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in memoriam - Caine - 03-03-2019
♠︎ ♣︎ ♥︎ ♦︎
S
leep beckons to him. A nightingale’s crooning, honey-sweet lullaby. But Caine does not succumb. He merely grits his teeth, darkens his scowl, and wills himself to lift one hoof in front of the other, over and over, over and over. Like clockwork. You have traveled further distances than this, he reminds himself, and exhaustion laughs in his face.
The sickle moon hangs sallow and weak in the hazy, starless sky. He has a night’s journey left still to undertake before he will finally see the golden sands of the Mors, and beyond that, the ivory palaces of the Sun Court. He has not eaten for three nights, has not slept for two. Staying a moment longer on the smoking shores of Vectaeryn — a fresh surge of hatred pulses through him, when he remembers the gilded extravagance of his birthplace — is a fate worse than a fortnight of hunger and sleeplessness.
He reminds himself of the fact dourly, though this time it is thirst that cackles at his suffering. The pool of light, though strange and lovely in its strangeness, had done nothing to slake Caine’s burning thirst. The water, if it could be called that, had sat upon his tongue like oil and slipped down his throat as substanceless as light itself. A reprieve for nothing but the tediousness of his mind.
The stubble-short grass of the Eleutheria pricks like needles against his ankles, and Caine wishes to do nothing else but take to the skies and leave the menacing earth far, far below. His wings, when he flexes his sore shoulders, gripe angrily at his sides. Let us rest, they hiss at him, and mollified, he listens.
A shadow passes over Caine's features. Later, he will say that he does not remember what had possessed him in that moment.
Softly, he begins to hum.
It starts off hesitant and wavering, like a toddler wobbling on unsteady legs. His silver eyes narrow in concentration, adjusting the tune of his voice, sifting through the vault of his memories.
And slowly, the melody comes.
The music box had been his only possession the first few years he had spent wandering the halls of Agenor’s mansion. He had been left mostly alone, then, the sorcerer only visiting once a day right after sundown, and only for the span of a single hour — never more, never less. Caine remembers those days with longing, sometimes. Agenor had been almost kind.
He had found the golden box, no bigger than a teacup, in the dusty corners of a forbidden room. (There had been many, and he had only been brave enough to stray into one.) He hadn’t known what it was. Not until his curious touch had triggered a hidden latch, and the bezeled lid sprang open like a clam's.
And then, to his fascination, a song had poured forth from the mouth of a spinning, golden stag.
Agenor had confiscated the magical trinket, his expression livid, when the boy had worked up the courage to show it to him a few weeks later. Caine never found it again, but he’d never forgotten the haunting melody.
Weariness and anger and longing erodes the knife-sharp edges of the midnight assassin until he is nothing more than a boy. A boy, humming a song his voice struggles to give a life to.
He does not capture it right. The song lives and dies in his memories. Caine's footsteps stumble to a halt, and there, in the soulless expanse of the Eleutheria, he stands unmoving and silent for a long time.
The first rays of blue dawn peek over the groggy horizon when he finally moves again.
@
♢ ♡ ♧ ♤
RE: in memoriam - Moira - 03-03-2019
m o i r a
ashes, ashes
we all fall down
we all fall down
S
kies set afire and drenched in water cannot contain the way the very air withdraws where she moves, the sparkling sunset set upon silken skin that stalks over the hill with ears curled back and eyes narrow. An adder ready to strike. A phoenix on the cusp of burning out or bursting into a million flames and ashes before rebirth. Moira has become a nocturnal thing like her kin in the court. She's learned to work by the light of the moon where only Caligo peers in to see her hands busy in some tonic or another, watch as pages turn of their own accord while the woman works endlessly, restlessly, to perfect another tincture and distil it to the court. So many stockpiles now grow, flourishing under the nurturing hand of Moira Tonnerre - a recluse, a cagy animal when cornered, a workaholic addicted to the feel of flesh mending, sewn together, and the making of remedies. Today, though, as the blue begins to brighten and the star-kissed skies are pushed further and further, the air shimmers and simmers about her.
There is no cunning healer that walks these lands.
Disgruntled, she is a wildfire on kindling, catching and igniting all in her path. Oh, and the man that surfaces like a dark god from the deeps, like a sin, like a plague upon her. He wears shadows and a peace she has not seen, but he knows the woman when she is in this state. A wild animal. A flighty beast with fangs and venom spewing forth.
Barely does she stop to listen to the end of his song, letting the haunting notes dissipate before boldly continuing on, eyes blazing as annoyance rears its ugly head. "You're back again then?" Once, her brows would have lifted high, mouth opening in a slight 'o' of recognition and shock. Not when she hungers for the gentle caress of the night, for the soft pillows from her bed back in Denocte. Not after those pesky twins woke her with a stick like she were a pagan thing, a heathen worm so disgusting they could not bear to touch her. Oh, how she would have roared if a hand had dared shake her, snapped it then and there and fed it to whatever crocodiles might be lurking in that pool of liquid gold. The same liquid that still sticks to her tail and feet, a reminder of where she's been, what she's touched.
"I thought you flew the coup, bat boy. Come to sing me a lullaby and whisk me home?" Moira says, words grating out in that smoky voice that sounds like hallucinations and dreamscapes might if she were anything other than what she is. It is not a teasing glint that's left in her eye; there's an edge on her today much sharper than the claws she sought to sink in and demand her pound of flesh with before. Her heart stammers and pounds, stops and starts, it twists and turns just as her emotions roil. Should she be relieved or let the anger flow? He left after saying he could teach her to fly. He'd given her hope beyond her pain and then abandoned her wholly.
Moira did not know the bitterness that grew in his absence, did not let the festering wound show to the outside world. Instead, she'd gone to parties to drink wine and mingle, she'd danced with a boy who had flowers in his hair and been just a girl with too much cake left to lick from her lips. She'd worked endlessly until exhaustion was the only thought left to occupy her mind instead of those damned silver eyes that still laughed at her in her dreams. So the anger wins, a bubbling cauldron gurgling until she ladles it out spoonful by spoonful.
@Caine | "speaks" | this is not what i expected o:
RE: in memoriam - Caine - 03-17-2019
make my messes matter
make this chaos count
make this chaos count
H
e hears the snapping of the dead grass long before he senses her presence behind him. Perhaps if Caine were not so tired, his conscience worn to shadows, he would’ve cared more.
But his song is not yet over, and he is beginning to wonder if he has ever cared at all.
The last notes of the lullaby fade away into nothingness, into void. Into memory. Silence separates them for a heartbeat before she breaks it.
“You’re back again then?”
The barest hint of surprise flashes across Caine’s eyes, but his gaze remains fixated on the blurring horizon. Moira Tonnerre. The rising sun burns as bright as fire, blinding in its brilliance. His head tilts towards her. As bright as a phoenix.
He stares at her for a moment, unblinking. At the red of her, at the fury of her. She has not changed, has she? he wonders, but he knows he is wrong. He lets out a breath. No. I am the one who has not changed.
“Tonnerre.” He dips his head towards her, a shadow of a smile across his lips, before turning back towards the sky. He knows she is not finished. Can see it in the line of her lips, the gold of her eyes.
“I thought you flew the coup, bat boy. Come to sing me a lullaby and whisk me home?”
Bat boy. A smirk tugs at Caine’s lips, amusement dancing in those fathomless silver eyes. He has been called many things before. Magician. Herald. Murderer. Raven. And the worst, uttered by a sneering count who had denounced Agenor's endeavors from the beginning: well, Selwyn, at least the mutt is obedient.
Bat boy. He turns the name curiously in his mind, wondering where she had found inspiration for the reference. The last time he checked, his wings had still been feathered. They droop at his sides, black and sleek and monstrous.
“I had other matters to attend to,” he says, voice carefully neutral. Things unsaid and matters unsettled whisper and whisper in the space between them. He is aware. He is always aware.
Caine turns towards her again, this time completely. Until he is facing her, back splattered blood red by the dawning sun. Silver eyes steady in hers. “I am sorry.” He does not say anything more.
If Moira Tonnerre looks deeply into those steady silver eyes, perhaps she will see the sincerity reflected within them. The flicker of regret at breaking his promise to teach her. (The boy is a great many things, but he has never been dishonorable. Always, always, he is sincere.)
But perhaps even if she does, she will find nothing there but apathy.
Caine lets out a silent sigh and lets his gaze fall. The shadows lining his eyes have never been darker. His throat burns with thirst, and patches of black cross his sight until he swiftly blinks them away.
Eyes darkening, Caine focuses his remaining energy into ensuring his voice is clear, his smile steady. His act perfectly polished.
“I hope, in my absence, you have been well?”
@
RE: in memoriam - Moira - 03-24-2019
m o i r a
quote line 1
quote line 2
quote line 2
T
hat smile could drop her dead right then and there if there was not a fuming, endless fire burning within; a starving, raging beast hungering for more than just the taste of blood, demanding everything, everything that she could take. His words ignite her even more, make the monster drool and salivate, let it drip down darkened walls splashed in reds from her childhood, blacks from those rooms, greys from the light she left behind and turned to the darkness instead. She lets it feast on the glory of him, lets it imagine the supple taste of dark flesh beneath gnashing teeth and flaying tongue. How she lets it run rampant for all of a moment before he turns. Silver clashes with gold, smashing against it in a tidal wave of emotion. Three simple words destroy her, bring that tower built so high, so high that should she jump she could have flown, crashing down. Rubble and shambles and debris splayed across her mind. Anger gone up in a puff of smoke, eviscerated with three words.
And then she cries, that sob heaving from her, the keening sound like a newborn fawn strayed too far from its mother coming from her carmine lips. Lips that she tries to valiantly press together, to still the trembling of her chin, the wobbling of tears in her eyes. But a flood, once begun, is harder to leash than a summer squall.
The phoenix rushes forward as though compelled by some other force, rushes forward as a tidal wave of longing and sorrow and aching, rushes forward until she curls into his much larger frame. Bright wings reach forward so carefully, so tentatively, before caution is thrown to the wind just as she tries to throw herself into his unsuspecting arms and she folds her feathers about him. Face curls into the dark man's shoulder, just at the base of his neck, and muffled sobs are so easy to hear. He could kill her and she'd let him splay her body on the hill there beneath the sun and she wouldn't care. Here he was, and he was back and unharmed.
How he's haunted her every moment he was away.
"You promised to teach me to fly," she hiccups in response, body trembling as she tries to crawl closer, as though to move into his very skin until black and red are not two separate things but an amalgamation of both. "You promised and then you left without a word. I thought you'd died, or I'd done something wrong. And I never could fold those stupid paper cranes right! How. Dare. You?" With every last syllable those wings, so feared before, hug him tighter, closer, matching the squeezing of her heart at last. She holds him there, her hostage and her almost-friend, as the sun bathes them both in the color of blood.
@Caine | "speaks" | notes: i did not expect this, not one bit. but i do not regret this, not one bit
RE: in memoriam - Caine - 04-07-2019
we begin in the dark
and birth is the death of us.
and birth is the death of us.
H
e cannot read her eyes.
The gold of them – they leap and burn brighter than Helio’s chariot, and Caine’s colorless silver drowns in her gold, succumbs to her luminous gaze like steel tempered in fire. He wants to look away, to retreat far, far away from that brilliance – but the drumming hollowness in his chest demands he stay, and burn.
Burn. Perhaps then he will feel something other than nothing. Perhaps then the feeling that had poured from the music box’s song like light – the feeling he can no longer feel or touch or breathe – will bathe him in warmth again.
Even if he must burn first.
Something twisted inside him (and he is twisted everywhere, like the gnarled roots of a dying oak) wonders: how long must you look at the sun for it to strike you blind?
So he does not look away. He narrows his eyes against the brilliance of her, the blood red of her pelt, the – anguish? fury? what is the difference, to a boy who cannot even recognize his own – to her lips, and waits for her words to come.
But they do not come.
Silver eyes watch as she breathes, in and out, like clockwork. He waits. For the burning (when the chariot drags across the sky), for the sun (to rise out of the gloom), for her (to say something). His timing has never been wrong. (Agenor had believed that the world ran like clockwork, mechanical and predictable if one only knew how to listen for the tick of the hands. Agenor had taught him how to listen.) So Caine knows she is going to say something. Soon she will –
When Moira’s sob comes, low and keening and gasping, Caine stills.
Silver tears drip from her eyes (where is her golden fire?) and each sob rings through the dead plains like the tolling of a clocktower.
Bewilderment flashes to life in the boy’s vacant eyes – he is a puppet reanimated, the strings tangled and wrong. Do not cry, he thinks, pleading, because it reminds him too much of death. (He hates them when they cry, because he cannot spare them. The command is absolute. He cannot spare them.)
Words choke and die in Caine's scorched throat. He forgets her name and her phoenix flames because sobs keep pouring from her lips like ash, and the boy takes each like a dagger to the chest –
And then she runs to him. Before the action registers in some untangled fragment of Caine's brain, she is there, in front of him, crashing into his chest, wings around him, everywhere, everywhere.
“You promised to teach me to fly,” comes her voice at last, but it does not quite reach him. It sounds muffled, like his head has been submerged in water and Moira is peering at him from the surface, lips ghosting over the shape of words. Her timing is wrong. The clocktower keeps tolling. He can no longer hear.
“You promised and then you left without a word. I thought you'd died, or I'd done something wrong. And I never could fold those stupid paper cranes right! How. Dare. You?”
She is so close, too close. Dread grips him by the shoulders and shakes. She is too fragile, too warm, too alive –
“Why do you care?” he whispers into her mane, dangerously quiet.
The question tears through him like an avalanche, building and building into something akin to fury. How dare I?
He feels the beating of her heart against his, fluttering like a fawn’s. Do you really think – a sharp, twisting laugh slices at his lungs – that you know me? He shudders from her embrace, from a touch he has never known. His skin burns fever-hot. Stumbling back, he lowers his chin and locks his gaze on her, unfocused and ember-bright.
You do not know anything about me, Moira Tonnerre.
He is half-hallucinating, half-delirious. He can no longer tell what is real and what is not, where is she and where is him –
And the black magic in his blood begins to scream.
@
RE: in memoriam - Moira - 04-22-2019
Moira Tonnerre
i will burn and burn and burn again, and you will come home safely
She should have seen the hollow, should have noticed the forests sprouting tall and thick and wild between them. Oh, Moira realizes she should have felt the way the winds scream and buffet against the cliffsides that are Caine, the cliffs she so precariously let herself balance upon, wings almost outspread without any confidence to back it up. But she did not.
She noticed none of it when succumbing to rich emotions, thick emotions, heavy emotions that fall like boulders down his cliffsides and into ocean waters ever so eager, ever so greedy to swallow all of the crumbling edges that are her. The stiffening of his spine (of the entirety of the black man, the shadowed man, the lying man) should have warned her.
Perhaps Moira Tonnerre is beyond warnings and reason.
There is no time to wonder as the coldness of him, the stillness of him, at last seeps into her. Like a glacier breaking, his actions are slow, his realizations and responses giving great groans, creaking louder and louder before ever showing on the surface. It is the subtleties she feels, the way his muscles are tense and his breaths are sharp. No kindness, no comfort, nothing akin to compassion shows in the Pegasus who made promises to break. And those words, snake-skin soft whispering into her hair - riotous curls seeming to leap toward him as she had in fury and anger and confusion, they toll like the bells of Notre Dame, calling her home and calling her away and calling, calling, calling.
There is that sweltering rage swallowed by the squall of her anguish, there it sits waiting, sizzling, forge-hot and ready to strike. The song in her blood is one of hopelessness, one of a girl losing her way with no northern star, one in the dark still learning what it is to smile instead of bleed. And it swells and swells with the rising tide of her confusion, of that anger so long absent in her youth jumping now to her defense.
He withdraws from that anger, he withdraws from his broken girl. A mere puppet to play with just as she'd always been in that house that was left so long ago. Will he burn if she touches him? Will his skin peel away to blackened bones?
But she does not want to hurt him with a touch.
And so a viper's sneer slips onto dark lips, lips that look like pools of blood below eyes that shine with accusations. "Because your life matters Caine. Because you matter to me. Ancestors guide me, you're daft and stupid and slow." It is a snarl. Smoky words acrid like burnt flesh, harsh with cutting edges. "Because I care what happens to you."
And she steps towards him, a challenge as his head lowers, Moira glares for all she is worth. "What will you do about it, Caine?" she purrs, she hisses, she practically spits. "If this were a cliff would you watch me after you threw me off? You could push me down now, throw me low and watch if I break. Will you kill me for caring? Wrap your magic about my throat and squeeze," emboldened, the phoenix steps forward again. They are awash with sunlight, and she does not care if he would attack.
They are wild things rearing to fight.
"I've seen others die, Caine. I've killed them and never looked back. I'll tell you a secret - they never mattered. But you, you horrid man -" wings ruffle, they flare and curl and retreat meekly to her sides as though preparing for a lashing, preparing for the burning that comes, preparing for those dark rooms and endless nights where she lost her voice long before she lost the sensations in her limbs. "You matter," and it is a hoarse whisper, a defeated whisper that beats with her own self loathing. He wasn't supposed to matter. None of them were. This was to be a home for Estelle and herself, a safe place they would lie low and merely exist by one another's side. Isra and Eik and Asterion and the twins and Caine never should have come into her life.
For the first time, she falters. There is an exhaustion that is not physical, but bone-deep and mental and emotional that is far older than the young age of the phoenix. It almost seems too much to bear. And how she tries to harden herself then. How she stiffens as he did. It's almost tragic to see the way her head finally falls, curls covering sad eyes, old eyes, and they do not rise again. "Go ahead then, walk away. We're just strangers after all, aren't we?"
She noticed none of it when succumbing to rich emotions, thick emotions, heavy emotions that fall like boulders down his cliffsides and into ocean waters ever so eager, ever so greedy to swallow all of the crumbling edges that are her. The stiffening of his spine (of the entirety of the black man, the shadowed man, the lying man) should have warned her.
Perhaps Moira Tonnerre is beyond warnings and reason.
There is no time to wonder as the coldness of him, the stillness of him, at last seeps into her. Like a glacier breaking, his actions are slow, his realizations and responses giving great groans, creaking louder and louder before ever showing on the surface. It is the subtleties she feels, the way his muscles are tense and his breaths are sharp. No kindness, no comfort, nothing akin to compassion shows in the Pegasus who made promises to break. And those words, snake-skin soft whispering into her hair - riotous curls seeming to leap toward him as she had in fury and anger and confusion, they toll like the bells of Notre Dame, calling her home and calling her away and calling, calling, calling.
There is that sweltering rage swallowed by the squall of her anguish, there it sits waiting, sizzling, forge-hot and ready to strike. The song in her blood is one of hopelessness, one of a girl losing her way with no northern star, one in the dark still learning what it is to smile instead of bleed. And it swells and swells with the rising tide of her confusion, of that anger so long absent in her youth jumping now to her defense.
He withdraws from that anger, he withdraws from his broken girl. A mere puppet to play with just as she'd always been in that house that was left so long ago. Will he burn if she touches him? Will his skin peel away to blackened bones?
But she does not want to hurt him with a touch.
And so a viper's sneer slips onto dark lips, lips that look like pools of blood below eyes that shine with accusations. "Because your life matters Caine. Because you matter to me. Ancestors guide me, you're daft and stupid and slow." It is a snarl. Smoky words acrid like burnt flesh, harsh with cutting edges. "Because I care what happens to you."
And she steps towards him, a challenge as his head lowers, Moira glares for all she is worth. "What will you do about it, Caine?" she purrs, she hisses, she practically spits. "If this were a cliff would you watch me after you threw me off? You could push me down now, throw me low and watch if I break. Will you kill me for caring? Wrap your magic about my throat and squeeze," emboldened, the phoenix steps forward again. They are awash with sunlight, and she does not care if he would attack.
They are wild things rearing to fight.
"I've seen others die, Caine. I've killed them and never looked back. I'll tell you a secret - they never mattered. But you, you horrid man -" wings ruffle, they flare and curl and retreat meekly to her sides as though preparing for a lashing, preparing for the burning that comes, preparing for those dark rooms and endless nights where she lost her voice long before she lost the sensations in her limbs. "You matter," and it is a hoarse whisper, a defeated whisper that beats with her own self loathing. He wasn't supposed to matter. None of them were. This was to be a home for Estelle and herself, a safe place they would lie low and merely exist by one another's side. Isra and Eik and Asterion and the twins and Caine never should have come into her life.
For the first time, she falters. There is an exhaustion that is not physical, but bone-deep and mental and emotional that is far older than the young age of the phoenix. It almost seems too much to bear. And how she tries to harden herself then. How she stiffens as he did. It's almost tragic to see the way her head finally falls, curls covering sad eyes, old eyes, and they do not rise again. "Go ahead then, walk away. We're just strangers after all, aren't we?"
@Caine | "moira" | notes: ohmygodwhatishappening
RE: in memoriam - Caine - 05-05-2019
childhood dotted with bodies.
let them go, let them be ghosts.
let them go, let them be ghosts.
T
oo late. Too late too late too late, his mind crows, his magic screams, and it takes
every
last
drop
of Caine’s decaying self-awareness, blood-forged empathy (he does have it, empathy — he does) to keep himself away from her. The phoenix girl does not understand. That when he is like this — when he is more magic than he is mortal — he is no longer in his own skin.
In his place, stands death.
Caine does not hate him, this monstrous, magicked version of himself — for he is the only reason Caine is still alive. Still… whole, or as close to it as he will ever come. Every kill, every horrible, heartless deed he has ever done — Caine has learned, over the years, to withdraw a piece of himself away.
To hide him (the colt with the mahogany pelt, too foolish and just-born and trusting to believe that his lovely, blue-eyed mother would leave him there, forever, with the rest of the weak and the unwanted and the loveless) — this pitiful, feeling creature, behind a dome of unbreakable glass.
To watch, with black-void eyes, the eager magic seep into the hole left behind. Reclaiming him, shaping him into a reaper without a heart. The boy he must be, to do what must be done.
“Because your life matters Caine. Because you matter to me. Ancestors guide me, you’re daft and stupid and slow.”
Too late, too late, the magic caws, delighted. He is not here to hear.
“What will you do about it, Caine?” He does not want to do anything about it. He does not want to do anything, does she not see?
“If this were a cliff would you watch me after you threw me off? You could push me down now, throw me low and watch if I break.” He steps back as she steps forwards, and it is no longer a dance of give-and-take, a midnight rendezvous between a moonlight prince and a princess of flame.
He has never been a prince, and he never will be. Another step forwards. Another step back.
“Will you kill me for caring? Wrap your magic about my throat and squeeze.” His eyes fly to hers, a gold rivaling her own, when she speaks of death. Her words shape a scene he has lived, over and over and over. A nightmare he has never been able to wake from. How easy it had been, to bleed them of their lives.
How easily she speaks of it, dying by his hands.
He has gave and gave and gave. Enough. He has had enough. The madness and magic in him quiets to an eerie, deathless calm.
“You speak so easily of death.” His voice whispers like snake scales over rock. “Caring is not a crime. Why should I kill you over it?” But what he wants to say is, I have killed for far less. I have never reveled in it. Your name is not written in blood on the reaper’s ledger. You are not wanted by him. You should never want to be wanted.
He looks at the hurt engraved like poetry in her scorching eyes, and memorizes the colors of it. She steps forwards again. This time, he does not step back.
“I’ve seen others die, Caine. I’ve killed them and never looked back. I’ll tell you a secret - they never mattered. But you, you horrid man -" This phoenix girl, killing — Caine’s eyes narrow at her cursory admission. What reason did she have for bloodshed? His magic, not yet tamed, not yet close to feeling sated, begs to taste her dreams.
Too late, he sneers back at it, and shoves it vehemently away. He does not want to know.
“You matter.” Does he? His mother had whispered the same, right before she had walked away forever. Agenor had murmured it too, right before his knife had carved torture into Caine's skull.
“If I matter to you, then I will say this. You should save your care for someone else.” Someone who will honor it for all its worth in gold. Someone, who is not him. “You asked if I would kill you. Then I ask this of you: will you kill me from your heart like you killed the others?” He is as still as black marble, as immovable as the earth beneath their hooves.
The sun crests over the horizon, burning away the dark, haloing them in a wreath of weeping gold. Caine’s eyes, once a raging, brilliant orange, die to slivers of silver. He looks at the dimming girl in front of him, and wonders what he has destroyed.
“Go ahead then, walk away. We’re just strangers after all, aren’t we?” His eyes flicker towards the distance, to a desert and a kingdom he has started to call home.
“Strangers would not have threatened to kill each other,” he says, quietly, with an echo of a smile. They are not strangers. He does not know what they are, only that he had given his first promise to her, even if she hadn’t known it. Even if he could not honor it. “And I am not so much of a bastard to simply walk away, Tonnerre. I can accompany you to the base of the Veneror, if you are heading towards Denocte.”
@
RE: in memoriam - Moira - 09-24-2019
Moira Tonnerre
i will burn and burn and burn again, and you will come home safely
Every step forward is like two steps back, a downward spiral she does not know how to halt her journey upon. So Moira digs her own grave, shovels grains of dirt out one by one, lets them fall in a growing mountain of regrets beside the open earth. Gold meets gold and he hisses at her, tongue lashing like that of her family's. Somehow, in some unimaginable way, his words hurt far more than the frozen blocks they stoned her with ever did. Hoarse, she is so hoarse and aching for water when she says "If I do, then it is because Death is the only friend who ever remained beside me."
Perhaps the world sighs again at the infinite sorrow she carries within her breast, the unending maze of pain. For a time, Caine knocked down hedge after hedge until she almost felt alright, until there was almost something like the tickling breath of hope in her chest. When he went away, that breeze died and her gardens of promise wilted until just a single tinder set them alight. Great pyres of memory and once-promises burned in her chest for so long, but they are burning low now. Can he see the smoke in her soul that matches the smoke of her voice when it cracks, when her fallen head does not rise but dark lips merely move to some unseen cadence and pace she sets? "You cannot tell the wind where to blow, you cannot choose where my emotions rise and fall and whom shall receive them. So much is taken, gone, gone, would you take that from me, too, Caine?"
At last she halts her forward attack, at last she meets those golden, grieving eyes. They stare at her, they search for the shred of her humanity which she learned to tuck away and hide her soft underbelly. Over and over and over she did, plating armor on, becoming a creature so unlike that which she could have been, would have been if the world had shown her more than even a half an ounce of kindness.
And the phoenix sighs and shakes her head, curls bouncing and falling into her eyes. Moira does not bother to move them with her next words. "They were dying, they could not be saved." It is soft, it is void, it is an unfathomable and great truth she has been taught since the day she accepted an apprenticeship. You cannot save that which is already dead. "It was a mercy to let the ancestors take their souls and let them rest in the twinkling stars." For death was far kinder than life had ever been to her. The phoenix would not inquire of the children who killed their parents in birth, she had closed herself off to the world that sought to shun her, to destroy her, to make her a scarecrow girl with beads for eyes and straw for guts. They taught her to be strong, but Eluoan taught her to heal. The twins taught her to laugh and trained the corner of her mouth to twitch up, a sly smile upon dark lips as she hid behind books and water fountains.
She is not terrible. She is not made to be a sinner and take from the world until it breaks. "I am not so horrid to desecrate their memory in that way, but I do not care for their lives as I do yours. So no, Caine, I shall not kill you for caring and you shall not slay my physical body." An answer at last slips out, limbs nearly shivering, but from what? Does she shake for the emotion and adrenaline that courses through her? Do her wings tremble from her want of crying that she should not ever let out? There are sobs in her chest pounding at high gates that have been locked and overgrown with ivy and thorns.
At the last moment, the phoenix turns away. Her fire does not touch the weeds that grew where that garden of hope once stood. Instead, a numbness spreads. It begins in her belly, slow and deadly, killing off butterflies that once shook her to her core, burying bile that would make her fall to the ground with sickness and disgust and self loath, covering up the forges of anger and hiding them away. Dished head tilts, an analytical woman rising to the forefront, armor locked in place again. "I wonder, though, what holes will you leave when we part? Something has changed, I can taste it, I can finally feel it." And in those feelings she lets herself become anesthetized. Curtains are pulled shut again, everything is through a fog, a haze, a never-ending night setting itself upon her soul to feast and feast and feast until it is gorged on the pain of a girl who feels her losses like pounds of flesh from her own body. How hungry the beast is.
Its feast continues, and so too do her steps. Moira Tonnerre dips her head in thanks, "It would be a pleasure to have you by my side once more. You can tell me your theories on flight, and perhaps next time I should not fall from boulders so easily." There is the ghost of a smile, or maybe that is just the memory of it, as she turns hopelessly away from the mountains, seeming without direction once again atop these foreign cliffs. Brow furrows again, and she looks back with a raised brow. "Perhaps you should lead, no?"
Perhaps the world sighs again at the infinite sorrow she carries within her breast, the unending maze of pain. For a time, Caine knocked down hedge after hedge until she almost felt alright, until there was almost something like the tickling breath of hope in her chest. When he went away, that breeze died and her gardens of promise wilted until just a single tinder set them alight. Great pyres of memory and once-promises burned in her chest for so long, but they are burning low now. Can he see the smoke in her soul that matches the smoke of her voice when it cracks, when her fallen head does not rise but dark lips merely move to some unseen cadence and pace she sets? "You cannot tell the wind where to blow, you cannot choose where my emotions rise and fall and whom shall receive them. So much is taken, gone, gone, would you take that from me, too, Caine?"
At last she halts her forward attack, at last she meets those golden, grieving eyes. They stare at her, they search for the shred of her humanity which she learned to tuck away and hide her soft underbelly. Over and over and over she did, plating armor on, becoming a creature so unlike that which she could have been, would have been if the world had shown her more than even a half an ounce of kindness.
And the phoenix sighs and shakes her head, curls bouncing and falling into her eyes. Moira does not bother to move them with her next words. "They were dying, they could not be saved." It is soft, it is void, it is an unfathomable and great truth she has been taught since the day she accepted an apprenticeship. You cannot save that which is already dead. "It was a mercy to let the ancestors take their souls and let them rest in the twinkling stars." For death was far kinder than life had ever been to her. The phoenix would not inquire of the children who killed their parents in birth, she had closed herself off to the world that sought to shun her, to destroy her, to make her a scarecrow girl with beads for eyes and straw for guts. They taught her to be strong, but Eluoan taught her to heal. The twins taught her to laugh and trained the corner of her mouth to twitch up, a sly smile upon dark lips as she hid behind books and water fountains.
She is not terrible. She is not made to be a sinner and take from the world until it breaks. "I am not so horrid to desecrate their memory in that way, but I do not care for their lives as I do yours. So no, Caine, I shall not kill you for caring and you shall not slay my physical body." An answer at last slips out, limbs nearly shivering, but from what? Does she shake for the emotion and adrenaline that courses through her? Do her wings tremble from her want of crying that she should not ever let out? There are sobs in her chest pounding at high gates that have been locked and overgrown with ivy and thorns.
At the last moment, the phoenix turns away. Her fire does not touch the weeds that grew where that garden of hope once stood. Instead, a numbness spreads. It begins in her belly, slow and deadly, killing off butterflies that once shook her to her core, burying bile that would make her fall to the ground with sickness and disgust and self loath, covering up the forges of anger and hiding them away. Dished head tilts, an analytical woman rising to the forefront, armor locked in place again. "I wonder, though, what holes will you leave when we part? Something has changed, I can taste it, I can finally feel it." And in those feelings she lets herself become anesthetized. Curtains are pulled shut again, everything is through a fog, a haze, a never-ending night setting itself upon her soul to feast and feast and feast until it is gorged on the pain of a girl who feels her losses like pounds of flesh from her own body. How hungry the beast is.
Its feast continues, and so too do her steps. Moira Tonnerre dips her head in thanks, "It would be a pleasure to have you by my side once more. You can tell me your theories on flight, and perhaps next time I should not fall from boulders so easily." There is the ghost of a smile, or maybe that is just the memory of it, as she turns hopelessly away from the mountains, seeming without direction once again atop these foreign cliffs. Brow furrows again, and she looks back with a raised brow. "Perhaps you should lead, no?"
@Caine | "moira" | notes: A CLOSER AT LAST and her sense of direction is impeccable, as always XD