it is because we are at a festival, and no one should attend a festival alone. At any rate, when I catch sight of a man who is alone, his meld of orange and charcoal feathers in many ways vaguely reminiscent of my own, I trot up to him with a spring in my step, glass hovering a few feet away from my face. “Would you like,” I ask, smiling at him hopefully, “to watch the sunset with me?”
(I think that I’ve seen him in Terrastella, before – and this is as good a time as any, I think, to meet more of Dusk’s citizens.)
@Hugo|| <3 || charles bukowski, "fingernails; nostrils; shoelaces" Speech
WEAVE HER A CHAIN OF SILVER TWIST, / AND A LITTLE HOOD OF SCARLET WOOL, / AND LET HER PERCH UPON YOUR WRIST / AND TELL HER SHE IS BEAUTIFUL. ☙❧
One of my lesser-known (and lesser-valued) skills is weaving crowns.
I picked it up mostly by chance in my first lifetime. You see, my mother absolutely adored flowers, and, when my sister and I were young, she would braid them into our hair all the time. If she wasn’t braiding them, she was making crowns out of them, and, somewhere along the line, I learned to do the same. The brilliant jewelry and bright gemstones that adorn so many of the residents of Novus were virtually inaccessible to most people at home, so we made do with what we had to dress up. Sometimes the priestesses used them, in ritual attire; my charms are from that. Otherwise, the brightest thing I’d ever seen before I left home were the golden laurels that sprung from the antlers of my king.
Now I am weaving flower crowns again, ever so meticulously, and I am laughing almost like I remember laughing when I would do the same with my mother and my sister, but in a different voice. (The tulips, sprung up from the frozen ground, are reborn; so am I.) This is my first spring, and it is beautiful. I have never seen so much green before in all my lives, dotted with head after head after head of multicolored tulips, which I have never seen before either – not in such great quantities. There are sweet drinks and pastries and the smiling faces of people that, after nearly half a year, I am beginning to recognize as slightly more than strange faces on the street, and I am trying to embrace every passing moment and be resplendently happy about it, without thinking now of all the ways that the tulips must eventually return to their place beneath the ground and how it has been nearly half a year, and I have not found who I am looking for, and how-
It is not good to think of dark things here. (Burned forests, burning starlings.)
I think of looking for Elliana, but, looking down at the collection of flowers in the wicker basket I picked up on the roadside nearest the field, I decide instead that I should look for Elena. If I cannot weave crowns for my mother again, and I cannot – we are separated by centuries, now, and lifetimes, and I have made my peace with it (as much as anyone ever will) -, I think that weaving a crown for her might be the next best thing. She is not a queen, and I have never served one, but I imagine that she carries herself with all of the grace and goodness of the ones who appear in Elliana’s bedtime stories.
I pick my way across the field, brow furrowed against the brightness of the midday light, and I find her eventually in the flowers, a speck of sun on the ground. I flash her a soft smile, calling out a gentle, “Elena?” and I pick my way towards her through the field, basket of flowers balanced neatly between my shoulderblades and wings. I gesture back at it with a turn of my head. “Would you like me to weave a crown for you?”
(My own, a mixture of bloodred and gold-yellow – to match my odd eyes and autumn colors – falls crooked on my skull; I readjust it quickly.)
@Elena|| <3 || elinor wylie, "the falcon" Speech
" KEEP MY HEART WITH MY DOGS, KEEP MY CAR IN THE YARD "
O has never cared for, or even learned much about, politics. But she knows a princess when she sees one.
The girl at the fruit stand is Hagar Ieshan. Somehow she’s smaller than O expected; in the sea of tall, lithe Solterran horses that crowd the market, she stands out in more ways than one. Lion-bright yellow eyes. A diaphanous robe, dyed a wine-dark purple. Despite her smallness, her general strangeness, the world seems to bend around her like everyone here knows enough to be afraid. Maybe it’s just the way she carries herself. (Bexley used to walk like that. That was the woman who raised her—someone who once was like Hagar, glittering with gravity, drawing people in from every direction. O presses her lips together and wonders what happened.)
The sun is high and bright today. But it’s still spring, not late enough in the year to be blisteringly hot, and the light that streams down is thin and gentle, closer to the ebbing heat of an ember than a raging bonfire. It seeps over O’s back, melts her into a stack of too-relaxed muscle kept standing only by the shoulder that she leans up against a tent pole. Around her, the world is picking up speed after a long winter with its head buried in the pillows. Vendors yell from both sides of the street; foals chase each other down the length of the market; everywhere one looks, there are coins being tossed from hand to hand, or drums being played, or some baked good being broken open, so fresh it spills steam into the air.
Will you talk to her? Tuchulcha asks, soft enough that only the two of them can hear.
O’s ear flicks back, half to catch the quiet voice, half in surprise. It’s not often the two of them decide to really be friendly. (Although, O thinks, if there is a difference between friendly and flirty, then…) Tuchulcha rarely even gets involved in social affairs; the “talking axe” aspect of its existence tends to freak people out. Somehow, though, O gets the feeling Hagar won’t be bothered by it. Or at least not as bothered as a princess should be.
Just to herself—just barely—she smirks, the sooty lip flashing up into a faint curl, then falling just as fast.
O pushes her weight out of its leaning stance. Languid, elastic, with the exaggerated confidence of a fox, she stalks toward the redhead and calls out: “Are you looking for something, princess?”
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him.
T
he bonfires cast dramatic shadows; the elongated light dances alongside the oppressive darkness, until the clashing of opposites creates a mural of blinking, still-framed images. The festival is full of hope; is full of growing. A poet sings of spring and children laugh aloud, among the high bright flames. Pravda might have once marveled at the flickering orange flames; or, certainly, the indigos. The kaleidoscope of colors is at once unimaginable and right before my eyes; blue flames, or green, and yellow too.
He does not marvel at them now. Perhaps it is because he feels separated from the occasion; the fires dance, but not for him. There are lovers singing poetry, but not for him. There are children laughing, but not for him. There is a race, but not for him.
The devision is stark and impenetrable; he is something, someone other, and these joys do not—should not—belong to Pravda, or so he believes.
Yet, he is enticed by one fire in particular. Perhaps it is because of the size; or simply that it is the only bonfire in the vicinity that seems to burn as normal flames do. Pravda is not typically impulsive; but something urges him forward. Perhaps it is the way the men stand there with bright silver eyes. He watches from afar, initially: but when they reveal tarots and delve into oomancy and divination by eggs, he is increasingly intrigued. There must be something to write about this experience. (After all, is not the most profitable knowledge rooted in experience itself?) Pravda steps forward, and then—hesitates.
He had not, at first, seen Ipomoea. But the other stallion emerges from the darkness and, before he can reach one of the Shed Stars, Pravda intercepts.
“Sovereign,” he greets curtly, but not without politeness. The light glances unevenly in Pravda’s strange eyes. His expression is marble, and spilled ink. “What are you hoping they tell you?”
He has never been one for social courtesies. Pravda gestures towards the Shed Stars and their divinations with a sharp motion of his chin; it had been clear that was where Ipomoea had been going.
But, Pravda supposes, it had been his intention as well.
The moon is half-full - somewhere around there, anyway - it is hard to tell, cloudy as it is. Sometimes August can make out the shine of it, a foggy bottom of a glass, a torch-glow through the trees. On and off it rains, enough to make everything damp but not to soak it to the bone. It’s chilly, but the wind is low, and the thought of the bonfires back in town is enough to keep him warm, for now.
It’s habit - old habit - that’s brought him to the sea. Ever since leaving Tartarus he’s been prone to wandering at odd hours, and ever since he was a belly-high boy he’s been prone to watching the sea. Now there’s hardly anything to see of it - a thin gleam on the water - but he listens to the waves lap, gently. He can’t tell whether the tide is coming or going, and there are no ships on the water - bad weather for it, too dark, and besides this stretch of beach has some rocks a hundred yards out or so that have caused more than one wreck in recent years. There’s probably treasure out there, somewhere.
When he first hears the creature surface - the slick of something coming out of water, and the unmistakable sound of a drawn breath - he thinks it’s a seal, maybe even a whale. August pauses in his walking and turns toward the water, watching for nothing but motion, and only when the thing moves do his eyes find it. In the darkness it’s only a silhouette, vaguely horse-shaped, and his ears twist back. He has his sword on him, but he’s out of the practice of using it.
But just then the clouds part for a moment (like a thing surfacing from the sea) and there in the moon-glow he sees a broad white face, and dark shoulders, and twisting dark spires of horns.
August squints in disbelief. “Boudika?” he shouts, and his voice carries over the water, and the moon slips away again.
@Boudika
August - -
there's a lover in the story but the story's still the same
—
« I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough. »
A
ugust is more free than he’s ever been in his life, and he’s beginning to feel it.
Maybe that’s expected of a man who spent the better part of the winter with scabs turning to scars in a cellar. But it’s less of a physical thing (though the spring air is fresh and clean, sure, and it’s good to see the sun and sea again) than a mental weightlessness. He feels like a ship that’s traveled for years under a heavy load, and has finally left it at harbor.
There’s a lightness to his step, then, that’s been missing for a couple years as he walks among the rows and rows of flowers. August has never been to Terrastella before; it seemed a natural enough place to stop off on his way back from the Delumine festival. Giving his life to the Scarab as he had, he’d never really had the chance to travel, too tied to his work and his patrons. Now he planned to relish it.
He’s far from the only one in a fair mood today. The sky is a blameless blue, the air is thick with the sweet scent of blooms, and everywhere horses wander in pairs, in groups, and, more rare, alone like him. It’s another solo figure whose eye he catches as she passes by - a gaze as pretty-blue as the spring day, as golden as he is, with flowers wound in her mane.
“How do you think they got them planted so precisely?” he asks her, smiling amiably, as though he has not just forced on her the most unimaginative small-talk possible.
Unburdened he may be, but his conversational skills could use a brush-up.
The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
~Rilke
The grasses brush at his feet. They sway, perfect and golden, with the vitality of the coming spring. Even the air has begun its change. It is sweet to his tongue. To his nose are floral smells he has never thought to find the source of before. Now he stands, wondering at the shape and colour of the flowers which might create smells such as these.
Still his eyes ache, yet here, stood beneath the midday sun, his shadows scattered, his back warmed with light, it is easy to forget the pain. Tenebrae listens, still and silent he drinks in the voice of the meadow. It is a symphony, a choir of noise, from the chirping of the birds to the cricketing and creeping of the insects in the growing grasses.
About his eyes his bandage is growing dirtier, more frayed. Threads have come loose, they tickle across his nose and mouth as the breeze comes, cool and pregnant with spring. A stranger comes, the Disciple thinks. He has yet to learn the sound others make through woodland and grassland. Yet the grasses rustle rhythmic, heavier than the wind.
“Are the tulips out yet?” The monk asks the stranger. Tenebrae knows Elena was growing them ready, he found her tending them in the Dusk fields. Her festival was this weekend, did they bud in time? He thinks only of flowers, for to think of Elena in any other way was to invite in that unwelcome little jab that reminded him her child was not his, a family was not his to have.
The night was cool, crisp, but not unpleasant, a statement to the newly blossoming season upon the land. The woman furrowed her brows at the thought, she'd grown so tired of the season and their ever changing ways, she was simply exhausted.
At home, when winter arrived, their world changed and everyone flitted about like bumblebees in a fresh field. There and then, it was their time, their moment to rule and her parents took it all in stride. Often, Zhavvorsi found the event tedious and honestly, stupid. Winter was perfectly happy to rule for a few months of the year before passing the torch, they were limp and lacked a backbone. For a young girl, it may have all been fun and games, but as she grew and matured, she'd changed, grown colder with each passing day until she skipped the event entirely. That's when she'd known there was no place left for her in the kingdom of Winter.
All this passed through the lady's mind as her icy eyes landed upon a gathered group of equines, all dancing around the raging inferno of a fire they'd built. A sly smile crawled across the dame's lips as she inhaled deeply. Besides the heavy smoke coating the air, she tasted wonder and mischief upon her tongue, causing her heartbeat to quicken. It wasn't until she drew closer and the crackling of the flames reached her that she heard the music. It must've been some sort of festival, but she allowed herself to be consumed by the moment.
Frigid skin sizzling, protesting the heat of the fire, she leapt into the fray, losing herself in the wildness of the night. The air was alive, reaching and pulled at her ivory locks, dragging cool fingers down her frost covered hide, enticing her - no, taunting her.
With a growl, the mare danced feverishly, jumping across trails of billowing smoke, twisting and turning as she went.
Finally, she'd found the revelry she'd craved for so long, now if only they'd keep playing, if only she could lose herself this way… forever.
~~~
Words: 348
Tags: @anyone
OOC: This is going to be fun! Sorry if there are errors, did it on mobile.
