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unbraiding the sun - Sabine - 02-19-2019


for those who dream of stranger worlds, 


S A B I N E

♥

To hunt is to dance. 

Moving bone married to the bright opaline glint of a predatory smile. 

The heaviest heart set against the lightest breath; bated, metal, rooted right into the earth upon which it crept.

The hunter is an author eager to draft great tomes using but the blood of its prey. 

These words licked the inside of her brain like ravenous hounds, as though they had grown wants and needs of their own; urging her to follow their instruction with an urgency that could not be contained. They brought her placid pace inward, silencing the sound of her weight as narrow hooves pressed into the brittle soil underfoot until she came to a square halt. Memories scrawled their way across her vision, blinding her with their remarkable tangibility - Sabine wondered whether they would curl neatly into her palm should she extend one pale freckled hand? She knew they would not linger long, for nothing in her life ever did. It occurred to her, nevertheless, it to be strange that these very words belonged not to Raum ( Raum, who lurked like a fever-dream in the pitch of her peripheral vision ) but to her mother. 

Sabine knew the sight of Rhoswen's lips moving over and over again, reciting the lines as though she were following an ancient script etched into her very flesh. Rhoswen's veins were caskets and her blood carried the corpse of a life she had once believed in. The last time Sabi saw her mother, she knew - like the moon knew the night - that such a belief was surely dead. Sabine had never known how to interpret these phrases; she had always wondered to what they might reference. Were they a gift? An instruction? 

But now, as she stared out over the mouth of the desert, she knew. 

They had been a warning. 

It was as though time had walked right out of the door. Daylight bled into darkness, only to arise once more upon the dawn. Birds fell and fledglings flew. Leaves shrank into floridity before peeling into skeletal annihilation. What did the laws of nature matter to a girl whose father was the hunter in her mother's song? What did they call him now? (Lucifer, Abaddon, Apollyon) She wanted to scream but her lungs harboured blood and ash and grief in the place of air. They trembled and splintered, desperate to keep the anguish within from swallowing the little girl whole. 


art created by chrystalunicorn | table by kezz


RE: unbraiding the sun - Eik - 02-27-2019

He had been trailing the young mare for some time now. Not because he was following her, but because they seemed to be going the same direction... better to have a stranger in front of him instead of behind, even if it meant going slower than he'd like. But he couldn't let her wander to her death in good conscience, even if she might be an enemy, so  he catches up to her with a lope, stopping a few lengths away once he has her attention.


"There's a sandwyrm ahead." 

The beast of topic is far enough away to not be an immediate threat, and it had recently eaten-- not that it wouldn't turn down the opportunity to further gorge itself. He noticed it in his usual mental scan for strangers (ahead or behind) and other threats. Such magic was near effortless unless he had been routinely doing it throughout the course of a day-- and he's been doing it for two days now, ever since (unhappily) leaving Isra. It leaves him without the energy to dip into the girl's mind and skim through her thoughts, which in this case is honestly for the best. He has enough anguish of his own.


(Autumn is unfolding in him-- angry yellow moons and chill winds and leaves that turn from yellow to orange to brown. The landscape changes too-- angry yellow moons and chill winds and leaves that turn from yellow to orange to brown. And so in at least one way there is a balance. Elsewhere there is a fruit, the dark purple of a black eye, that ripens and ripens and ripens)

Eik does not recognize the girl, although he should. Maybe he would if he took a harder look, but that would require setting aside his thoughts... And his thoughts are not of the mind to be set down. All he really has the energy to see is two sharp horns and troubled eyes. Likely not a threat, but you can't let your guard down these days. Even when sleeplessness blurs the edge of your vision.

"Best turn back, girl. Wiser to leave Solterra than enter right now." He looks at her with haunted eyes a moment longer, hesitating (for what?). Eventually he nods in farewell and turns, setting off on a path that should lead him in a southern arc around the sandwyrm that lies in wait to the east.






@Sabine

RE: unbraiding the sun - Sabine - 03-05-2019


for those who dream of stranger worlds, 


S A B I N E

♥

She couldn't quite remember when she realised someone was trailing her path, but she could recall the memory of not caring whether they caught up with her or simply watched her pass. She had not even taken the time to turn that crushed-rose head to inspect the fellow traveller, so when the muted sound of hooves against sand and an even baritone broke the air, Sabine found herself swivelling on the spot to see just who exactly had been following her, for the first time. 

Immediately, she wished she hadn't. 

The air erupted from her lungs, cannonading and cracking. Perhaps it was that she hadn't slept in days, perhaps it was that her nerves were sat on the edge of a precipice -- or, indeed, perhaps it was simply shock that tricked Sabine's eyes into believing that the pale man stood before her was Raum. Had she been of sound mind this mistake would never have occurred; the differences between this stranger and her father were boundless, but of course Sabine was not whole, not undamaged. She was threadbare. She was porous and shot through.   

The girl stared at this silver man for moments that felt like several time-travelled lives, until it registered slowly that this was not the beloved villain that walked her dreams. A memory cracks like lightning, her mind scrambling for the words that had passed this grey stranger's lips, but her breath was too fast and her heart was too cold. What had he said? It was too late, with parting advice he was already walking away by the time she remembered. A sand-what? Sabine shuddered inwardly, glancing to the east where he had pointed with that hollow gaze. This ghost had likely saved her from a death most gruesome, though Sabine felt herself disturbed more by the nagging disappointment that he had. 

With a sigh, and the knowledge that if she turned away from Solterra now she would never return to try again, she set after her new acquaintance. "Wait," she hummed, her voice reaching after him with willowy hands, 

"may I join you, sir?"

 

art created by chrystalunicorn 


RE: unbraiding the sun - Eik - 03-10-2019

He wants to say "no."

"Solterra will crush you."

"Turn back."

Instead he sighs and says "sure". He's trying real hard to not make her business his business, but if she really wants to go to Solterra, he won't stop her. He keeps walking, young stranger in tow.

(have to hunt, don't have time for children. Have to hunt. But her eyes are so familiar...)

Eik is good at silence. He's always been good at it. Some people can't be alone with their thoughts, but for a while that was all Eik was ever really good at. The regular use of his magic has drained him beyond small talk, anyway. Every so often he stops and it appears he is listening for something. He is, but it is not a sound Sabine, or anyone else would ever hear.

(he heard a heart break once. It reminded him of the first sound of spring in the place Home used to be-- the first great crack of the quickly thawing river-- it tore him up for days)

He does not turn his magic to the girl. He doesn't want to read her mind, doesn't want young girls to be anything but foreign. From time to time he looks at the her quickly from the corner of his eye. (It hurts to look at her directly, he does not know why but it might be the blue of her horn.) Even in half-glimpses he can tell she's not Solterran. He can see it in the way she walks on the sand. Is she with the new regime, then? She does not seem particularly menacing... even with those sharp horns, he thinks he could take her quickly, crush her head-- if he had to. He has to prepare himself for acts of violence, or else he won't have the heart to carry them out, not anymore. So he pictures how it would feel, her small skull breaking beneath his weight.

The thought, or rather his capacity to even think it in the first place, turns his stomach.  He might as well focus on small talk, then, while he's still got a soul.

(she's just a fucking child)

When he finally breaks his silence he does so with complete ease, as if they hadn't been plodding along without a word for as long as they have. "What are you looking for there, anyway." He looks at her, a little closer this time. If he can see how broken she is, it does not register on his tired face.






@Sabine

RE: unbraiding the sun - Sabine - 03-18-2019


for those who dream of stranger worlds, 


S A B I N E

♥

Their eyes catch for a moment that passes as quickly as the light that gathers around their ankles in folds and pleats, but even a splinter of time this brief is too long for a child without a home and a man without a gun. There are monsters in his eyes that circle and bloom and Sabine is caught like a rabbit in a snare by the shadows that braid the edges of his gaze, haunting her thoughts long after she looks away. She is too young to understand that these monsters are not his own. Still, questions burn the edges of her thoughts: what darkness plagues this pale-skinned stranger? Does he know of the horrors that live in his head? Sabine shoots her gaze downward, finding sudden unprecedented fascination with the sand that sifts beneath her feet; searching for anything magnetic enough to keep her from staring into those twin black-moons. And it poses the question, when he looked into her eyes, what did he see? 

She didn't want to know. 

Despite what she had witnessed, Sabine is not afraid. She has lost too much to feel the prick of fear, for it is a needle dulled by circumstance and grief. And so, with the girl's mind ringing only with wonder at the very fabric of this man, they walk on into the gold. 

The silence between them is enough to settle the hummingbird beat of her little patchwork heart, for it is a friend Sabi has known longer than any other; it does not matter to her that it is skinless and unseen, for in many ways she is much the same. So it does not bother her when the soundless air stretches between them like a loose wire that drapes over their shoulders; if anything she wears it with ease. The sky overheard watches their solemn march behind an assembly of iron clouds, like a king shielded by his legion. And Sabine has never seen a vault of heaven so inordinately wide as that which looms high over the desert - it sends bone-cracking awe shooting down her legs. But even then, with her mind running desperately away from the ceaseless possibilities that hid the light from this man's gaze, Sabine does not miss the way he grabs glimpses of her; stealing something she had not yet realised was her own.

His first question is a simple one, one that she had expected to drop anchor from the outset, and so her answer comes easily:

"My father."

The truth of her who her father is, however, came less so.

 

art created by chrystalunicorn | table by kezz 


RE: unbraiding the sun - Eik - 03-31-2019


The grey man and the blue-eyed girl make an odd pair. Not at all complementary, except for how comfortable they are with few words to wreck the windsong between them. Eik does not ponder her eyes, or her story. Instead he tries to listen to the warm breeze the same way he listens to thoughts, but it is not nearly so easy. He can only pick up generalities-- no recent deaths nearby-- probably good weather tonight-- You could spend a lifetime listening, and still only glean at the wind's secrets.

When he first came here the desert seemed brutally cruel with its heat and its spikes, its mirages and predators. The self-loathing in him was drawn to that cruelty. But as the seasons passed and Eik became familiar with the desert, as familiar as any foreign-born could be in a few short years, he learned the desert was not cruel. Of course, it was not kind either. It was just indifferent.

Eik tries to mimic the apathetic desert air between them, but he was not made for not feeling. So when she says "my father," he snorts softly. He does not share with her that if he had a daughter, she'd never be left to cross the Mors alone. He does not say anything at all to explain his reaction. It just becomes another indecipherable sound on the wind.

(oh but you did have a daughter once,
and she's dead now, so.
all you know about fatherhood is loss,,
or lost)

The magic slips in and out of his soul, and when it leaves he feels a terrible emptiness, far vaster than any he's felt before-- and we are familiar with emptiness. He begins to feel a little desperate, a little anxious he won't make it to the Vitae. He knows conversation is a waste of breath, but it keeps him focused on something other than panic. "What will you do," his breathing is heavy and every step feels leaden. "When you find him." Such is his determination, if he were to fall his legs would continue to move, step by step, long after the heart stopped beating.





@Sabine

RE: unbraiding the sun - Sabine - 04-14-2019


for those who dream of stranger worlds, 


S A B I N E

♥

Though she had expected his initial question, she had not expected his second. 

Dread finds her, carrying a scythe like its cousin. It is a cruel shepherd; fastening a collar tight around her neck as though she were a sacrificial lamb chosen for slaughter. For she bleeds beneath a swarming black doubt, leaking breath and life with every step she takes toward the capital. What is she going to do when she finds him?

What are you going to do, Sabine? What are you going to do?

Her truth is shameful and bleak and brings her naivety to light faster than she can hide it. Because she hadn't thought that far. It was impossible to think that far. How could she think of what she was going to do, what she was going to say, when the world was wearing its skin inside out? Nothing in her small, careful life made sense anymore. Because black bloodthirsty moths had torn great holes in the lining and no matter how hard she tried to sew her little world back together, she could not keep the happiness from spilling, spilling, spilling out.

As her feet sink like stone obelisks into the sand, she thinks of what she would say to Raum. Raum. She has never thought of him as anything other than Papa, but that loving name does not belong to the man who gouged throats from the souls she cherished or brought once-great nations to their knees. Papa is the smell of frankincense and cigar-smoke, he is the early morning of her childhood and the glint of her first blade.

She does not know the creature who stands now at the helm of Solterra.

The girl might have wept if it were not for the present emptiness swimming in her heart. "I don't know." Too young, too tender, she doesn't know anything. 

And when she looks up again at this stranger clothed in speckled alabaster, she wonders if he might know instead.

The words fall from her mouth before she can stop them, "you see, though his body talks and moves and breathes, I think my father is dead."


art created by chrystalunicorn | table by kezz
@Eik

RE: unbraiding the sun - Eik - 05-01-2019


"You see, though his body talks and moves and breathes,"

Her words are ash, fuel spent by fire. His chest tightens like it's trying to keep something inside.

"I think my father is dead."

"I think my father is dead."

"I think my father is dead."

His voice is sandpaper-dry, his tongue heavy with dust and regret. "Sounds complicated."

He does not tell her how his father is dead, too, except unlike the young stranger Eik would never meet the elder grey again. Old Valk was dead for years now, in a land far enough away in space and memory that Eik could not-- would not-- ever find his way back. And if he did, there would be nothing but bones to talk to.

How much loss lies between here and where we started?

... How much lies ahead?

He has no time for grief but he feels it rising anyway, and as it does the walls of the levee creak and strain against the mounting weight of unshed tears. His ghosts whisper to live is to suffer and it would be so easy to believe them except--

He feels something else, something more on the other side of suffering.

He can't give up until he knows what it is.

As they walk, the sandy landscape slowly begins to fill with boulders large and small. Palm trees beckon, just over the next dune. The Oasis. Past it, a thin trail of dark smoke rises. The capital. The stallion's pace has been slowing with every step, his breathing has been growing more belabored. His magic is all but gone now, and in its place a dull pain fills every cell in his body. His head drifts towards the ground, too heavy to be held up, and every exhale sends a whorl of sand into the air (the smell and taste of it too familiar to be a nuisance) that makes him think of the gods resting their heads so very near to the skin of this earth, stirring the winds of the world with their breaths.

His knees sink into the soft, warm sand at the edge of the water and it feels like an embrace, like the desert was for a moment something other than apathetic, but when the feeling passes he's just lying there, too spent to drink water yet.

I almost didn't make it, he thinks to himself reproachfully. He was foolish with his magic, letting it burn right through him

(or-- maybe I did not want to make it)

His eyes close for a moment, and then they reopen and return to the girl. From the ground she looks even smaller than she did when he was standing-- it baffles him. He wants to say I hope we meet again or my name is Eik or I'm sorry. But some words lose their meaning in times of war.

"You want to go that way." He gestures towards the capitol with his nose. "When you find him..." What exactly is he trying to say? Forgive him? Forget him? Love him? If only he had a smidge of magic left he could plant his intent like a seed in her mind.

If only he had a smidge of magic left he would see that her father's name is Raum and what he wants to say is Kill him.

"Good luck."

He does not think they will cross paths again.





@Sabine ;_;

RE: unbraiding the sun - Sabine - 06-10-2019
















for those who dream of stranger worlds,


It was not the answer she had been hoping for. Naively, childishly, she had prayed for a vial of wisdom to pass between those cinder-dry lips; a whisper of truth, a rasp of direction. For this strange man bore features that reminded her of silt and loam that had laid dormant beneath a superficial topsoil - ancient and enduring and passive beyond. He was marble and stone; an effigy born in the age of Rome; surely he had seen all the wonder and horror Sabine only dreamt of? 

But he has no answers and he speaks no wisdom and Sabine could never fault a stranger for keeping those unlit secrets close to their breast. Like weeds in dank cellars, they would grow still; blooming from the ugliness that lived in the hearts of men. In the end, the girl knew she had no right to open this stranger's cellar and peer down upon the unholy greenhouse that had taken root in the place nobody dared to look. 

The oasis has laid its trail, and Sabine can taste the water on the air for it fills the arid sky with a milky fullness. Now three paces behind her pale companion, she stumbles twice over wads of rock hidden beneath the golden wash of sand; sheepishly she hopes the nameless ghost does to glance back, for she knows he will see so transparently how young and unprepared she is for the desert.

It is not the circular haven of the Oasis that catches Sabine's glittering eyes, but the smoke that angrily kisses the sky; violating the bohemian-blue firmament with a slash of lead here and a slice of iron there. It feels like an omen and her heart laughs like a cruel sister at the fear that wails in her head. When again she looks to the man, he is not upon his feet.  

And it strikes her just how defeated he looks. Sabine does not think she has ever seen a creature so tired. She wants to reach out her seraphic muzzle, to place it upon his brow so that his chest might become full with the electricity that flows like a river through her blood. She wants to tell him that, in time, the world will right itself once more and the birds will sing Hosanna for the beauty that they see. 

But when he speaks, breaking the silence with a dull thudding hammer, gesturing her on toward her fate, Sabine does not do any of those things. She does not brush the tangled web of hair from his eyes and she cannot tell him all will be okay, because she does not want to lie. 

With a soft, acknowledging dip of her crown Sabine bids farewell, though the words she wishes she could say fail her so terribly. The sadness might break her down the middle if she should so much as try to speak of the knot in her ribs at the thought of leaving him where he lay. And when she begins to move away she tries to think of Rhoswen, of the bitter strength that had carried her mother so far and she holds it so tight that it burns - but you see, it is the only thing that stops her from turning back. 



♣

@Eik