let our eyes show the 
fire in our hearts tonight

She looks at the unicorn that rears with groping hooves up to the stars which midnight holder, bright and twinkling. It’s flesh is pale, liquid moonlight and frangible as bone china. If she touched it, she is sure it would shatter into a thousand pieces, returning to little more than the blinking shards of stars above.

The horn, it points to one lone star. It gleams brighter than the others. It’s laughter is fire in the darkness. It’s lungs roar and it burns hot and wild. With glittering eyes it watches the star fire girl below; the girl who walks beneath that still, marble gaze of a sculpted unicorn.

Leto bears nothing as sharp as that unicorn’s horn. Her weapons are soft, their threat is nothing cold and solid, like a sharply worked blade. No, they are hot and wild. They are the gentle licking of a flame, soft blue edges, hot as a furnace. Her magic is the heat of stars falling and the keening of a world that watches its sky falling. 

She comes for the blood divines such terrible things. It whispers of ancient magic stirring, rising and evolving. Leto comes, with her breath held like a vice in her lungs. Oh, oh, time slips and slips and the blood she wears is singing.

| "speaks" | notes: loooooong

i'm full of poetry now.
rot and poetry.
rotten poetry.

"The Relic," said a mare as sleek as a greyhound, her eyes misted over, her voice a rasp of garbled tongue. "The Relic is here."

Caine slicked his wings back and stooped under the leaves of the bowing palm tree. Coconuts bigger than pitchers grew in groups of twos and threes, and dragged the young palm's slender trunk to the sand like a battleship's groaning anchors.

Spindly green fronds tugged at his braids as he parted the leaves and peered into the milky eyes of the seer. 

"The Relic, you say?" Where had he heard it before?

Tempus. The time god's name flowed like molasses into his mind, fetched from the catacombs of memory one letter at a time. But he remembered. Out of Novus' five pillared pantheon, only Tempus' name and story had survived past the lashing waves of the Terminus Sea.

The Relic of Time, an artifact of unimaginable power — though what exactly that power was had been conveniently left missing in the scroll's spidery script.

"So that's what all the excitement is about," he said, eying the crowd of bodies gathered like curious sandpipers at the end of the beach. If he squinted, he could just make out the sunlit silhouette of a black — horn? — attached to a mass of smooth stone, piercing the cloudless sky like an angel's sword.

Feeling no pressing inclination to join their ranks, Caine turned back to the silver haired mare. 

He knew her (not well, but he rarely knew anyone well) because he'd met her before. Deep in the twisting heart of Denocte, more than a year ago — back when he'd crept despondently through the four courts after a Prince who would never learn his name.

"Will you join the search?" came the seer's needly rasp, her long thin nose turned nosily towards him. He watched as a coconut shook violently on its stem, fell onto the sand with a dull thud, and rolled to a stop at his hooves. 

"No," he scoffed, and kicked the coconut back towards her. "That wasn't what I came here for." More specifically, a mad hunt for an ancient artifact wasn't the trivial yet distracting one night excursion he had flown to the island to seek. It was larger than that, hungrier, and Caine preferred to keep the number of blood-starved problems on his plate to one convincing betrayal, one furious revolutionary, and one tyrannical king. That was already trouble enough for a lesser man to gorge and die on. 

"I wouldn't know what to do with it either, if I do somehow find it in my possession." A thin smile glanced upon Caine's lips and obscured the ribbon of unease buried within his words. His ear twitched, the only indication that the very idea of wielding the Relic disconcerted him more than he chose to let on. 

The seer pursed her lips, amused. "Wise boy." He shrugged. Wise? One had to be old, in spirit if not in body, to lay claim to that. He merely didn't desire for things that weren't meant for him.

He glanced up, startled, when half of a coconut, its meat hanging in jagged chunks where the seer's stone had smashed instead of cut, was shoved a negligible distance away from his face. "Ah. Thanks." Hesitantly, silver eyes paling, Caine tilted it to his lips and drank the cloudy water like the seer did, though with distinctly less pleasure. It tasted marginally better than seawater.

The halved coconut reminded him a little of the moon. There had been a story the Denoctians liked to tell about the moon, and the man who'd fallen in love with it. The man had lived his life in anguish, driven mad by hope borne of impossibility. Caine hadn't seen the point of the tale, if there had been one at all. The impossible would never become possible. Wasn't that the whole purpose of dreaming? As the wielder — or manipulator — of those, Caine knew the solace to be found in dreams.

But he also knew how easy it was for torment to wear the face of a lover, honey-lipped and rosy-cheeked. Only to claw their eyes to clumps when you leaned in to kiss them, lips rotten, cheeks sunken. Shrieking with the sick delight of the nightmare-departed. "If they knew what was good for them, they would leave the Relic buried."

But he knew they didn't, so he knew they wouldn't.



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