FAITH IN THEIR HANDS SHALL SNAP IN TWO, AND THE UNICORN EVILS RUN THEM THROUGH; SPLIT ALL ENDS UP THEY SHAN’T CRACK; AND DEATH SHALL HAVE NO DOMINION.
Fire does not cleanse a dead thing. Weeds do not sink into the flesh and marrow of a made thing and grow life in the abyss of black rot. Pearls and paint do not write out legends on blood-red skin upon which the only story laid bare for all to see is one of wrath.
Thana is not a thing to celebrate and roll her shoulders between the magic of a chewed-out star.
She is a dead thing, a monstrous thing, a does not belong thing, as she walks through the crowds of lambs and maneless lions. The look in her eyes is one of lilac purpose that flashes, and sharpens, and dances with the reflection of light off the stone below her horn. At her side a star with silver eyes (who she knows is no star at all) bellows and beckons her closer with a foolish sort of hope. Thana, the regent who is no kind leader, does not turn to look.
Instead her eyes linger on the red-glare and smoke rising up above the outskirts of her cage like shapeless dragons. Instead she lingers on the music of the lambs and the stumbling of hooves bred for dance instead of war. Instead of moving closer, or turning to look (look!), she does nothing but lift her liliac violence towards the red flashing outside Ipomoea’s city.
Her hooves, the ones made for destruction, angle towards the main archway leading into the meadows. The crowds bleats before her when each stone, and flower, and booth, in her path turns slick with moss and rot. It does not cause her to feel remorse or anything but a terrible, vicious sort of understanding. And like a unicorn who does not know the sound of regret, or remorse, or go gently into the flock, she does not clap a collar back on her magic.
That magic purrs in her belly and Eligos echoes the sound as he joins her with his own flock of sand lambs running at his shoulders.
Thana’s trot turns to a gallop and every tree in her shadow starts to dry and beg for ember and soot. The red haze of the bonfires beckon her wrath and want closer with a clarion call unicorns are made to hear. When she leaps through the first obstacle (for she cares nothing for the rules of the mortal races) her heart trills back in its own wolfish clarion call.
And as her form cuts through the smoke of a fiery ring, before she slides to a lighting crack stop, there is a smile cutting through her lips. She laughs and even that sounds more like a sonnet to a long chewed-out moon than joy.
and at last i see the light, and it's like the fog has lifted
Spring had come to Novus, and with it, hope anew in the blessings of the gods. Just as they had in their fall festivals, Delumine came back to life with its tribute to Oriens, and Solstice found herself against wandering through the stalls of merchants and entertainers with a whimsical smile. Her step is much less burdened than in the past, relaxation drawing a sense of calm over the mare. Sunrise hued wings tuck closely to her body, so as not to disturb those who she passes, and her leonine tail flicks absentmindedly with each step.
“Oh, excuse me!” her clarion voice is hushed as she dodges children who run past, giggling as they went, paint streaking their bodies and feathers flying from their manes as they raced one another through the field. Absentmindedly, she allows her daydreaming to wander toward her own childhood and how different it might have been if she’d grown up in the wilds of Novus instead of the confines of the temple walls. It was a good place for children, she decided, for here they were treated with love and kindness – just as she was treated now, at least by the few she’d met.
Girl, do you want to know what the future holds? It was an offer too alluring to ignore, and Solstice murmurs incredulously as she follows the silver eyed fortune-teller into his tent, drawn by the way stars seemed to shimmer to life along his spine. “What are you?” she wonders aloud – for surely the shed-star was more light than horse, and he replies with only a chuckle as the cards are laid before her to choose.
Behind her, the girl hears a rustle of fabric as the tent welcomes a new stranger into its hold. Solstice turns, her tawny eyes falling on the soldier as she offers him a soft smile of greeting. “Couldn’t resist…” she explains to the stallion. “Have you come to learn about the future as well?” While Solstice couldn’t be certain that the shed-star is not a charlatan, she is intrigued as the fortune teller turns up the High Priestess, the Wheel of Fortune, and the Nine of Swords.
“What do you think it means?” she murmurs to the stranger, not quite able to meet the fortune teller’s strange silver gaze – for the seer’s eyes seem endless as they watch hers, as if they could read her very soul. What secrets would he find beneath the haunted shadows in her eyes?
A hawk appears with a letter wrapped around his leg and takes perch beside you. He looks at you curiously, but then turns so you can more easily untie the thread and take the scroll of paper. When you unravel it, the writing is messy and there is even a drink stain at the top right corner. Still, you're able to make out the words after reading closely.
Dear Nic,
I'm sorry it took so long for me to write to you! It actually took me a little while to figure out how to hold the pen right and then actually… write. I hope you haven't forgotten about me! I actually just saw a pretty night sky the other night and thought of you. Hopefully wherever you are reading this, you can still see all the stars and the moon.
I think I grew a bit, but I'm not sure if I'm as tall as you yet. I guess you'll just have to come visit and we can compare. Speaking of which, when are you coming to visit? I'll have to tell you all about the dream I had whenever you get here. I was flying - I think I was a bird! It made me wonder if I had been a bird in a past life, so maybe you can tell me what you think after I tell you all that happened.
Oh, have you found that hair guy yet? I know he was really important to you, so I hope you find him soon if you haven't already.
Oops, I'm running out of room on this paper and I didn't ask Momma for more. Well, I hope you're doing okay and that I hear from you soon!
my voice rings down from a thousand years to coil around your body and give you strength; you who have wept in direct sunlight; who have hungered in invisible chains, tremble to the cadence of my legacy; an army of lovers shall not fail
There is a story in Oresziah of two boys imprisoned in a garden. The old fable contains the stereotype, that they weather all the seasons in the span of four days: hot as summer, cool and rainy with autumn, cold as winter, and crisp and windy as spring. One boy cannot resist the temptations of the garden, despite being warned against the fruits within; he eats of it, and is condemned. The boy who hungers and thirsts and suffers without relent is later spared.
I’ve always thought the tale rather strange; what is the moral of it? To suffer, and be rewarded for one’s suffering? That seems the most logical allusion to draw away with, the easiest; but my mind has always remained on the boy who first succumbs to the temptations of the garden, and ask, why are they there?
The question follows me now, to the Ieshan estate. I had come to visit Adonai, but when overcome by a fit of coughing, he dismissed himself. He invited me to tour the estate; specifically, he mentioned, I would enjoy the gardens.
Perhaps the commentary had been derived from my admiration of his lyre. It is true, the beauty of the gardens appeases me in a way I do not expect; there is a fountain tinkling in the background, and around me the desert flowers are budding. Everything seems voraciously green from the backdrop of desert soil and rock. I admire stalks of desert lilies, green that fades into dusky purple. Some have white blossoms already spread.
I hate myself for the boyish hope that begins to blossom, similarly, within me when I hear the telltale clacking of hooves upon the stone walkway. The foliage obscures my line of sight and so I call, presumptuously, “Adonai?”
Even as his name leaves my mouth, I know it cannot be him. I had recognized the fine spray of blood that left his lips, and the bleached expression of his face. He had been in pain—and what kind of man am I, to wish he there, while in pain?
I clear my throat quickly, coming around the corner. I amend, “Excuse me. I thought you were someone else.” The disinterest is evident in my tone; and my eyes are unabashed in analyzing the stallion. I do not recognize him. I have never seen him here before. But what colors my expression, and my tone, is not confusion or curiosity; I dislike him on the principle that I had asked, Adonai and received, instead, this.
arricaded by books, Nico had spent the last several hours attempting to decipher a long forgotten text ladened with thick sheets of dust and grime. The foreign words had appeared to allude to some sort of potion that could potentially promote longevity, a long standing goal in the mule's hidden eyes. Or could potentially be a poison, but the scripture's near illegible scrawl made it that much more difficult, considering the words were already eerily close in nature. The young equine flipped his attention back and forth between the initial book and another which he hoped to use in transcribing such a problematic piece.
Huddled in his towering mess of books that walled him into such a tiny space of the large room, he managed to find an area of which he could dab his feathered pen into the viscous ink he had made. Absentmindedly, the mule would tap the inked end to his lip as he analyzed his work. Each success he found was met with a private joy and enthusiasm as his writing utensil danced across the loose pages he had scattered around him, another note added to his ever growing log.
He was knee deep in his studies, his outer body simply a placeholder while his mind wandered freely. Each paper he filled was pushed aside in wake of a new one, though in his haste he managed to tip his well over. Black oozed over several of the pages, absorbing Nico's efforts within seconds. The teak haired mare all but shrieked. He dropped all else in favor of picking up the well and setting it right, away from his notes.
He had to act quickly.
The mule shot to his hooves, his shrouded gaze now darting about his residence in search of anything to mop up his mistake.
So set on his task, he hadn't even noticed anyone approaching, no. No one ever came by, unless of course they found him by chance which was rather awkward indeed. Awkward, awkward...
Elena knows what it means when she fusses so softly at her, know those little mumbles and the way she nestles close to the gold of her skin. She had been up watching the night again, soaked in the patch of starlight that often pooled just outside of their cottage home. She breathes in deeply, sighs and shifts so slightly to press her lips to the soft place just behind her little, dark ear. At least she had not left this time, not followed the siren song of the night that so often called her to come and play in its shadows. There was nothing worse than waking up and finding her gone, to find only cold emptiness in the bed beside her, where her daughter had once been tucked against her.
Her mouth wanders so slowly down her little neck, nuzzling her lips along the crest of her neck and just beneath her blonde mane. She moves over her withers, that crescent moon sigil of gold. To her side, the curve of her hip, and her soft little belly, grooming all the loose dirt and damp earth from her dark skin. It is so easy to fuss over her while she sleeps, to tug loose the tangles in her downy soft mane while the morning creeps closer and closer through the windows of their home. Morning is nearly here, and se wishes she could push it back a little further. She settles her head back over her daughter, to draw her close.
Their cottage is modest, Elena has no necessity for extra, expensive things, Elliana has her own room, but she was perfectly content to sleep beside her mother while Nic slept soundly in her room. She preferred it, to sleep beside her every night, in her mother’s bed. Elena doesn't complain.
She must have been drifting in and out of sleep herself while she waited for her to wake, because a small jolt of surprise races through her when Elliana starts to stir. She blinks, noticing how much of the morning had crept in and she wishes it would stay back away for another moment, but it progresses just as it always does. “I will be home later, baby,” she says, kisses her head and tip toes out of her home.
When Elena had been small, she had not needed to imagine the places of story lands because she lived in the land where so many of her stories took place. And now she lives in another land that feels altogether mythical. Blue eyes blink away the sleep, the faltering edges of her lips smoothing out like a church dress on Sunday. Not a stitch out of place, not a wrinkle. She finds her in the court, it is still early, Elena wonders if she spent the night in Dusk, or traveled all through the night to get here. Either way, The Champion of Community greets her with a warm, spring morning smile.
“You must be Ruth. I’m Elena.”
those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves
Posted by: Hugo - 10-11-2020, 12:59 AM - Forum: Archives
- No Replies
"Tell me about despair, yours and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.”
It's strange, how some things become tied to others without you even noticing-- like when you look at your hammer and nails and think first of your uncle and then of your father and the long line of Arkwright men that went before you, or how the smell of your favorite drink, whiskey in your morning tea, feels like home in a way that you think it shouldn't. The world has a sort of brutal honesty to it that you've never quite managed to master, like the slim, polite smiles that your family is so fond of wearing-- at all costs.
The last of these brutal truths, these brutal ties: the sunrise country, its tall old trees, its white brick walls, and its field of poppies that make you think, before you have even realized you're thinking at all, of her. It's a flower that bloomed without warning through the cracks in your foundation where there is just enough soil to allow it to live.
You try not to think of it. You are not very successful.
You walk, with as much dignity as a winged horse can, from Terrastella to Delumine, because you have no other choice. Over your back, as you pass, you feel the cold shadows of other travelers temporarily blot out the sun. They are flying. You set your jaw and stare at the road ahead and try to remember that each step brings you closer to the first celebration you've willed yourself to attend in years, though you love them.
You love them a lot-- throngs of bodies, bonfires, booze; there is no part that does not make you feel more comfortable in your own skin than your day-to-day life can, there is no world in which you are not far happier in a crowd than you are alone. There is music as you pass through the city and flock with the rest of them to the meadow. Music loud enough that you can't hear yourself think.
Perfect.
Perfect too, the coincidence that drives you toward her, a passing chance in a sea of complete strangers. But here you are, in front of Mesnyi. Again. And you're smiling.
"Hello again," you say, and your smile touches the edge of each word. "I'm here to cause some trouble, I guess."
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
Danaë does not know much about fire-- why it is a hollow hunger without end, why the smoke spirals up instead of into the ground that is starving of want of carbon. Mortals are lingering around the flame, diving through the circles of them like frail hawks between clouds. Their thrilling avaravice for danger, and cleansing, and whatever else it is they are seeking, echoes in her ears like the wailing of the trees in the hurricane winds.
And so she watches them, each bloody eye as intent as the eyes of a predator pack of rabid beasts, dissolve into the base chaos of mortals. Each time one singes the tip of their nose in the flames she images growing a morning glory from the black wound on their lips. Every time a horse bellows in victory she imagines etching out the sorrows of the dead-wood into the canvas of their brittle, mortal cheeks. Every time a horse tosses copper, and metal, and whatever else they call magic, into the flame she imagines tossing them into the fire to burn.
She wonders who would leap with her then, when it’s not sorrowful wood burning but ignorant moral skin.
Without her sister she is too cautious to stray to close with her heart wandering between the laments of dead-wood and the wrath of a unicorn made. In the darkness, just beyond the kiss of fire-light, she paces with her head slung low like a dragon and her tail lashing tracks into the damp, dawn earth like a lion before a hyena pack. Beneath her hooves buried voles, and rabbits, and mice devoured by owls, tremble as roots bloom between the sockets of their long gone eyes. Her soul flickers between unicorn wrath, and dead-prey lament, and something darker and needier than both.
On the edge she waivers and with each blink she becomes something else. In the fire poppies, and jasmine, and nightshade bloom and burn in the knots of the dry wood. Her eyes gather the red-light, and blue-light, and amethyst-light, until her gaze is glowing with a hundred different shades of blood.
With that bloody kaleidoscope gaze, she finally steps closer to the fire. She plummets off the cliff-edge of kindness into the black yawning jaw of the earth in which dead things tremble with those vine stitching their broken, dirt-fat, jaws back together. Danaë walks closer, and closer, on her graveyard of things trying so desperately to feel the heat of that fire.
And when she stops, with her horn tossed violently into the smoke, her eyes blaze in the ways of unicorns and lions. Every inch of her body screams in the immortal challenge of a monster, and a mother, and a wolf with dead cubs in her womb, that for each inch of sorrow the wood had to suffer that a drop of mortal blood will be spilled in payment.
“We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light,"
Warset knows better than to stray too close to the silken tents of shed-stars with their gazes heavy with a religion they know far, far too little of. In their eyes, she knows, they’ll see the truth of it and some (she’s learned the hard way) will seek to drink that magic straight from her heart. And so she rolls past them like a stone, her eyes tucked behind the protective shroud of hair and curled forward wings.
She tries not to feel the gazes that linger on her like knives instead of looks (and she tries not to tremble in both fear and a vicious sort of hate).
Onward she rolls, head tucked low, until the meadow opens up into the song and the joyous laughter of children painting themselves in a mess of colors. Warset tries to see the stories in their art, she tries to turn color and shape into something more like a mockery of star song. All she can see is the brittle chaos of mortality and the joy of a thing she does not know how to be.
But she wants to learn, desperately so.
Her eyes unfold from the darkness of lock and wing. They shine far from the vicious gazes of stars shed instead of lost. Each of her steps is less hesitant than the last as she walks towards the music and colors caught in buckets instead of rainbows. And when she pauses before the stallion singing a ballad her head tilts like a leopard at a hare snarling instead of rearing.
Teach me, every inch of her lost heart cries in between the silence of sonnets.
Her hoof dips into a bucket of blood-red paint (of course she’s chosen the color of mortal blood). And when she draws lines of red across the grass she does not understand the strange look the children give her as she stumbles through this mockery of living, and healing, and looking up to see sun instead of cave-wall and winter frost.
Warset does not join the stallion in song even when her brittle and broken heart laments against the silence in her soul.
"and deep in our secret hearts, we worried that we were just a mistake"
