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+---- Thread: [P] believe, and it's water from what deep well (/showthread.php?tid=3576)
believe, and it's water from what deep well - Septimus - 05-09-2019
BE BOLD, BE BOLD
BUT NOT TOO BOLD
Septimus feels ill-contained in this space, with its narrow, serpentine streets and artificial gleam. There are beautiful trinkets that line each and every passing stall, and they catch his eye as he walks, his wings jerked in at his sides and his steps hounded by the sort of tension that overtakes a wild animal in a cage; no amount of resplendent beauty can distract him from the way that the walls are too tight, the way that the roads guide his movements, that, even if he wanted to, he does not have enough space to fly in these back alleys. But they are beautiful, lined with moonstones that gleam like silver chips of fire in the light of cast-iron lanterns that cast the shape of strange, fantastical beings (dragons and trolls and phoenixes and chimeras and wisps) on the dark pathways. The bob in the winter wind, stirred by the chill. (Before he stepped into the city, when he could still see the sky, he saw distant tendrils of clouds on the horizon, a mar in an otherwise pristine sky; the court is not covered in snow tonight, but he suspects that it will be in the morning, so he might be forced to remain longer than he intended.)
The air is so thick with incense and woodsmoke that it makes his head spin, as though he is dizzy with a kind of intoxication – and the sound! All around, singers and minstrels make their way along the streets, and dancers twirl, so quick and dark in the dull light that they might as well be streams of silver and gold, characterized only by the precious gems and metals that so often adorn their graceful forms. He wonders if the markets are always like this, so bright and so much. He is allured by it. He is repulsed by it. His heart threatens to pound through his chest, sped by the noise and the cold and the overwhelming movement, wherever he looks.
(He thinks that this is another symptom of his newfound mortality. He is being so easily charmed and strung along, buffeted by his mortal blood; if he still had every piece of his soul, he would not have lingered nearly so long on this place, which is not altogether different than dazzling marketplaces he has visited before. But there is a gaping hole where his wildling blood used to run hot and brilliant red, and he is scrambling to fill it up with something, and his mortal half, like most mortal things, is grasping for heat and light, for a flickering beauty – anything to stave off that absence.)
His antlered head feels too heavy. He dips into a darker alleyway, breathing in the cold, and tries to clear his head. The light cast from the lanterns pulls at his legs like chains, but he stands stock-still in the shade as the first flakes of snow begin to fall, so fragile and small that you’d be forgiven for missing them entirely.
(He must ask himself what he regrets: his lost magic, and his lost fae-blood with it, or his stubborn pride that will not allow him to embrace the half of himself that is becoming his whole.)
@Nestle || your choice <3 || gregory orr, "his dream: the black tree/thirst"
"Speech!"
BUT NOT TOO BOLD
Septimus feels ill-contained in this space, with its narrow, serpentine streets and artificial gleam. There are beautiful trinkets that line each and every passing stall, and they catch his eye as he walks, his wings jerked in at his sides and his steps hounded by the sort of tension that overtakes a wild animal in a cage; no amount of resplendent beauty can distract him from the way that the walls are too tight, the way that the roads guide his movements, that, even if he wanted to, he does not have enough space to fly in these back alleys. But they are beautiful, lined with moonstones that gleam like silver chips of fire in the light of cast-iron lanterns that cast the shape of strange, fantastical beings (dragons and trolls and phoenixes and chimeras and wisps) on the dark pathways. The bob in the winter wind, stirred by the chill. (Before he stepped into the city, when he could still see the sky, he saw distant tendrils of clouds on the horizon, a mar in an otherwise pristine sky; the court is not covered in snow tonight, but he suspects that it will be in the morning, so he might be forced to remain longer than he intended.)
The air is so thick with incense and woodsmoke that it makes his head spin, as though he is dizzy with a kind of intoxication – and the sound! All around, singers and minstrels make their way along the streets, and dancers twirl, so quick and dark in the dull light that they might as well be streams of silver and gold, characterized only by the precious gems and metals that so often adorn their graceful forms. He wonders if the markets are always like this, so bright and so much. He is allured by it. He is repulsed by it. His heart threatens to pound through his chest, sped by the noise and the cold and the overwhelming movement, wherever he looks.
(He thinks that this is another symptom of his newfound mortality. He is being so easily charmed and strung along, buffeted by his mortal blood; if he still had every piece of his soul, he would not have lingered nearly so long on this place, which is not altogether different than dazzling marketplaces he has visited before. But there is a gaping hole where his wildling blood used to run hot and brilliant red, and he is scrambling to fill it up with something, and his mortal half, like most mortal things, is grasping for heat and light, for a flickering beauty – anything to stave off that absence.)
His antlered head feels too heavy. He dips into a darker alleyway, breathing in the cold, and tries to clear his head. The light cast from the lanterns pulls at his legs like chains, but he stands stock-still in the shade as the first flakes of snow begin to fall, so fragile and small that you’d be forgiven for missing them entirely.
(He must ask himself what he regrets: his lost magic, and his lost fae-blood with it, or his stubborn pride that will not allow him to embrace the half of himself that is becoming his whole.)
@Nestle || your choice <3 || gregory orr, "his dream: the black tree/thirst"
"Speech!"
RE: believe, and it's water from what deep well - Al'Zahra - 05-16-2019
“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
When the first snowflake falls her hooves are falling softer than that on stone. The fire is a veil around her shadow, cutting through it, stretching it, building around it a halo. Each reflected bit of firelight finds another flake of snow, soft as a raindrop, falling and pooling in the hollow channel of her back. She dances harder for the snow, loving the way nature feels like ice splintering her skin, even as the fires singe her nose when she strays too close the red.
The snow and the fire make her feel like a wild-thing made holy by a halo of orange-light. She feels a little like a jinn untamed, an ifrit made of ash and smoke. It feels like her skin is not a cage, but light rippling over soft, golden bones.
Snowflakes watch her move and cling to the song she's singing. They remember, the sky remembers, the earth at her shadow remembers. They all remember what it was like to be endless and open, with no buildings cutting through them like wounds.
Al'Zahra dances for the earth. Her legs are the bones of it rising through the dirt and stone.
She twines from fire to fire and the silk shrouds of bodies ripple across her like water when she strays too close to the merchants. The way her eyes shine when she looks at them says an apology her lungs have no extra air to say. They all smile at her. It's not the first time she's danced to close to them, or knocked their tables into a song of chiming glass and moaning wood.
On and on she moves through the markets like a river, and a snowflake, and a bit of molten gold carved from the dirt. She dances until the firelight changes to darkness that seems to catch each flake of snow and make it pause before falling. The snowflakes look like fireflies here, white and bright against all that blackness (and the last bit of firelight clinging violent to her).
She misses her wild halo the moments she turns to the stallion hanging between the darkness and the lamp-light. He looks handsome and ominous all at once. A smile curls her lips and her teeth look like a slash of moonlight against her black muzzle. “Hello.” Her voice rings softly just like the gold metal tapping against her shoulders begging her to move, to dance, to do anything but stand still.
But her eyes, they don't say hello. They shine like small fires, or maybe halos, and they say come into the light, the darkness is no place to be.
RE: believe, and it's water from what deep well - Septimus - 06-21-2019
BE BOLD, BE BOLD
BUT NOT TOO BOLD
He sees her, for a moment, before she approaches. Maybe he has seen her before, but he was too distracted by the scenery to really look – but now that he has seen her, Septimus does not know how he did not notice her before. She moves like the wind through the ancient branches of old-growth elms, each curve of her body the sinuous weave of a river; where are the shoals? The rapids? She flickers like a leaf, dried and reddened by coming autumn, but she is as sturdy as a stone, weathered but standing. And he thinks that she is like a little ember – his eyes are drawn to the way that she moves, the way that those golden chains swirl around her and catch in the gleaming light, the way that she is too many things at once. There is something childlike to the way that she is so unrestrained, the way that she dips to bring cheer to the passerby, the way that she steps too close to the flames-
She is not dancing when she comes to him; a barrier stands between them, long line that separates light from dark. There is something about her that makes him marvel. When she is not dancing, she seems an entirely different creature. She is beautiful, certainly, strong and lithe in the way that any good dancer should be, but she is not an elaborate beauty – she is painted in the hues of a simple bay, with only those golden chains, dripping from her forehead to weave around her sides and circling her ankles, to provide a dash of excitement. (Perhaps that is the attraction of it; if the rest of her were overwhelming, the chains would have no impact.) She smiles, her teeth bright as stars against the darkness of her muzzle, and says simply – softly, “Hello.”
But her gaze – it pulls him from the darkness.
Septimus draws forward, the rich bay of his coat gleaming like polished wood in the lamplight; he is the forest drawn forth into the city streets, with a shake of his antlered head that makes the emerald jewels adorning the points clink and gleam in the flickering light. He brushes by her, just close enough to feel the golden chains against his skin, and turns to watch her, with a tilt of his head and a faint smile. (His dark lips curl up, just barely – just enough to reveal the wolfish tips of his teeth.) “Hello,” he says, in turn, his voice quiet enough to match her own; and he looks her over again, and wonders. “Where did you learn to dance?”
He wonders - there is something about her that makes him wonder.
@Al'Zahra || <3 ||
"Speech!"
BUT NOT TOO BOLD
He sees her, for a moment, before she approaches. Maybe he has seen her before, but he was too distracted by the scenery to really look – but now that he has seen her, Septimus does not know how he did not notice her before. She moves like the wind through the ancient branches of old-growth elms, each curve of her body the sinuous weave of a river; where are the shoals? The rapids? She flickers like a leaf, dried and reddened by coming autumn, but she is as sturdy as a stone, weathered but standing. And he thinks that she is like a little ember – his eyes are drawn to the way that she moves, the way that those golden chains swirl around her and catch in the gleaming light, the way that she is too many things at once. There is something childlike to the way that she is so unrestrained, the way that she dips to bring cheer to the passerby, the way that she steps too close to the flames-
She is not dancing when she comes to him; a barrier stands between them, long line that separates light from dark. There is something about her that makes him marvel. When she is not dancing, she seems an entirely different creature. She is beautiful, certainly, strong and lithe in the way that any good dancer should be, but she is not an elaborate beauty – she is painted in the hues of a simple bay, with only those golden chains, dripping from her forehead to weave around her sides and circling her ankles, to provide a dash of excitement. (Perhaps that is the attraction of it; if the rest of her were overwhelming, the chains would have no impact.) She smiles, her teeth bright as stars against the darkness of her muzzle, and says simply – softly, “Hello.”
But her gaze – it pulls him from the darkness.
Septimus draws forward, the rich bay of his coat gleaming like polished wood in the lamplight; he is the forest drawn forth into the city streets, with a shake of his antlered head that makes the emerald jewels adorning the points clink and gleam in the flickering light. He brushes by her, just close enough to feel the golden chains against his skin, and turns to watch her, with a tilt of his head and a faint smile. (His dark lips curl up, just barely – just enough to reveal the wolfish tips of his teeth.) “Hello,” he says, in turn, his voice quiet enough to match her own; and he looks her over again, and wonders. “Where did you learn to dance?”
He wonders - there is something about her that makes him wonder.
@Al'Zahra || <3 ||
"Speech!"
RE: believe, and it's water from what deep well - Al'Zahra - 06-26-2019
“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
Her eyes watch him as a doe watches a wolf, deep and hooded with lashes quivering beneath the weight of dusty snow. Even then, when every inch of her is poised in the snow-light, there is still that promise of dance and that plea to come closer, come closer. Almost, almost do her lungs heave with a heady sigh when he moves out of the darkness, through that cleave of gray and snow dust, into the firelight with her. And when he shakes his alters, her neck quivers underneath her tangled mane with the urge to dance to the sound of his adornments hitting bones.
She wonders if in the spring his antler will grow bloody, and if he carves his mark into great oak trees before they shed from his head like broken, wounded crowns. Part of her thinks she would follow that trail through the woods. She would along dance along his map of blood and injured trees like a god dodging mortality even as they love it.
The urge to move when he brushes against her golden chain itches at every joint in her body. But she tells herself she is stone, and rock, and earth. She tells herself to wait, just a little longer, wait until the snow starts to fall like a heavy secret. And it does, it falls a little thicker on their backs and their hair looks dusted with diamonds when she lets the silence drag out just a little too long.
Each movement of her hooves feels heavy to her, like she's stepping into another skin when she turns to face him. Amusement, and a little bit of something terrible and golden, flashes in sparks of reflected firelight in her eyes. Her smile brightens to a suggestion that if she had wold teeth too she would wield them well. She lets her neck curl and her anklets chatter softly, like songbirds in a dark twilight forest.
Al' Zahra steps back, back towards the crowds ebbing and flowing like a tide around them. In the distance another song starts, the pitch of it soft but the faint words she can barely hear rise up something wild in her heart. She smiles for the ache of it, for all the blood rushing through her veins like lightning. Could he hear it, the way she's as loud as a rushing river beneath the secret, muted snow?
“Oh,” She pauses, inhales and steps back just a little more. “I could never tell you.” Each word rings below that distant, muted song, like a tolling bell instead of a praying one. Her tail flicks at her side and snow starts to move out of pattern around her, as if she knows the very rhythm of the world and has decided like a storm-cloud that it no longer suits her. “But I could show you.” The crowds starts to lap at the edges of her shadows. She smiles once more, like a doe learning how to be a wolf.
And then--
She lets the crowd sweep her away like a feather on the wind, or like a bit of sea-foam on the edge of the shore. But she lets her gold sing louder than the song, than the hundred hoof-steps around her. She is louder than the fire cracking and sparking in the middle of it all like a pyre of dangerous, hunger light. When she laughs it's crystal clear and louder than it all.
It begs him to follow.
@
RE: believe, and it's water from what deep well - Septimus - 07-04-2019
ECHOES, CAN YOU FIND THE CENTER IN AN ECHO?
She is quiet for what feels like an eternity, and, given Septimus’s age, he has quite nearly experienced one – but her eyes, the deep, beautiful gold of her eyes, which are more striking even than the chains that adorn her skin, speak enough, so he is willing to wait. It is not an uncomfortable silence, but it is an anticipatory one, and he wonders what she is waiting for.
He lingers, an antlered silhouette against the bright light of the streets – dark and observant, like something that could be seen in passing on a forest ridge.
When she moves, the dust of snow that gleams like precious stones along the curve of her spine and the rich waves of her hair tells him what she had waited for. (He wonders what he looks like, with snow to illuminate his dark tresses, the branching outlines of his antlers…) She is a performer, after all, and anything can be made a prop by a good one.
And – and, in his many years of travels, he does not think that he has ever encountered a dancer quite like her.
She smiles, something wicked but perhaps mischievous, when she turns to look at him. Her steps are slow and controlled, and he can barely hear the soft clink of her anklets and her golden chains. And then she is moving back towards the crowd, just as the music returns, another song that he has never heard before, in a language he never knew existed…
Oh, I could never tell you, she says, but I could show you, and he blinks, green-glass eyes widening a fraction, but has no time to debate what that might mean.
Septimus is no dancer. He has danced before, of course, in his innumerable years of existence, but he is not a dancer, like she is, and he is sure that he will look terribly clumsy alongside her fluid movements, whatever she has just offered to show him…and he is not sure that he will be able to understand it, even if she does. Understanding is not always an easy thing, after all. Sometimes it is hard. Demanding. But still his response comes immediately, without the barest scrap of hesitation, because his study has always been the study of sight, of watching the wild and the unknowable and trying to grasp meaning from them.
“Okay,” he says, easily, “show me.” But she’s gone into the crowd before she can answer, possibly before she can even hear his voice, a little strip of dark bay lost in the swell of moving bodies -
But for the sharp clink of her chains, he might have lost her. But for the sound of each graceful stride, the way that the gold metal crashes like a wave against itself, against the contours of her sides; and the sound of her dance is somehow still striking above the hum of voices, like the echo of a thousand little bells. He can barely see her, though he stands taller than most of the passerby, but he can hear her, so he follows -
and lets her wild laughter be his guide.
@Al'Zahra || fought with the tagging system for a while & finally concluded that I have no idea how her name works with it. ||
"Speech!"
She is quiet for what feels like an eternity, and, given Septimus’s age, he has quite nearly experienced one – but her eyes, the deep, beautiful gold of her eyes, which are more striking even than the chains that adorn her skin, speak enough, so he is willing to wait. It is not an uncomfortable silence, but it is an anticipatory one, and he wonders what she is waiting for.
He lingers, an antlered silhouette against the bright light of the streets – dark and observant, like something that could be seen in passing on a forest ridge.
When she moves, the dust of snow that gleams like precious stones along the curve of her spine and the rich waves of her hair tells him what she had waited for. (He wonders what he looks like, with snow to illuminate his dark tresses, the branching outlines of his antlers…) She is a performer, after all, and anything can be made a prop by a good one.
And – and, in his many years of travels, he does not think that he has ever encountered a dancer quite like her.
She smiles, something wicked but perhaps mischievous, when she turns to look at him. Her steps are slow and controlled, and he can barely hear the soft clink of her anklets and her golden chains. And then she is moving back towards the crowd, just as the music returns, another song that he has never heard before, in a language he never knew existed…
Oh, I could never tell you, she says, but I could show you, and he blinks, green-glass eyes widening a fraction, but has no time to debate what that might mean.
Septimus is no dancer. He has danced before, of course, in his innumerable years of existence, but he is not a dancer, like she is, and he is sure that he will look terribly clumsy alongside her fluid movements, whatever she has just offered to show him…and he is not sure that he will be able to understand it, even if she does. Understanding is not always an easy thing, after all. Sometimes it is hard. Demanding. But still his response comes immediately, without the barest scrap of hesitation, because his study has always been the study of sight, of watching the wild and the unknowable and trying to grasp meaning from them.
“Okay,” he says, easily, “show me.” But she’s gone into the crowd before she can answer, possibly before she can even hear his voice, a little strip of dark bay lost in the swell of moving bodies -
But for the sharp clink of her chains, he might have lost her. But for the sound of each graceful stride, the way that the gold metal crashes like a wave against itself, against the contours of her sides; and the sound of her dance is somehow still striking above the hum of voices, like the echo of a thousand little bells. He can barely see her, though he stands taller than most of the passerby, but he can hear her, so he follows -
and lets her wild laughter be his guide.
@Al'Zahra || fought with the tagging system for a while & finally concluded that I have no idea how her name works with it. ||
"Speech!"
RE: believe, and it's water from what deep well - Al'Zahra - 08-10-2019
“both beauty and terror, without beginning, without end.”
For a moment--
Because there is always a moment ticking in her heart. A moment in which small pieces of her body are dying, and being remade, and dying again. And there is a moment in which she hangs off the lip of some spectral, incandescent life is she already starting to forget.
So for a moment, in which she is dancing and flitting around that deep well, she debates letting the crowd open up and swallow her whole. Each step she's taking, each sharp peel of metal and flesh, is carrying her downstream to that place where she is smoke, and soot, and magic. All the bodies around her feel like jagged mountains. Al'Zahra feels like the wind ripping through the crags and dead pines, wicked except for the way she brings snow, seed and life to stone.
A thing resting in the coal-dark core of her blooms until her laughter starts to sound like the harpsichord bleating a sad eulogy somewhere in the center of all this snow and flesh. The moment passes, and she turns all her wildness back towards the stallion like a doe who has just found a stream in the desert. At first she is nothing more than a stray touch along his hip, a breeze in his feathers, and
another reckless reveler pressing too close and too feverishly against everything.
At first she stays the wind though the mountain-pass, seeded with thick with a promise of spring. Then her laughter goes as silent as a fog.
“The secret,” she says when she emerges from the crowd to press her ribs to a wing, “is to forget that you are a tangle of sharp bone trapped beneath skin.” Her gold ripples when she tucks her nose to the place where his throat meets a tangle of mane hiding some secret beneath. Each frosted tip of her begins to thaw. Her tail draws quick patterns in the drifts of snow forming in the places where one body ends and another starts to begin. Every inch of her begs to be closer, to find what is looming up from that life she's missing.
The music turns over like a leaf for rain. The snow picks up and somewhere above them the wind is starting to howl between stone walls and dead branches. A drum starts to dream of skin and it vibrates up her bones like an earthquake. Al'Zahra starts to think of flying, of clouds reaching up to run fingers over sparrow feathers. “And then, when you start to think you are only make of smoke and wind, soot and seed--” She runs her nose across the side of his face before she pulls away.
“Then you start to dance.” Her laughter this time feel less like a wildcat lumbering in a jungle. It feels like fire.
And for a moment she is more the promise of a dance than the steps to one.
@