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+----- Thread: [P] a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow (/showthread.php?tid=3738)
a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow - Seraphina - 06-18-2019
STILL I DREAM MYSELF BLOODIED, MY BODY SWALLOWED
my body grass-stained & longing for the treeline
Salt licks at Seraphina’s forelegs as she stands in the surf, her stare cast out to sea. Dark waves roll on the horizon, far less pristine than the electric blue things that lap at the shore; she thinks that she can see the bob of a tentacle or the shape of something that is like a dolphin or a whale but is somehow wrong in texture rise out of the tumultuous surface, but it is otherwise as grey and murky as she expects of the Terminus, crowned by thin lines of milk-white foam that she can see even from a distance. There is not much foam at the shore; in spite of her stirring, and in spite of the roll of the waves against the sand, the water is largely undisturbed, and it is so blue and so clear that she feels like it could be artificial. Silver fish dart beneath the surface, some swimming dangerously – rebelliously – close to her legs, which stand like pillars sprouting out of the sand. The water is warm, although it is winter, and it would be soothing if everything inside of Seraphina did not burn – burn like a forest fire, left to rage out of control, not like a warm hearth. She does not burn with love. She burns. Everything inside of her is burning to the ground, and it leaves behind nothing but ash and smoke. She used to think that, like the silver of her coat, she was those things that trail after fire-
No. She can be the flame.
But, for now, she is waiting. Ereshkigal circles lazily above her head, barely a dark blip in the cloudless sky; she considers sending the vulture ahead, to scout for Raum, but a moment of consideration makes her decide against it. The island is likely full of dangers, if it is anything like Tempus’s maze, and much as the demon unnerves her and angers her in even measures, Seraphina needs her. If nothing else, she can serve as her eyes as she advances on the forest. She only knows how to navigate open landscapes, and the wild forests that the island seems to promise, full of strange creatures and even stranger magic, will likely be no aid in her efforts to navigate – and, more importantly, to track down her targets.
Crows. Ravens. Gods. She isn’t sure if the discrepancy – the divine and the monstrous – is hilarious or heart wrenching; and, given the magic of her mortal targets and the ugly, wicked feeling that knots up in her stomach when she thinks of the gods, she is beginning to wonder if there is a discrepancy or a line at all.
This much she knows: the gods can’t die, but men can.
When she hears the sound of hooves on sand, she turns to look over her shoulder, the dark yellow of her hood falling back to let her long tangles of white hair, half-undone from their braids, flutter loose in the ocean breeze. She takes in the sight of the Dusk king, with his star-spangled pelt and his deep brown eyes, and she thinks that maybe he is a bit older than when she last saw him – a bit wiser, or a bit stronger, or a bit more determined. Seraphina watches him, haggard and waning, with the eyes of a starving thing, and, when she speaks, it is only his name.
“Asterion.”
@Asterion || I wasn't planning to start this so soon, but Tempus,,, chose for me.
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
RE: a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow - Asterion - 06-23-2019
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
It isn’t difficult to find her, now that he has met Ereshkigal.
The vulture is like no bird he’s seen, and the way it circles above her is as clear as a spotlight - and a little chilling, a little ironic, given what the spiraling of the species usually means. That there is a dead thing, somewhere below.
The surf washes up against his hocks, a warm kiss of foam, and for the moment the waves are the only sound he can hear. He’s grateful for it, this momentary calm; he has never been a fan of crowds, and the impromptu counsel at the base of the statue only heightened his worry, asking far more questions than it answered. If this is all only another game of the gods, then he is sick of playing. The king has no interest in relics, and the only time he concerns himself with is that which Florentine can cut to pieces with her dagger; he only wonders, then, what the rules are, and what the payment for losing.
Bits of strange things washed up by the surf catch his eye, seen only briefly beneath the glass-like cover of the shallow water: jellyfish with pulsing blue bodies trailing tentacles like streamers, and starfish with too many points, and shells that were inhabited by no creatures he can name. The water itself is the most familiar thing, a lullaby he intimately knows, but even the Terminus is small comfort here. Too many voices have joined its lulling tongue, and silently Asterion edges further up the sand.
She has been in his sights for a while, now, but he still draws and holds a breath when she turns to face him, and her hood falls back, and her hair falls free and thick as the long lines of froth at the breakers. She has always had an intensity to her gaze, but the way she looks at him now makes him want to shiver. He had thought it odd, the pairing of her and that red-eyed, mad-eyed harbinger that had been on her back, but now he wonders. And then there are the marks across her cheek, the spacing and length of a rake of claws, all filled in with gold.
“Seraphina,” he says, and her name is weighty on his tongue - but oh, he is surprised by how good it feels to say. “This island must suit you.” For here you stand, alive, he does not add. Neither does he smile, though something inside him is unfolding great, dark wings, and rising up, and opening its mouth to sing (in wonder, or in warning, or in fierce and crooked joy?) -
“Does he know?”
That you are alive. That you are here. That you are coming to kill him.
@
Asterion.
RE: a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow - Seraphina - 06-23-2019
MY BODY, THE QUIET GRAVE
it's the difference between drowning and burning
He comes from the sea.
Submerged, but only up to his hocks – there is something to the way that the saltwater moves around his long, slender legs that seems strange to Seraphina. Dusk has always been closest to the tides, with their sharp-toothed kelpies and their shamans. He looks, she thinks, like a character from a Terrastellan folktale, with the soft dappling of newborn stars on his hide and the wash of salt water against his dark skin. She wonders, sometimes, what she is becoming when the anger burns up inside of her, red and blinding, and she feels like she is more magic than she is Seraphina. (A monster, perhaps, that roams the Mors, with a mind to kill and a scarred face – a story told to scare small children so they do not wander.) She wonders if there is something in Asterion like that, something that comes with carrying some great weight upon his back – or if it is simply a trick of the tides, another test by the island.
He regards her with something that is almost like worth. “Seraphina.” And oh, it is a relief to hear her name on someone’s lips – even someone she barely knows. “This island must suit you.” There is a smile that curves across her dark maw, then, but it is not a pleasant thing; it is bitter and hollow and aching, a sort of resignation.
“It seems so,” she says, simply. “We are both things that should not be.” Ereshkigal is proof enough of that; the vulture came to collect her soul because she should have died but did not. (So many things she should have done! And, the old echo - you could have prevented this.) Seraphina regards him with a certain curiosity, wondering if he will make real his suggestion at the statue. She has never disliked Asterion, but, when she met him, she wondered what would become of him – pensive and depressed and lacking in conviction, as far as she could see. But, as she looks at the starswept bay now, his hooves buried in the tide, she sees something different. “I’m not sure that I ever congratulated you on your ascension – you seem to be doing quite well.” It has aged him, she thinks. Asterion has always been older than her, but, when they met, she thought him practically a boy. He seems wiser for it – but there is something crueler and harder about that wisdom, inflicted by the near-loss of his sister and tested in the absolute devastation of his nation during the disasters. And all for the tests of a god.
When she nearly died, she cried to Solis. He seems to have answered her, though his voice is silent; but he gave her a knife, and he showed her how to use it.
She takes that to mean that they have no need of gods, now – good. She tires of them anyways.
There is warmth in Asterion, but he is not smiling. There is a gleam in her eyes, and she does not think that she should like it, but she does; and she knows that she should not like the way he asks his next question, but it momentarily satiates the gnawing, thrashing beast that has taken up residence inside of her chest, that thing which longs for blood. (Comforted, perhaps, in that she is not the only one being driven towards terrible things.)
“Does he know?” It requires little contemplation to understand what Asterion is asking.
“No,” comes her response, cold and surgical as a knife; somehow, her presence has escaped the Blood King’s notice, as much trouble as she must have been to his newborn regime already, “and I intend to use that to my advantage.” What Raum did not expect he could not prepare for or avoid; she had the element of surprise, and now was an ideal time to push it, gods or no gods. (She cannot see it, but she feels Ereshkigal smile above her, her mouth all full of razors.)
She watches him with a gaze that is weighty as ocean depths, clawing at the shore – to drag down below the surface, into the dark. “Will you help me hunt him, Asterion?”
After all – every ruler must learn to kill.
@Asterion || <3
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
RE: a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow - Asterion - 06-27-2019
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
If they knew one another better, more than names and faces seen twice - once in the candle-lit dark of a long-ago festival and once in the magic-lit dark of a collapsed clearing on a god’s mountain - then they might recognize the monster opening its wide mouth within them both.
Or maybe it is easier this way, when there is little familiar between them but their names and the rumors that surround them like vultures or crows. For all his own ignorance, for all his boyish uncertainty, Asterion has always recognized power when he sees it, and he sees it now in Seraphina the way he had from the first in Calliope. No matter how still she stands, no matter how poised with her half-loose hair billowing around her like roiling stormclouds, there is a kinetic energy he can feel as he nears. And there is a similar thing in him, yawning like a vortex, pulling like a whirlpool, asking to be fed or freed (he is not sure which).
When she answers him, her smile is as familiar as his own, for how often he has worn a similar one. But he doesn’t wear it now. Instead he only regards her, shifting his weight back, feeling the way the waves tug and tug at the grains of sand beneath his feet. “And who’s to say this shouldn’t be?” he says, quietly. For if she still holds to the gods of Novus, then she must accept that it is Tempus’s will for the island to exist; and if she does not, then she, like him, must know that for magic there is no should and should not. That the only law is what is, and what can be.
But Asterion knows, too, that whatever journey she has taken - whatever has changed her, put that half-wild look in her eye and those golden scars on her cheek and took her country and gave it to a killer - is not something he can understand. It is not his story.
Though he may yet help with the ending.
At her congratulations he wants to laugh, but instead he only touches his muzzle to his chest, smiles in a way that does not reach his eyes. “I’m not sure the circumstances are worth congratulations,” he says, “but thank you. It’s an honor to serve such a people.” He makes no comment on the other; she doesn’t need told that he is doing only as well as he can, that every decision has frayed something new in him, that no matter that Terrastella has at last recovered from the floods he still feels as though a sinkhole might open beneath him at any moment. That sometimes it would be a relief, to be swallowed up. Maybe she would understand.
There are no gulls, on this stretch of beach; anything that has called in a tongue he would recognize has long since fled, leaving only the sounds of the sea, and the wind, and their breathing. No, she says, and he is glad. He does not shy away from her gaze - almost finds comfort in it, for he has felt that same pulling for so long - and if there is anything left of the dreamer in him now it is beaten back, far from the shore, somewhere the waters are not so cold, and cruel, and hungry.
“Of course,” he says. And then a confession, his only concern (not for the blood to be on their hands, not for the wrath they may face): “I don’t know how to keep everyone safe. In the meantime.”
And perhaps there is some part of him that is still a boy, still a dreamer - for he should know by now there is no such thing as safe.
@
Asterion.
RE: a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow - Random Events - 07-24-2019
A Random Event Has Occurred!
The iguana knows that he does not belong on the sand. But there are horses up ahead and he knows they do not really belong here either. And actually, if he knew how to form a language horses could understand, he would ask them how any of them have gotten to his place.
Still, even though he knows it shouldn't, the sand feels like home beneath his tail. And the flies are sweet and fat on his tongue. Each meal takes him closer and closer to the horses whispering between each other. He understands, like any creature made to hide in the jungle, what secrets look like when they take the shape of flesh and bone. Maybe if he could speak he could tell the two horses all about secrets and islands that appear out of nothing.
But he cannot.
So the iguana that is almost bright enough to be called yellow (or maybe newborn gold), only pauses and cocks his head at the other creatures on his shore. His tail whips at the sand as if to pass along a warning. This he does three times. Thump, thump, thump, like a fading heartbeat.
Each bit of sand that rises into the air turns into a butterfly that flies out towards the sea instead of the treeline.
The iguana turns away and forgets why he is he walking on sand instead of jungle bark.
Still, even though he knows it shouldn't, the sand feels like home beneath his tail. And the flies are sweet and fat on his tongue. Each meal takes him closer and closer to the horses whispering between each other. He understands, like any creature made to hide in the jungle, what secrets look like when they take the shape of flesh and bone. Maybe if he could speak he could tell the two horses all about secrets and islands that appear out of nothing.
But he cannot.
So the iguana that is almost bright enough to be called yellow (or maybe newborn gold), only pauses and cocks his head at the other creatures on his shore. His tail whips at the sand as if to pass along a warning. This he does three times. Thump, thump, thump, like a fading heartbeat.
Each bit of sand that rises into the air turns into a butterfly that flies out towards the sea instead of the treeline.
The iguana turns away and forgets why he is he walking on sand instead of jungle bark.
Each participant will be awarded +100 signos for encountering a Random Event! How you reply is up to you; feel free to NPC the forgetful iguana.
Enjoy!
RE: a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow - Seraphina - 08-13-2019
HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE GUILTY, TO ABSOLVE THEMSELVES
does the sky ever let me out of its sight? does shame leave the body? mine crawls up my throat nightly, asking for water.
To her remark, he grants her a look that she doesn’t know how to read and asks, softly, And who’s to say this shouldn’t be? There is a part of her that wants to fight him on that point, but she doesn't. She just watches the waves.
“You’re right,” she concedes, which isn’t quite an answer, because she knows what he is getting at – magic has no law, and neither do the gods, “of course. But I have…spent my entire life in Novus – I remember when things were simpler. I am worried at what it means that the gods have reappeared, and that these displays of magic have come with them.” She remembers a time when magic was a genuine rarity, when the gods were little more than figments, suspended somewhere in the sky; she remembers a time before the maze, when the worst things that Seraphina had to worry about were corrupt noblemen and Denoctian soldiers. Those problems were normal, and she knew how to handle them. Even Raum was not unfathomable. He could die, like any other man.
But Seraphina has never heard of gods dying, and she doesn’t know if she wants them dead anyways. She has never heard of magic dying, either, or so much as being fought – not in its raw form, like this.
These are unknown waters.
He thanks her, but the smile he gives her doesn’t feel like a smile; it rings hollow. The gesture is more grim than anything, and she shifts in place, grains of sand grinding beneath her hooves. It occurs to her that she hasn’t heard much about Florentine, beyond that she was hurt and that’s why Asterion took over in her stead; her expression darkens with something that’s not-quite shame and not-quite guilt. “How is Florentine?” She thinks of his sister, with a coat as golden as Bexley Briar’s. Seraphina knew little of the once-queen of Terrastella, but, in the few times they’d met, she’d liked her.
It is his next remark that gives Seraphina pause. Of course he would help, and then that quiet admittance - I don’t know how to keep everyone safe. In the meantime. She doesn’t want to admit it, but it reminds her of herself, younger – newly-crowned. Long before the Davke attacked, when she was buckling under the weight of her own responsibility.
And then – she didn’t. She didn’t keep her people safe, and they died, and that was all there was to it. She looks away from Asterion and out towards the sea; the ridges of foam remind her of the crests of dunes, and she wonders, with a pang, what she has missed in Solterra while she has been gone.
“That is…” Seraphina trails off. She sucks in a breath, and she thinks of all the people she’s seen dead – she thinks of all the Solterrans burnt and bloodied after the Davke attack, swallowed up by snow in during the disasters, starved in the streets by Raum. She thinks of all the people that she couldn’t save, and she looks at Asterion “I think that all you can ever do is try to protect them, Asterion. And sometimes that isn’t enough.” Seraphina pauses for a moment. To breathe. (There are glossy eyes in the back of her mind, the faces of ghosts; when she dreams at night, she dreams of the dead. Her mind is a sepulcher.) “But you keep trying anyways.” She pauses, then, and opts for less abstract advice; she doesn’t have a crown anymore, and she doubts that she ever will again, but she’s still leading a rebellion, and this island is something more easily fought against than controlled. “The contingent on the shore was a good idea. Can you send your Halcyon to scout the islands from above? It would make patrolling such large distances easier, in case anything changes-“ She is sure that things on the island will continue to change, but she doesn’t say it. “-and I think that it might be smart to have someone keep an eye on the bridge. If something changes there, we could all be stranded on the island.” She looks at him sideways, her eyes narrowing fractionally. “And you, Asterion…you have magic, don't you?”
She can’t be sure, of course; mostly, she is guessing at what she saw when she first encountered him on the island, during that makeshift meeting.
But-
But before she can think too much about Asterion or his magic or lack thereof, her attention is distracted by the sound of thumping. Her head turns. Inclines. She finds herself staring at an iguana, slapping its tail against the bleach-bone sand of the shoreline. Once. Twice. Three times. The sound is low and flat, and it sends a shiver up a spine – she doesn’t understand what it means, but it makes her skin crawl.
The scattered sand grows colorful wings and small black bodies with curling antennae; she watches, blinking, as it flies away as a cloud of butterflies.
She exhales, then – low and uncertain – and looks back at Asterion. “It feels like…things here are becoming stranger and stranger,” she says, and she’s not so sure that it’s a good thing.
@Asterion || <3
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
RE: a prayer roiling somewhere dark and hollow - Asterion - 08-21-2019
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone
or else alone
There is little enough to add, when she speaks of simpler times, and voices her unease for the things changing now. He can only watch her, gray as the sea before a storm, gray as a ghost against the sun-bright yellow of her cloak. He can only regard the ocean beyond, and the forest behind, and the shadow of a vulture dark against the sand, and ask his own heart what roils in its depths.
“I feel like I’ve spent most of my life worrying,” he says at last, still quiet, half to himself. “And so far it hasn’t changed a thing.” If only it was as easy to stop feeling as it was to name futile; if only his own feelings and mind obeyed him as well as the waves now did, or the rain.
It’s a true smile that curves his mouth when she asks of his sister, and for the first time when he meets Seraphina’s gaze his own is clear of darkness and doubt. “Better than I’ve seen her in a long time,” he says, and it gladdens him to remember how they’d stood together as the smoke of the volcano rose like a god’s offering in the distance. “She was born in a world of wild magic, so this feels almost like home to her. And,” he says, hoping Flora will not mind her brother sharing her news, “she’s going to be a mother, soon.” A little thrill goes through him then, an echo of the one when she’d first told him. Asterion knows nothing of children, nothing of being an uncle, except that love for it has already grown up in his heart, wild as a garden.
If only he could have paused in that thought, if the sun had chosen then to freeze and time to sweep them up.
When she offers her advice (and comfort, of a sort) it is Eik that the king thinks of. Of how he and the grey man had stood upon Denocte’s wide balcony, looked over the sea and spoke of magic, of the responsibility that meant power.
He would not have touched her, except that he looks over at the moment of her pause and sees how her eyes go far away. What Seraphina sees is not what he sees, a woman marked by fate more than once with a wild world at her back. It makes him think, of all things, of Calliope, of each scar silvered on her flesh and the way she bore them proudly. The bay can’t remember if he’d ever asked her the story of any, though he knew her before she was given the one that barred her eye.
Gods would take your bargain then cut your heart out anyway.
Asterion touches her lightly, on the shoulder, with the dark velvet of his nose. He breathes warmth onto her skin as though she is Florentine, or Eik, or Marisol, or anyone he loves. And then he steps away again, and a wave rushes up to kiss their feet.
Her tone changes then, and he is glad of it. At her comment his gaze shifts her way, and he leans, quiet, into the cool sand. “I can - they’d be eager to do it, I think. And you are right about the bridge, too. Do you know of anyone? I wonder what’s below the waves - though the only ones who could tell me wouldn’t.” His smile feels foreign when it shapes his dark mouth; he is still a man unused to anger, and to violence. Asterion has never been a creature of sharp edges, no matter what he wished for as a boy; he’s as soft as fog or sea-foam.
Though that is not what the unicorn had told him, before she left.
“I have magic,” he says. “Strong enough, perhaps-" and then he trails away, his ears twisting, too, until he follows her gaze to the iguana.
He watches the sunlight glint off its unnatural gold, and watches each puff of sand become a butterfly. It is not wholly intentional, when he shifts closer to Seraphina, and he holds his breath as he watches the bloom drift out to sea.
“Yes,” he agrees softly, still watching the place where the butterflies have vanished to suggestions of color. “I think we’d better start changing, too.”
@
Asterion.