the deadline has been extended!

☥

fear is the mind-killer.
fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

here through the night, a steady body and a beating heart to keep her calm and keep her at bay, Juniper is unsure exactly how she lost her King. For a moment frozen in time, the world closed in and opened up, her sky disappeared as mile upon mile of water grinned like a drowning, drunken fool. It tried to pull her close, to hug her tightly. Then he spoke, then he distracted the pale girl, the holy girl, from the terror of the sea and all its horrors. Such open spaces were awful. Unlike the heavens, water so great and terrible offers only death to Juniper.

Green eyes close and she prays to Vespera that all will be well. Words are inward, silent, for no living ears should hear them - not such an intimate request, such a moving speech cannot be for mortal ears and mortal mouths.

So the crushing of bodies and rushing of bodies to reach greedily for pearls as the heart of the island stops and opens, as its splendor and richness is born before their very eyes with the rising of the red dawn, awakens her and frightens her. One wrong move, and then they all would die. Toppling into mile upon mile of endless, depthless water. Pale spine contracts, phantom hands running along sparrow-boned ribs, shivering even though there is the pressing of bodies, the swelling of excitement tangible on the air.

Juniper is almost terrified. Then, she sees a spotting of black along the beach. He does not go swarming like worker bees into the island, eager to see what the gods have given their creations. Instead, judgmental black eyes scan the sands as though they hold the answer to the world.

And how Caine is dissatisfied with what he finds.

Curious and in need of distraction, kohl-rimmed eyes follow curving muscles and rolling shoulders. They arc along black wings, and before she knows it, Juniper has walked up to his shadow. Her own pale pinions ruffle and shiver, shaking off condensation sitting too long on fine, down feathers. "Your frown is too big for your face, I'm afraid it might fall off. And what shame that would be," Juniper chirrups, brows pulling together as teeth worry lower lip. "Do you always look so closed?" For her people are not closed, they are open and bright and ready. In that moment, Juniper misses her sisters and cousins and mothers most of all - not these strange birds that sing off-kilter, not the pearls from flowers and berries and vines that melt into the silencing of a strange heart. None of this matters, none save the frown that is too big and the man that is wholly dark and brooding.

my roots run deep into the hollow

Antiope had not waited at the bridge, before that endless wall of ivy. She had returned to Denocte, to the cobblestone, fire lit streets, despite the yearning of the lioness in her bones. She had returned to whatever life she had here, if one could call it such.

She had, until—

Until the first equine came back, telling to all who would listen that the wall had gone and that there was a strange, mystical, magical land beyond it. This, above all things, is what had drawn Antiope back to that bridge. The bridge that stretched for miles into the sea that shifted and changed with the waves.

So she crossed it again, across each strangely see-through pass and over each dip and rise, even where it looked like the ocean would rise up and claim it. And when she reached that place where the bridge stopped and a wall of vines had once stretched endlessly in all directions, she kept going.

On the outside the island appeared the same as any other she had seen. Sand that swept into the ocean and grass that spread beneath trees that stretched into the sky. But upon closer inspection, Antiope saw the abnormalities within. The birds that did not look quite like birds, fruits that looked exotic but dangerous, plants too bright and too knowing.

Oh, how she could get lost in this place that looked like a world but held a lioness within.

"Speaking."

How long had Eulalie stood there with her son at her side, with the others who had traveled from Delumine, waiting and watching the wall of ivy? How many had gone up into the sky to search and peered down into the sea, to try and find the end? There had been none. And then the sound had started, and at first she had mistaken it for her own heart, uncertain and thrumming.

But it had been the berries, all of them, all across the vines. Like a hundred, a thousand, a million hearts. It had grown to a crescendo, louder and louder until Eulalie hadn’t been able to hear even her own thoughts. Was her heart beating alongside them?

Then they had fallen open, dropping pearls like seeds across the bridge, into the ocean. The quiet was almost worse than the incessant sound, and then when the first equine pointed out the place where the ivy started to wilt. They had gathered and waited and watched, seeing the world beyond expose itself moment by moment. She could not hide her wonder. What would they find when they finally stepped beyond?

Grey went in the night, for how little he slept and how long he wandered. He went in the night, when the world was quiet and asleep and he was so wide, wide awake with the shifting shadows inside him that would not let him rest.

He walked the long, lonely, strange path to the island everyone was talking about and paused when the beasts in the ocean stirred the surface. Their shadows were hidden in the dark midnight sea, but their bodies crested the water and their fins, and above all that, perhaps, their hunger. Their want. He could feel it. He could feel them wanting his flesh and his blood.

For awhile he stood there, watching, with the moon looking down with her bright silver eye. Did she judge him, for the thoughts that weighed down inside his head? At last, Grey turned away from the promise swimming just below the surface and toward the island’s silhouette in the distance.

And then he enters a land that is too otherworldly, with sand that glows in the moonlight and waves that seem to whisper to him and creatures that look out at him from the shadows as if they might know what is in his heart, with eyes too keen. Grey has tested the magic of this world once before, and he is not ready to do it again, not here in the dark with blackness in his veins.

The unicorn turns and walks away, back across the bridge, past the monsters who call to him from the deep, to the land he is familiar with. And yet the island haunts him, in his dreams and in his thoughts. Something, oh something is not right about it.

“Speaking.”