The music hammers away like a knife at my temples. Each note is another stab, each crescendo a knife flaying me open.
I wonder how they — how any of them — can stand it. Are they not screaming inside? Do they not care that they cannot hear their own thoughts above the noise?
Is it only me?
The music slips away like the screams of the dying when Isolt steps into the overgrown yard. Peace, she would call it, if she had to call it anything — the death of things had always been most peaceful to her.
And now as the silence dips deeper, and the shadows between the lights grow longer, and the vines crisscrossing the ground begin to shiver — Isolt sighs with contentment. The shivers that have been running down her spine since the moment her hooves touched sand in place of snow come more slowly now, less violently. She quivers as finely as sand in an hourglass that has just been flipped back over, soothing the hunger (if only for a minute. Just like the hourglass, the sand is running out, the calm can only last so long.)
The vines are still creeping slowly away from her when she spots the other horse.
It is her blood-colored cloak that catches Isolt’s eye first, a stark familiarity standing pressed between the leaves and the foliage. It is her colors of death, and destruction, and all things in between that makes her turn her head like a wolf looking for the moon.
But it is something else entirely, something she has no words for, that has her creeping slowly forward. Her tail blade drags lines through the grass and vines, cutting open the belly of the courtyard.
And all it takes is one look from the mare’s amber eyes for her to start wondering at all the ways she might pull the sunlight from them.
The wondering gnawing at her belly brings her up to the edge of the booth, until leaves turn black and crumble onto the velvet cloth and rot creeps further and further along it. The candles seem to flicker when she draws closer, and closer, and closer, and she does not pretend it is the wind that makes the flames shiver so close to their wicks. Wonder makes her eyes burn brightly as rubies, when she drags her gaze from one candle, to the next, and the next, and the next — and then finally to Hagar’s face.
Something is whispering in her bones, begging her to turn each drop of her blood to something profane, something monstrous, something made to tear the life from hearts. But her hourglass is nearly full, and for the barest of moments —
Isolt feels almost like a unicorn instead of a beast.
Her voice is whisper-thin, the rasp of winter frost coloring weak lungs black and brittle. And she can almost pretend the coiled thing lying in wait inside of her chest is sleeping instead of only resting when she says, “hello.”
In the darkness behind the table, where the ivy grows thick and tangled, something blinks. Isolt blinks back.
And all the while the sand in the hourglass is draining.
Saphira had gone north, away from the city and the shore, hoping - what was she hoping for? To be alone? To starve? She carried only a few small loaves of stale bread. They wouldn’t make the trip back to the court, and they certainly wouldn’t carry her through however many days at market it took for her to earn her next couple of meals. Winter wore her thin; even through her curling coat you could see it. Bony hips, protruding ribs. She wasn’t starving, mostly.
As she crested a low hill, a field of equines and lumps of snow met her. She curled her lip and surveyed: they looked happy. Merry, even. Lights shone around them for as far as the eye could see, and all over there were couples piling snow into - animals? She could practically feel their giggles. Gross.
The singular thought which kept her from turning around was this: Maybe there’s free food.
So, Saphira, the salt-crusted, hungry mare, crunched through the snow with her least-threatening scowl (she was never-not scowling, perhaps even incapable of it), and as she looked about for some sign of a banquet table, she was hit with a snowball.
A young stallion cantered up to her, laughing heartily. Saphira bared her teeth. He turned tail immediately. Her gaze traveled down to the pile of snow at her feet, the residual cold seeping into her skin. In moments, the snow had formed itself into a small fish. Saphira stopped scowling, if just for a moment.
Darkness closes in on the shadow. Across the plains he runs, close to the river, he hears it like his own heart thrumming in his ears. Can’t stray too far from her, close, close, stay close. He nears its shoreline and shies away, charging at the frost-hardened soil by sheer force of will along. A wound throbs somewhere, blood long since congealed and dry. Skin sewing itself back together. Hunger sowing itself in him. More blood, different blood, thrums through a heart somewhere else. He can hear it. Feel it, like the river, almost, like his own heart. No, he says, no, no, no. This isn’t right. For how long have I been a monster? For how long must I continue to be one in the eyes of my countrymen, my own cousin? And this - now I will never escape it. I will be a monster to everyone. He yearns to stop it somehow, to starve himself, but dying has been off the table for much too long now and he can only press forward, forward, and back to the water, the shoreline, and - he trips - into the water.
No. No. Don't. Let me live. Live. Stay the same, as I was, not any different - Something changes. Longer limbs, sharper fangs. The black mare is laughing somewhere, he can almost hear it. He can hear it. He wants to scream. But he is drowning - thinks he is - splashing frantically in the shallow river’s edge, water up to his knees only. He feels it consuming him. Let me out, he cries, silently, let me out.
I don’t want to be a monster anymore.
@Leto ”in blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown,“
I call my ankles by your name. When my mother dipped me in the river, she was introducing us.
Every emotion has a taste.
Rage is cinnamon whiskey or the tart blood that rushes out through clenched teeth over broken gums.
Sadness is: burning mesquite heavy on the tongue, and the humid air by the sea (where our funerals were held).
Love is: sweat gathering at the edge of the lips, subtle salt, and gingerbread from wintertime.
Hatred is: the hardest to describe, like too-strong salt, like the sea, gritty between teeth and skin. Like iron. Like copper.
(Do not ask me why love and hate are both different forms of the same thing).
Those are not all emotions. There is no flavour for joy; no taste of excitement; no sweetness to envy; no bitterness to regret. Every other emotion becomes not a taste but a colour: the blended shades of gray that exist just after the sun has set, and the sunset has bled from the sky all beauty.
Tonight, however, I taste nothing. Solterra is too arid. Winter keeps the air cool enough that I do not sweat. I am clean, and smell more of linen than anything remarkable, than leather or steel. It was not as difficult as I would have expected, to escort Adonai from the Ieshan estate to the border of Solterra’s crown city. Just outside the city gates, Damascus awaited.
When we arrived, the dragon dropped back onto his haunches, and held out two massive hands. The effect of crawling into them would forever unnerve me; although through our bond, I felt no resentment. He simply opened them to allow us passage; and then those claws descended with the utmost care, until Adonai and I were both cupped between them. The world narrowed; within that monstrous grasp, there was little space to be anything except for lovers.
Our limbs were one; where something of his ended, something of mine began. Wings and elbows and knees knocking; my horns soft tap, tap, tapping into his. I knew I ought to have said something charming; later I would regret my silence. But then Damascus coiled his quadruple wings and sprung from the earth; the wind rushed into my ears. With Adonai’s hair whipping wildly into my face, I closed my eyes: but through my Bond, I saw all that Damascus saw.
The desert like a scar upon the earth; the rugged city of Solterra growing small; the dunes that became a sea and then, eventually, bled into the water of the true ocean. I felt the pitch of the wings. Damascus’s great breathing; the way we began to descend.
Yes, I knew. Speak to him. Say something to that wide-eyed wonderment. Turn your face. Kiss his cheek. Anything. Anything but rigid, militant silence.
Damascus lands much the same way he had ascended; with a great coiling of muscle he absorbs the impact in his hind legs and balances out with his tail. The dragon is forced to take several long, vaulting steps on his hind legs before balancing out with his wings. Then, with care remarkable for such a tremendous beast, he settles his hands upon the earth and parts them.
I step out with care. At last, I turn to Adonai and offer him a shoulder to balance on as he descends. We had timed it perfectly. The sun is setting, and the sky over the sea is the colour of a slit throat.
I smile when I see his expression; but the gesture is one that does not resound within my being, that does not meet with the veins of my heart. Externally, I know, it is perfect. Had I not told Ruth, his sister, the trick? Practice, I had said, in a mirror.
Practice, I think. Practice, until you believe it yourself. My smile is bright, and mischievous, and it reaches my eyes.
(I wish I could tell him that everything I had ever hated came from the sea; I wish I could tell him that even the taste of it in the air reminds me of all that had ever gone wrong in my life. Looking out at it, I can only imagine a blood-red stallion running just at the edge of the surf, away, always away. Looking out at it, I can only reminiscence soldiers standing shoulder-to-shoulder as they faced the heaving monstrosities that slunk from the depths, as amorphous as water itself, beasts so terrible that even remembering them casts shades upon my soul. I wish I could tell him that I had seen more men than I could count gutted in the waves; and that the water, then, frothed and turned pink. I wish I could tell him I had once fallen from cliffs like those in Terrastella, and the fall should have killed me; but instead the only man I would ever love (who was not a man at all) had pulled me half-dead from the water, and brought me back to life. That was the only time his lips had ever touched me--)
My voice is small and boyish and nearly sad when I ask, “Do you like it?”
What I do not say, but dances in the depth behind my eyes: It explains all I am that I never can.
Angry. Restless. Roaring.
The waves are rhythmic; the ocean is much calmer here than Oresziah. I step forward with him, until we are ankle-deep in the still-warm sea. It does not matter that it is winter.
Quiet. Solemn. Aching.
I had never known a sea to be warm, before this. The sun winks lazily off on the far horizon. Damascus lays down on the sand behind us and exhales a cloud of red vapour; it is harmless, and dancing, and meets the waves only to dissipate.
Unpredictable. Soothing. Apathetic.
I cannot tear my eyes from the sea that I do not recognise. But, somehow, at last I look at Adonai. It is from beneath my lashes; shy and dark.
I am dying, too, I want to tell him. There are different kinds of dying. Sometimes, the dying thing is being strangled by something inside. Sometimes, the dying thing isn’t the body. Sometimes it’s the soul.
I don’t have the courage. It wouldn’t matter, anyways.
The ocean is beautiful; he wouldn’t believe me, that it could be anything but. I smile, a charismatic gesture, a grand gesture. “Is it what you expected?” I ask.
If this is repentance, it tastes like sun-baked sand. If this is repentance, it tastes like tears held back.
YOU WHISPER / THEN HOLDING YOUR BREATH, place this cup on yesterday's saucer / without the slightest clink.❃
It is nearly spring.
Even if there were no calendars in Delumine (and there are), Septimus could tell by the character of the forest. Already there is a faint green unfolding of buds on the very edge of the skeleton-branches of trees, the return of what they shed the previous fall; already the heads of small flowers and bits of grass were beginning to poke through a carpet of warm brown ground that was only recently covered by the last snowstorm of the season, which had kept Septimus indoors for longer than he would like to admit. He had already resigned himself to the fact that he would not finish his mapmaking or his species collection before the season was out. (But, then, when did he ever finish it entirely anyways?) He would work on it again next year, he supposed- unless something finally pulled him away from this land, which had already held his attention for a nearly unimaginable two years, in spite of his present mortality.
(He still feels like he has accomplished little, and he wonders if this constant pressure – bisected, as it is, by time - is how mortals always feel.)
He thinks of his home more often than usual, lately. He knows that it is more often than usual because this is the first time in a long time - ever - that he has ever thought about time. Normally, it passes by him thoughtlessly, or he lets it pass unthinkingly. The change of seasons is a breath, or a blink; years are the same, and centuries, even millennia, are barely anything more. He never thought about home, for the first unspeakable, remarkable amount of time that he was gone. Eventually, those thoughts began to creep in, but, even then, they were like birds flying south for the winter. He knew that they were there, and that they would come, but they were so expected and fleeting that he barely noticed them.
He steps out, with a crunch of dry branches that sends a cardinal flittering out of a nearby evergreen, and into a clearing. There are not many in the Viride, even this time of year; the branches are so dense that, even when he flies above the great forest, he can barely make out the ground below. By now, Septimus has walked most of it. When he arrived in Delumine, it was a labyrinthian expanse, though no more labyrinthian than anything he had seen before – and now, having mapped it, it seems almost familiar, almost magicless. He wonders if this is how mortals feel all the time, when they talk about the dangers of the mundane. He used to think them nonexistent, for creatures like him.
A cardinal skips down a branch ahead of him, red feathers fluffed out – and Septimus has seen a hundred thousand cardinals or more, by now, but he still stops to appreciate the way that the mid-morning light sifts through its feathers, curls around it like the gleam of a halo. He’d draw it, if he had a moment, but the sound of his hooves and the shifting of leather is enough to send the bird flying off, a rapidly-disappearing spot of color against the darkness of the woods, and-
And sometimes he has this strange feeling, lately, that makes him innately aware that each passing moment can’t be recaptured or experienced again. He sighs, sealing his satchel again, and adjusts his glasses on his muzzle; it’s probably not worth considering. He isn’t mortal. He’s merely entertaining mortality, and besides-
His mother always used to say that it was like a scar. Once you were touched by it, you could never go back to the way that you were before, and Septimus would still like to return to himself properly, once all of this is over.
@Torielle|| excited to thread w/ you <3 || billy collins, "days" Speech
There is another unicorn staring at me in the mirrors. She is white as sun-bleached bones, moonlight spun into a body. Her horn is as straight as mine is crooked, solid as mine is hollow, soft as mine is sharp.
She is as lovely as I am terrible.
And I want to kill her for it.
Isolt taps her horn against the crystal mirror just to watch it break. A fracture spiderwebs across its surface in arcane patterns, cracking the image of the unicorn looking mournfully out from it. As the sound of shattering glass fills the air, Isolt wonders if she feels dead yet.
Another tap against the glass with her horn, and the fractures spread further. Another, and the unicorn trapped in the star-skeleton starts to cry. Her tears are quicksilver bright, falling in rivulets down her cheeks. And in all the places where the cuts spread across her skin, she bleeds silver blood. It leaks out from the mirror, coating her horn in unicorn blood.
A final tap and the crystal shatters into a thousand thousand pieces, and that other unicorn shatters with it. Isolt laughs, and her laughter twines like music through the star’s and the unicorn’s deaths. Her perfect teeth, her moonlit horn, her unscarred, unbloodied, unbroken skin — all of it lies now as dust at her feet.
It has always been the most beautiful things that made her feel all the more monstrous.
She turns away from the broken mirror, her eyes burning to see all the other star-skeletons staring back at her with watching eyes. There, a fox, with daisies blooming and wilting in his empty eyes. And here a lion, with rotten teeth dropping like tears at his feet. A wolf, a fairy, a wendigo, a shadow — all of them watching her. A snarl rises in her throat, rattling like thunder in her lungs and oh, how her flower-printed bones leap at the thrill of it.
There are no more unicorns watching her now.
Her walk turns to a trot, then a run, then a gallop in which she stretches out long and low and loses herself in the furious beat of her hooves cracking the crystal ground with every step. She turns into madness streaking through the graveyard of stars, a blur of color tearing apart a colorless island. Even when it seems she has been running forever, when it becomes a wonder she has not run into the ocean, still the echo of madness burning in her veins urges her on. She runs until her lungs tremble and wilt, and her heart flutters like a dying thing taking its last breath.
It is the endlessness of it that makes her stop, with the sound of her blood singing rising above the crystal shattering beneath her hooves. And when she turns to the next mirror that rises tall and pale before her, she does not see the other horse standing in front of it, not at first.
She sees only the eyes of the unicorn staring out at her, with skin as red as blood.
And it steals every thought, carves away every bit of hunger and loneliness from her heart.
n motion, it is like watching sand slipping through your fingers - you want so badly to stop it, to hold onto it, to hold onto him, and yet it flows by so freely, so easily despite your wishes and desires. The blue rivals the stars, the gold is metallic matrimony of both beauty and grace. Each heartbeat if yours is another he swallows, another he lets go, lets pass him by even as he dances from your sight.
Alecto doesn't mind the smoke that ensnares the markets, swirling overhead every evening when the patrons awake, coming to the street to fill their bellies as much as their souls. And he hungers like they do, like a dog salivating over a steak just out of reach. But he is not a dog left to be trampled underfoot, kicked about the world and starved.
The man could be many, many things, and a dog would never be one of them.
Now, aureate eyes dance over the many bodies as his feet dance upon the cobbled streets, he listens to the singing of the stones, to the swaying of the bodies. All his wares are stashed in the room he rents, paid up for the season with extra for charms and protections to keep all that he has left safe.
Tonight, he is naked among them, his jewels and crowns, his capes and gowns all exempt from his skin. He shivers with the chill, a breeze from the Armas embracing him as it would a lover. When the smoke hits his nose again, when the scent of pine and fresh-cut cedar mingle with it, when a girl beckons him near with her too-bright purple eyes and fragile faerie wings barely set aflutter behind her, he can do naught but answer. One merchant to another, one living, breathing beast to another.
She smiles prettily when he approaches her table of carved wood, a boy still whittling another piece (of which there is a collection set off to the side) nestled in a blanket. They must have come early enough to find a central stall.
His smile rivals the cosmos, his hungry heart left a black hole.
"Hello little dreamer," he purrs into her stall.
✦
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you
This guide will walk you through two of the most common myBB glitches- "authorization mismatch" when logging in and "invalid email address" when registering. These are known glitches with the forum software that are unfortunately beyond our control. However, not all is lost! Follow the instructions below and it should help you get past the issue.
Try any of the following:
Switch devices and/or internet browsers temporarily (If trying to register, try doing this just to register your account, then log into your preferred device and stay logged in)
Clear internet browser cookies/cache (Click here for a guide on how to do this on any browser)
Restart your internet browser or device
Try switching to the default myBB theme, then attempt to login/register while on that theme. (Visual aid here)
If none of the above work, wait for a period of time and try again. Sometimes the issue will essentially resolve itself and let you login/register as normal.
If you're trying to register a new account and the options listed above still don't work after several tries, please contact a staff member. Make sure to provide as many screenshots of the issue as you can. We can help register your account for you if all else fails.
Overall, best practice is to check off "Remember me" when logging in from all devices so that you stay logged in. This will likely prevent the login glitch from repeatedly happening.
This guide will walk you through two of the most common myBB glitches- "authorization mismatch" when logging in and "invalid email address" when registering. These are known glitches with the forum software that are unfortunately beyond our control. However, not all is lost! Follow the instructions below and it should help you get past the issue.
Try any of the following:
Switch devices and/or internet browsers temporarily (If trying to register, try doing this just to register your account, then log into your preferred device and stay logged in)
Clear internet browser cookies/cache (Click here for a guide on how to do this on any browser)
Restart your internet browser or device
Try switching to the default myBB theme, then attempt to login/register while on that theme. (Visual aid here)
If none of the above work, wait for a period of time and try again. Sometimes the issue will essentially resolve itself and let you login/register as normal.
If you're trying to register a new account and the options listed above still don't work after several tries, please contact a staff member. Make sure to provide as many screenshots of the issue as you can. We can help register your account for you if all else fails.
Overall, best practice is to check off "Remember me" when logging in from all devices so that you stay logged in. This will likely prevent the login glitch from repeatedly happening.
The dead are sleeping. It is a restless sleep, one I know well. They toss and turn, grumble and groan, trembling within the stone and roots encasing them. Dreams of running and breathing reverberates in their empty skulls, visions of grass and sky flickering in their empty eye sockets.
The dead are sleeping, but their dreams are mine.
T he darkness feels colder than it should. It curls like a finger down her spine, breathing down the back of her neck, hanging like a funeral shroud down her sides. It feels hungry, in the way that winter is always hungry, in the way a graveyard that has been abandoned is always hungry.
All this space —
All this room for new gravestones —
Isolt wonders how long it would take to fill it all. How many dead she would have to wake, just to lead them here to their stagnant graves. Already she is imagining how they would look — she blinks and she can see them there, lined up neatly on either side of the narrow path she walks now, bodies curled into a bow as she passes. The thought carves a smile through her cheeks, and it is a wonder that her teeth still flash brightly in the darkness.
Like bones left out beneath the moonlight.
She drags her tail blade along the cavern floor behind her, tracing arcane patterns even she does not recognize through the dust. The sound it makes, bone against stone, is like wailing; it swells up, up, up to fill the caverns, twists through the chambers of her heart like wind whistling through the caves. It is the only part of her that is singing, or dancing, whispering to the dead in nightmares and terrors, filling their sleep with all the violence of a hundred bloody deaths.
The stone is cool and damp against her skin, when she turns and traces her muzzle down the walls. When she licks her lips it tastes like copper and dust and mold. She imagines it to be blood soaking the walls, and she is thankful there is not enough light to ruin the illusion. But ahead of her a light is flickering into existence, flames lapping at the darkened walls.
Isolt presses on hungrily, everything in her straining for the darkness, begging to bring whatever life clings to the fire down to its knees, to submission. Her tail flicks faster along the cavern floor, wails turning to howls as her walk turns to a dance.
The corridor suddenly opens into a rounded room, a single torch burning defiantly in its bracket on the wall. Its light does not fall against faces, or skin, or eyes —
but the room is not empty, not truly. The walls live and breathe with a thousand scriptures and ancient arts scrawled across it, alive and dancing in the flickering firelight. And where the caves she had passed through were only dark and twilight-grey, the room she stands in now is bursting with colors.
There is a scene unfolding on the walls, a group of men armed with spears chasing after a dark shadow. She follows it around the room, as they sprint through forests and deserts and lakes in pursuit of the beast. A story is printed in an ancient, forgotten language above each scene.
But she does not care what the words mean, or the purpose of the picture story.
No, when Isolt steps forward and drags her nose down a line of red painted over one of the warrior’s throats, she only wonders what happened to the mens’ bones, after the beast was finished picking its teeth with them.
