little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.

They take her whip at the entrance, as if a girl with a strip of leather is anything like a threat to a Ghost. 

Elif has only worn it for a few days but already she feels bare without it, as though it were her alaja they had taken. How slight the weight had been at her hip, and how comforting. Even the wind is left behind at the door, the last breath of a breeze cool against her cheek before the throne room doors are pulled closed behind her. 

She does not look back. Instead, cat-wary and hawk-proud, she watches the silver king through eyes that spark green and bright, copper thrown on a fire. In this moment she looks less like a girl and more like a dragon, lean-shouldered and narrow-faced, her wings tucked tight against ribs stacked like barrel-slats. Elif is hungry, but she has been hungry before; she is thirsty, but that is nothing new to a Solterran daughter of sand and searing sun. 

More than anything she is angry, and while that is nothing new, either, it feels new to her. It feels like a rage that could eat up the city. 

But there is nowhere for it to go now, with guards on either side of her and a monstrous king before her. It only lives in her eyes instead, and the snap of her tail, and the wide flare of her nostrils as she stares. 

And oh, what there is to see! There is no part of him that could belong to the desert; his is a silver that could only belong to the moon, to cold starlight on a metal blade, to bones picked clean at the bottom of the sea. And his eyes, blue and cold enough to make her shiver where she stands, to make her hot blood steam and hiss in her veins. Elif does not see his monster but she fears it nonetheless, and her fear makes her hate a little stronger. 

She forgets what she had come to say, as she paces as near as the guards will let her. She forgets petitions to let citizens flee if they choose, or pleas to stop putting a chokehold on food and water and the very hours of the day. 

Instead she curls her lip, and arches her neck, and thinks of the way it feels to have the sun on her back, her wings spread wide, high enough and fast enough that nothing could hope to touch her. And when she speaks, it carries some small portion of the heat of that feeling. 

“If you’re only trying to kill us, then you should do it more quickly.” 




 
@Raum  ... yeah take that! xD

 


She comes in from the desert, with the winds still licking at her heels. She turns the shadows of his throne room to sunlight and warmth. Yet she is more. Her skin is the red of fire, it licks at the walls, blowing heat with every stride she takes toward his throne. Her wings sit tight to her sides and they are the dark of shadows, the shadows that already creep forward to touch the parts of her that do not burn red.
 
As Rhoswen is sand-fire, so too is this girl. She is angular and slim, her ribs a contour of bone along her sides, her hips pointed and stark. Raum has walked to the songs of rumbling stomachs, heard the pleas of those begging for food, saw the ones who resist, fighting through the barricades renouncing their loyalty to Solterra. As he drinks in this hawk-girl, he wonders if she too is here to renounce her loyalty.
 
She advances, slim and fast. Her black legs shift through swirling shadow and she is everything he is not. Raum is the silver of the moon, the pool of mercury beautiful and dangerous. He waits for her to stop, she has nothing, a whip once strapped to her side is now kept by the guard at the door. He watches the girl with eyes as sharp as her own, he wonders if this strip of girl will strike the king. He wonder too if he would do anything if she did…
 
Raum’s blue eyes slip idly from the guard and the whip he holds, ready to use it against the girl if needed. What would it feel like, to have your own weapon used against you? Raum didn’t know, Acton never got his strike in…
 
If you are only trying to kill us, then you should do it more quickly.
 
Her words are cutting they are the cry of a hawk circling before the kill. Yet she is just a hawk before the lion that is Raum. Languidly he watches her stalk forward, he watches her fury blaze and her words aim for him like daggers. They land as needles, laying small pricks along the silver of his skin. They fall away to nothing and the king is so greatly unmoved.
 
He regards this warrior-girl, with her band about her throat, her neck long and lean, her hair shaved short. She is tribal and wild.
 
“Now why would I want to do that?” He asks in a murmur, soft as silk and dangerous as rope in the hands of a hangman. Raum stirs, sitting up, rising like a lion awoken by her clarion call. “He moves toward her, his footsteps almost silent. He advances and advances until he stands close enough to taste the hunger upon her breath. He is silver to her red, the cool to douse the heat of her. She is not the only bird with eyes bright and keen, his Crow head tilts and he turns as black as the night she so despises of him, his eyes turn dark as a raven’s. “But what if I want to break the spirit of the people? What then, Elif?” Her name falls, full of knowing, full of every piece of information he knows of her. “May I continue to do it slowly? A will does not always break at the first time of asking…”

---

@Elif

little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.

He stands in a beam of light that makes his skin gleam like a dead star. The sunlight pours in from a dome of glass in the ceiling, placed so that Solis’ light might ever anoint the sitting sovereign; dust motes hang suspended in its shaft.

If the sun were truly the light of Solis, she thinks, that shaft of light would become a spear. What was the history of Solterra if it was not smiting, if it was not vengeance? So much red blood has been spilled on the desert’s sand - perhaps that is why nothing grows. A thousand years of death has salted the ground. Elif tells herself that Raum is nothing new.

Oh, but she does not quite believe it. His cool eyes do not waver when she lashes him with her tongue; she thinks of standing fast before the bay man’s griffin and straightens her shoulders a little more. Her thin tail snaps behind her, the only betrayal of her livewire nerves save for how wide her eyes are, how bright they shine.

She does not know what she expects, other than punishment. It is not to be answered so softly that the robust beat of her heart nearly drowns out the words. When he begins to move, her nostrils flare and her skin shivers as though it is a lion before her and not a man, but still the girl gives no ground; instead she shakes out her wings, feels the feathers brush along her dappled ribs. She tries to time her heart to beat with each fall of his feet on tile but it will not stop racing, running ahead of her, begging her to act. Elif is not a girl good at waiting.

And then he is upon her. For a moment, with her neck arched like a knowing cobra and his fine-boned face only inches from her own, she thinks she should strike. Oh, she is not so foolish to think she could land a fatal blow, but even to draw blood from the thin skin of his nose might be enough, each drop more precious to her than a ruby.

But then he turns black, darker than all the shadows in Solterra. Solis does not love him, she thinks, even as fear makes her tense like a hare below an eagle’s shadow, and I cannot fight if I am dead. The only way away from his eyes is to close her own, and she does, and swallows, and feels her throat tighten against her alaja. Elif recites all the prayers and blessings written there, and when her eyes open again her expression is as brash and challenging as a drawn blade.

“Come now, king,” she says, unwilling to sully her mouth with his name. His use of her own only lays a smile curved like a scimitar along her dark lips. Has she not always wanted to be known? “You are no fool, you know Solterra’s history. We have been asked to break so many times. But the will of this people is a blade, and if you think to shatter it then you should know the heat of our blood and our god will only forge it into something new, and better-suited for killing.”

She has never thought herself a talker - Elif has ever preferred to react to her conflicts with hooves and wings and teeth - but now her tongue serves her where the rest of her body cannot. Though she is smaller than him, she does not feel it now; she leans forward, she resettles her wings again and the red feathers along her shoulders look like old blood.

“What makes you think you will succeed when each before you has failed?”


 
@Raum 

 



She smiles like a blade and he feels it like a caress across his cheek. Fight harder. He might whisper to her. Aim for the throat. But he does not say anything, not when she is talking like a girl not used to chains, to a parched throat. He studies her, as if she might be his world, as if she is but one spark that could ignite the whole of Novus with a word.
 
Raum feels her anger and it is sharp and violent and so very proud. Behind her bright, bright eyes his blood is shed, only droplets, barely payment for the Blood Sea he is making of his fallen victims. Each of their deaths is a river of red running into a sea bright as the rubies she longs to shed. He knows the last river to bleed into the Sea would be his, of course, but it would not be at this girl’s doing.
 
Her words are a torrent, petrol pouring upon the tile of his throne room. He would give her a match to see what sacrifice she would make for her people. “Then I wait to see what killing weapon your people will become. But for now all I see is a court divided, full of those who only care of themselves. They do not care for their dead queen, they do not care for a new king, they do not care for the suffering of their compatriots…. You are a self-centered race, I wait for the day when you manage to unite into one weapon, where your people actually care enough for one another.  For now, you can all hunger and thirst with your backs to the king, or join me and each other and drink and eat until your ribs are not splinters in your sides.”
 
“I am already succeeding and you are proof.” His eyes run like a stick along her ribs that jut like roots from beneath the thin desert skin. She is the tree gasping for water. “What has brought you here? Hunger? Thirst?” A corvid gaze has his head tilting, has his lips setting hard as a beak. He would be a scavenger to her carcass, the creature there to peck, peck, peck, picking away until her bones are bleached and alone, the rest of her gone.
 
“You have a loud voice, a bright spirit, but I have yet to hear any words of value from you. Come on,” He murmurs, baiting her, chiding her, mocking her. His voice is little more than a whisper, yet it echoes like thunder between them, it sparks like lightning and the word rends itself beneath its force. “The only one here misjudging their importance, is you.”
 
He turns from her, stepping into Solis’ ray of light, he stands for a moment the black hole opening its jaws wide, ready to swallow the sun. He looks up, “You misjudge your gods too – where is he, Elif? Where is his righteous anger descending to forge you all into something better?” He moves in the light, smooth as spilled ink. He spills up the steps and to the Solterran throne. At the top of the chancel steps he turns to regard her like a god from the heights of his heavens. “You are alone. Now come, beg for your people.”

---

@Elif

little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.

She is so relieved when he does not touch her.

Elif doesn’t realize she had been bracing for it until the moment does not come; she is not sure what might have happened, then. Would she shiver, would she weep, to feel that cold touch on her burnished coat? Or - more foolish yet! - would she strike him, draw a line of red across that silver, and so forfeit her brief life?

But her end is not met yet. (Nor can it be - she has yet to find the man who slew her brother, though it is no longer the most important thing on her horizon with Solterra smoking, burning yet again.) Instead the king is only talk, each word the touch of a wetted blade, made to prick the blood to her skin. If only he knew how close to the surface it runs already! Always she is flushed with it, fists up and ready to punch at the first perceived slight. She is so high-strung now that she is, perversely, almost calm - trembled to stillness. Her eyes flash like a blaze upon summer grasses, her ears turn back, her mane is bristled like a cat’s back -

and yet she cannot disagree. Oh! She loves her people, she thinks them the best, the boldest, the fiercest of Novus, but ever have they been tigers prepared to turn on each other. She is silent in the face of his commentary, her gaze the only thing that moves - across his face, over the guards, around the throne room so open, so still, so full of cold gold. How many times has it been threatened with burning?

It is not until he speaks of their hunger - their starvation - that her gaze snaps back to his, that her ears flatten more fully yet. Her sparse tail snaps behind her, a whip against her hocks, when his blue eyes rake across her figure. She knows she has never been much to look at; she is not ashamed to stand, plain and thorny and thin, before any man or any king. But to have him judge her, or think her already so weak -

“I could leave if I wanted,” she says, and stirs one wing against her side. “It is not for my sake I stay.” At once she regrets it - this madman could have her wings clipped or torn away, she would not for a moment put it past him - but she only shakes her head when he continues, his voice dropping to a whisper that ghosts along her skin.

Oh, her eyes burn at his back when he turns! He has no clue how many times she has been told some version of how she is misjudging her importance, how she is only a girl (and a poor one at that), how she would be better minding her too-sharp looks and too-sharp tongue. Almost more than anything else this goads her to fury, to hear from the mouth of this murderous king what she has heard her whole life from her mother.

It is much easier (though it should not be, not to a proper pious girl) to talk of her god.

In silence she snarls when he invokes Solis, and takes a step forward after him - though she is quickly stopped by a movement from the guards on either side of the room. Otherwise she might have followed him, as he gives his soliloquy, and struck him at last. Instead she can only watch, burning and burning, as Solis fails yet again to strike him down. “I do not know where he is.” She bites it out and it is bitter on her tongue, but had she truly expected anything else? Well she remembers the day she saw her god, jesting, laughing, proud, like any other Solterran boy. Like any other Solterran fool.

Solis will not help them win this. She need not go to a priest to know it.  

Her mouth is a drawn line when he turns back to her, but up and up her chin tilts when she answers him. “I came here to beg.” More bitter words; she does not even know how. Did it involve tears, did it involve falling to the marble on her knees? Impossible. “But I see you are unreasonable - mad. I heard you were an orphan. Is that what you wish, then? To make orphans of the rest of us? Already you have killed the queen our mother-” Abruptly she falls silent, struck by a realization. There had been no pyre for Seraphina, to send her soul to the heavens on flame and on smoke. There had been no vigil, no offerings made. And when she had flown over the battlefield, to see for herself that this madman’s words were true, she had seen no body.  

Elif is different, now. Grief stills her, quenches the blaze of her anger and pride. Grief, and shame. When she continues her voice is softer, and sorry. “Where is her body, your…your majesty? It is our custom to burn it. I - I will beg for that.” Even if she must grind her teeth to dust to do it.



 
@Raum 

 


She is wild before him. Her blood is vital in her veins. If he spilled it upon the throne room floor would it fall hissing like a riled cat? Or clang like bells set peeling with drama and discord?
 
As he watches her, the rise of the hairs along her slim back, the press of her lips, tight, tight to the blunt lines of her teeth, he thinks he could admire her. Yet he enjoys bettering her more. To see her cowed, to see her weak – is that not better still?
 
Her blood surges as strong as Rhoswen, yet Elif is the sun’s heat beneath which he lies like a cat, content and warmed. But Rhoswen makes him Icarus and always she has him flying to close, always she burns him and he bears so many scars for loving her. As he moves in the light, he wonders if Elif can see them there, glowing black beneath the silver of his skin.
 
She talks of leaving, Elif does. She snaps her tail against her hocks and stands tall. There is no mane to fly defiantly about her slender throat. There is no wind to use it to tug her to the door. She is straight and angular, small and slim but she stands tall and rigid and tries to become a giant from the torso of an ant.
 
“Then go, Elif.” Raum says, as if bored of her. The guards stand sentinel, they do not move, they do not flinch or even stir the smallest millimeter. They would not stop her if she left, not when their king has told her she could leave. But oh there is something daring in their king’s eyes, the soldiers see it and they know it. Raum does not hide it from Elif, he wants to see if she is brave enough, he wants to see if she dare excuse herself from the king’s company, if he might let her leave and keep each piece of herself that she brought in.
 
He might take from her everything. “You value your tongue too much.” Raum says as soft as a kiss, as soft as a blade lying between her teeth. “I would be careful how you use it when you do not know where your god is, when he does not know or care for you enough to come and save you…”
 
The king turns from her, releasing her from a silver gaze of chains and ice. He looks out the window, to the deserts that roll like waves, like crimson waters swelling with leviathan backs.
 
She says she came here to beg and he agrees, “You did. And yet your tongue does you a disservice and your knees are still too clean.” He does not look to her, his attention is on the workers so far below his window. Does he make them orphans? Does he wish to make them all orphans? He might make Solterra great, or he might not. He might wish to turn it into ruins, or he might not…
 
“Your queen,” Raum addresses Elif’s last question at last, “Is buried in the Steppe.” He lies with the ease of water pouring along a river’s path. “I believe it is now covered in gems and flowers. Good luck finding her grave to offer her respect.”

---

@Elif

little pilgrim
the Indian's axed your scalp.

He gives her nothing but more insults, more words spoken soft as dull silver but that are meant to cut oh, so sharply. When he threatens her she is at least wise enough not to respond, not to rise to his provoking, not to even tip one black ear back as a sign of her bright hate. Neither does she sigh in relief (though she wants to, even as her heart still hammers like a jackrabbit’s steps, away and away) when he turns to the window. It is the hardest thing she has ever done, to do nothing, but dying here would only satisfy the expectations of everyone who told her she was too rash, too foolish, too bullheaded.

At last he speaks of Seraphina. Only now does even her breathing pause, her heartbeat jump - she stares at him, the cold arch of his neck and the sharp line of his cheek - and it does not occur to her that he might not be giving the truth. What lie could be worse than a body that could not be burned?

Elif can’t bring herself to thank him. Stiffly she bows, more stiffly turns away. She waits for the cold burn of his gaze on her back, but it does not come; she forces herself not to glance back at him, to see if he still stares out the window like there are ghosts all around him and he is the only real thing.  

It pains Elif to leave having said nothing, done nothing, to move Raum at all - not even to anger. The man seemed as unchangeable as an ancient statue in the desert, immune to all but time and the slow scouring of wind and sand. She might have wondered if he could feel anything at all, were her heart not full to bursting itself. She brims with grief, with anger, with confusion and dread. As her whip is returned, tightly coiled, the maelstrom within is already affecting her magic; a breeze finds her, riffles along her feathers and her short hair, carrying with it the scent of the winter desert.

If the guards note this strange wind they say nothing, and she stares them down with her angry green eyes until her weapon is secured once more on her hip, feeling like nothing so much as a viper, coiled and ready to strike.

But there is no fight for her here, not today.

Not until after she sees the Steppe for herself.


 
@Raum  worst closer ever D:

 

He does not turn from the window to see her bow, yet he hears the scuff of her feet, like dragon wings, across the tiled floor. There too is the rustle of her breath, the way she holds it, the way it betrays the beat of her heart and the river of her thoughts. It catches on thoughts like stones and rushes forward as her decision is made.
 
Still the King watches Solterran business play out before him. Citizens move like ants through the maze of buildings and shops. There are queues for food and water and idly he wonders if he might see Elif join one. The snarl of her stomach implied so.
 
The creak of leather shatters the silence of the room, it rides above the click of her sand-worn hooves. If there are words upon her lips, he does not know them and neither does he care to hear them voiced.
 
There is rustling the sounds of weapons being sheathed and replaced upon her person. Then the door clicks shut and all is so utterly silent. Raum’s gaze tips up toward where the Steppe lies before returning to the floor. The girl emerges a thin line, a slender ant, her weapons glittering wickedly in the light. She walks forward and he utters softly to his guards, “Follow her and let me know what she finds.”

---

@Elif