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+----- Thread: [P] weapons don't weep (/showthread.php?tid=2613)
weapons don't weep - Rhoswen - 07-12-2018
Rhoswen ►
Afore the great circle, Rhoswen stood drenched in silence and, strangely, it suited her. For a creature so incandescent this isolation, cool and bleached, sat well behind her avian silhouette, for against it she burned like a pyre. The autumn wind whipped her hair into a cardinal cyclone worthy of Medusa's name and her eyes, carved from dragonsmoke, strangled the mountain as slowly they etched higher. To the peak her gaze climbed, battling high winds and thin air, and a thought began to form like smoke in her mind. Were the Gods watching her now? Her heart did not flinch at the notion, if anything it steeled itself an inch more as her chin lifted against the breeze as if to match their divinity with a scarlet punch: fuck you, Calligo. I hope you're listening. She had come to the summit later than most. The regime's meeting had adjourned several days ago, and many had already scuttled back to their nests of gold, red, purple or blue; but Rhoswen had been patient -- unusually so. She had not wanted to wait in the clamour, breathing in their panic; nor had she felt inclined to mingle among the masses that had gathered around the stage Tempus had set. So instead she had dwelled in Dawn, alone and alive, postponing her leave from Delumine until the very last moment. She was never going back.
So much had changed in her bloodred world. She was a mother, a woman, a traitor, a lover, a fighter: what skin would she adorn next? Where would it end? She knew where she hoped it would. She knew it like the back of her hand, for all the times she had wandered it in her dreams. Its scents, its sounds - they haunted her like ghostships passing her by, drifting further away with every aching moment. Solterra. Did it miss her too? Did it turn skyward to honour her absence, staring into the eyes of a sun stood sentinel for every day she did not pace its halls. At such a thought, she smiled: it was a rare, splitting thing to see Rhoswen smile these days; it cracked her marble skull in two to match the chasm in her heart. Of course the desert did not miss her; what was she but another body to litter its ancient sands? Rhos did not shrink from its magnitude, nor its brutality: she was born from the fire, and the fire was born in she. Spring and summer were behind her now, committed to the very darkest recesses of her mind where she refused to venture. There was no uncertainty - no fear of unbelonging left to be found. What was left then? What was the sister of Thieves made of now? She'll tell you if you come a little closer.
@Seraphina
So much had changed in her bloodred world. She was a mother, a woman, a traitor, a lover, a fighter: what skin would she adorn next? Where would it end? She knew where she hoped it would. She knew it like the back of her hand, for all the times she had wandered it in her dreams. Its scents, its sounds - they haunted her like ghostships passing her by, drifting further away with every aching moment. Solterra. Did it miss her too? Did it turn skyward to honour her absence, staring into the eyes of a sun stood sentinel for every day she did not pace its halls. At such a thought, she smiled: it was a rare, splitting thing to see Rhoswen smile these days; it cracked her marble skull in two to match the chasm in her heart. Of course the desert did not miss her; what was she but another body to litter its ancient sands? Rhos did not shrink from its magnitude, nor its brutality: she was born from the fire, and the fire was born in she. Spring and summer were behind her now, committed to the very darkest recesses of her mind where she refused to venture. There was no uncertainty - no fear of unbelonging left to be found. What was left then? What was the sister of Thieves made of now? She'll tell you if you come a little closer.
Fire.
@
RE: weapons don't weep - Seraphina - 07-18-2018
☼ s e r a p h i n a ☼
holy water cannot help you now
see I've come to burn your kingdom down
Her lips are a curl of charcoal, dried lava left cracked and bloody after a volcanic eruption; she’s licked them enough to dry. They curve into a quiet snarl as she prowls back and forth across the dry, clear ground of the summit, steps so heavy – practically thunderous – that they leave deep gouges in the dusty earth as she drags them away. Her braids were falling out in tatters, ghost-white tendrils free-flying around her skull; haloed by the sunlight, they look like serpents, curved back and ready to strike. She is tired, she was so tired, she is always so tired. But she is not passive, defeated tired – she is not on her knees. She is outraged, she was betrayed, she was heartbroken, but she was not quiet.
She is needy and burning and filled with a hunger enough to swallow the entire world.
She has never been ambitious, save for when she took the crown. She has never been wanting, either, but for then. Want became an ugly thing too early to embrace it, but she never realized the gaping hole that it left behind until she stood too close to the edge and careened into it. She didn’t realize what want really felt like until she was trapped beneath heaps of stone and silt by a god that she had been fool enough to trust and she had wanted - she had wanted to rip and blaze and bite, to snap back at the hands that had claimed that they were feeding her.
(But the entire time, they were only ever eating her alive.)
And that was how she found the girl of sun and stars – burning. Her bird-boned frame and pale scarlet locks remind her of another fire, and another betrayal, and she wonders if she looks any less the banshee – the aftermath of tragedy, of disaster - than she did when they last met in the canyons. There is no little girl between them now, no mistrust to cloud the cool mountain air, and, as her eyes come to a rest on the other, older woman’s, the violent curve of her lips twists into something comfortably neutral, in spite of the latent flame eating its way out of her once-cold stare. She paces towards her, each long stride closing the gap between them until there is little space at all, until she can get a good look at her.
Rhoswen is older now, she thinks. She regards her in silence for what feels like a long moment, considering the right words to say, and she finally settles on a simple greeting. She has questions. She has time for them, too, divine-come-down-from-the-heavens or no.
“…Rhoswen,” comes her voice, still hoarse with ash and dust.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Rhoswen
notes | <3
holy water cannot help you now
see I've come to burn your kingdom down
Her lips are a curl of charcoal, dried lava left cracked and bloody after a volcanic eruption; she’s licked them enough to dry. They curve into a quiet snarl as she prowls back and forth across the dry, clear ground of the summit, steps so heavy – practically thunderous – that they leave deep gouges in the dusty earth as she drags them away. Her braids were falling out in tatters, ghost-white tendrils free-flying around her skull; haloed by the sunlight, they look like serpents, curved back and ready to strike. She is tired, she was so tired, she is always so tired. But she is not passive, defeated tired – she is not on her knees. She is outraged, she was betrayed, she was heartbroken, but she was not quiet.
She is needy and burning and filled with a hunger enough to swallow the entire world.
She has never been ambitious, save for when she took the crown. She has never been wanting, either, but for then. Want became an ugly thing too early to embrace it, but she never realized the gaping hole that it left behind until she stood too close to the edge and careened into it. She didn’t realize what want really felt like until she was trapped beneath heaps of stone and silt by a god that she had been fool enough to trust and she had wanted - she had wanted to rip and blaze and bite, to snap back at the hands that had claimed that they were feeding her.
(But the entire time, they were only ever eating her alive.)
And that was how she found the girl of sun and stars – burning. Her bird-boned frame and pale scarlet locks remind her of another fire, and another betrayal, and she wonders if she looks any less the banshee – the aftermath of tragedy, of disaster - than she did when they last met in the canyons. There is no little girl between them now, no mistrust to cloud the cool mountain air, and, as her eyes come to a rest on the other, older woman’s, the violent curve of her lips twists into something comfortably neutral, in spite of the latent flame eating its way out of her once-cold stare. She paces towards her, each long stride closing the gap between them until there is little space at all, until she can get a good look at her.
Rhoswen is older now, she thinks. She regards her in silence for what feels like a long moment, considering the right words to say, and she finally settles on a simple greeting. She has questions. She has time for them, too, divine-come-down-from-the-heavens or no.
“…Rhoswen,” comes her voice, still hoarse with ash and dust.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
tags | @Rhoswen
notes | <3
RE: weapons don't weep - Rhoswen - 07-22-2018
Rhoswen ►
It was not dark when Seraphina found her, but neither was it bright. It was instead an eerie half-light that swallowed both women whole, hungry and barren of any remorse as it ran a violent fragmentary tongue over flesh and sinew and bone. An eastern witching hour, that mirrored the very otherworldly events of the recent past. It seemed almost too incidental that the desert queen should appear so soon, without even searching for her of her own accord. Rhoswen shuddered internally at the thought of a higher power watching over them even now - moving their bodies like pieces of a chess board, every act bringing them closer to a zenith they were unable to name. For Seraphina was the very woman she had endured this pilgrimage for: not Solis, not her daughter or brother. Just a child-queen who bore the weight of the world with more grace and fortitude than any creature she'd ever seen. Of all the people Rhoswen had met, Seraphina had always rung the most true, a bell to toll through the night. What did it take to lose yourself to a regime, only to ascend it's tyranny high enough to touch the sky? To say the red woman admired Solterra's sovereign was an understatement of the most painstaking kind.
She owed her the life of her first born child. A chance of freedom, perhaps even redemption. Clarity had come on the one-hundred-and-eighty-second day of her absence, and it pooled like fallen water at her feet, wide enough to peer down at her reflection and see what she had been missing for so long. We are all guilty of mistakes, but it is what you make of that mistake which defines you. Rhoswen knew, at last, what had to be done. There was no turning back now.
Her name sounded alien in Seraphina's voice: abstract and nebulous, but not entirely wrong. Her ashen eyes found their mark on the silver mare's skin, moving briskly over her frame in search of that hard mismatched gaze, wondering if it had changed in all the seasons that had passed. It is impossible for any living being to escape the hands of change, for time is a ruthless beast - unforgiving and uncaring of those it warps, but that is not to say that it's victims are incapable of concealing this very modification. And when Rhoswen, at last, caught those desertborn eyes, she was surprised by what she saw. As surely as the rising sun, Seraphina's hard hailstone wall stood firm, but as they stood there in the moment between sound and it's absence, Rhoswen captured something else behind that mile-high glacier: a window into the deeper caverns of the sovereign's being. Was it anger? Was it frustration? Despair? Perhaps all of those things combined, or indeed none of them at all. Rhoswen could not, would not, say.
"Seraphina." Her voice is gasoline to set fire to the dusk that threatens all around; she would burn the night for this woman, and the moon for good measure. "To ask if you are okay is a foolish question, but I am going to ask you anyway." The pale unkempt braids, the sheen of perspiration on her shoulders, that nameless look in her eyes... when would Sera's troubles end?
She owed her the life of her first born child. A chance of freedom, perhaps even redemption. Clarity had come on the one-hundred-and-eighty-second day of her absence, and it pooled like fallen water at her feet, wide enough to peer down at her reflection and see what she had been missing for so long. We are all guilty of mistakes, but it is what you make of that mistake which defines you. Rhoswen knew, at last, what had to be done. There was no turning back now.
Her name sounded alien in Seraphina's voice: abstract and nebulous, but not entirely wrong. Her ashen eyes found their mark on the silver mare's skin, moving briskly over her frame in search of that hard mismatched gaze, wondering if it had changed in all the seasons that had passed. It is impossible for any living being to escape the hands of change, for time is a ruthless beast - unforgiving and uncaring of those it warps, but that is not to say that it's victims are incapable of concealing this very modification. And when Rhoswen, at last, caught those desertborn eyes, she was surprised by what she saw. As surely as the rising sun, Seraphina's hard hailstone wall stood firm, but as they stood there in the moment between sound and it's absence, Rhoswen captured something else behind that mile-high glacier: a window into the deeper caverns of the sovereign's being. Was it anger? Was it frustration? Despair? Perhaps all of those things combined, or indeed none of them at all. Rhoswen could not, would not, say.
"Seraphina." Her voice is gasoline to set fire to the dusk that threatens all around; she would burn the night for this woman, and the moon for good measure. "To ask if you are okay is a foolish question, but I am going to ask you anyway." The pale unkempt braids, the sheen of perspiration on her shoulders, that nameless look in her eyes... when would Sera's troubles end?