![[ CLOSED♥ ] NOVUS rpg](https://novus-rpg.net/images/logo.png "[ CLOSED♥ ] NOVUS rpg"){kind=logo}
+- [ CLOSED♥ ] NOVUS rpg (https://novus-rpg.net)
+-- Forum: Realms (https://novus-rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=5)
+--- Forum: Terrastella (https://novus-rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=16)
+---- Forum: Archives (https://novus-rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=94)
+---- Thread: [P] all the lives i have dreamed (/showthread.php?tid=4932)
all the lives i have dreamed - Ipomoea - 05-03-2020
Ipomoea
I hope you are blessed
with a heart like a wildflower.
Strong enough to rise again
after being trampled upon,
tough enough to weather
the worst of summer storms,
and to be able to grow and flourish
even in the most broken places.
with a heart like a wildflower.
Strong enough to rise again
after being trampled upon,
tough enough to weather
the worst of summer storms,
and to be able to grow and flourish
even in the most broken places.
He watches the sun as it breaks over the edge of the sea, turning the waters around it to gold. It reminds him of a story he had heard as a child - a story of a man whose touch transformed all he loved to gold. He had died the wealthiest man in the world, but also the loneliest.
Ipomoea wonders now if the sun ever becomes lonely.
He can hardly remember the last time he visited Terrastella; the waves sound like they’re chanting to him, too long, too long, too long. He remembers chasing after an eagle with a queen spun from sunlight - or had that been in Delumine, too? - and a blue bird following in his shadow. But both of them were gone now. He remembers a king made of starlight and a boy with skin as black as night and eyes the color as stars, but they, too, were gone. It seemed everyone he once knew here was gone.
Below him the waves are a hungry thing, dashing themselves against the cliffs as though the sun were not enough to satisfy them. They reach with fingers of foam up and up to kiss his face, until saltwater tears stain his cheeks and brine froths against his skin. He feels almost a part of the ocean, standing there on the cliffs; like the sea would welcome him if he were to fall into its depths. His mane already feels like seaweed, hanging in ropes down his neck.
Only the flowers pressing themselves against his ankles still remind him that his place is on the land, not in the sea. That there is more waiting for him than the darkness of the deep, and waves crashing over his head. But still he looks out across the water, watching the waves swell and rise and crumble and fall - and maybe a part of him is hoping to find something hidden there in the currents. Perhaps a part of him is still searching for lost things, if only to convince himself that he is not one of them.
He tears his eyes from the horizon just long enough to unfold a worn letter The words are blurred together now, water-stained and crumpled. But he reads it over one more time, his heart aching at the familiar handwriting. My dear boy… even reading it takes him back to a time Arhen had called him that in person, teaching him to read over a table of potions and scrolls. It has been so long, and the last thing I wish is to burden you -
By the time he makes it to the end, his wings are trembling. Ipomoea closes his eyes against the waves, against the dusk, and with one quick movement, tears the letter in half. He rips it again, and again, and again, until a dozen bits of paper are spinning down the cliffside to meet the ocean.
He watches them go, twirling around and around each other in their race to the water, and wonders if Terrastella has forgotten him the way he had forgotten it.
@
This turned out a lot more sad than I planned oop.
“speech”
RE: all the lives i have dreamed - Anandi - 06-01-2020
There was a creature lurking beneath the waves the morning Ipomoea came to the cliffs. She watches with bright, curious eyes as the pied stallion comes to the edge of the land. From beneath the surface he is just a brown and white smear against the first-blush sky. She does not realize he's reading a piece of paper, then ripping it, then tossing it into the wind until it hits the water. It floats for a minute, the fibers of the paper growing dark and heavy until, bloated, it sinks past the kelpie.
For a long time, paper scraps like that were a lifeline to her. They would sink ever so slowly into the sea, undulating back and forth with the breath of the tides. And when they reached the depths where the Minns resided, Anandi and her sisters would carefully draw close in the dim light to decipher whatever text was still legible. Sometimes the words had already faded, the surface of the paper dissolved into the sea, but sometimes they hadn’t. They mostly got business ledgers from sunken trade ships, but sometimes they would get letters, lost or discarded, or even books and maps. Each poured over like scripture, and hotly discussed for weeks to come.
Anandi doesn’t attempt to piece together the writing on the letter that drifts down now. People, she had quickly learned, were far much more interesting than their trash. Instead she gracefully rises to take its place on the surface. Blink and you’ll miss the exact moment she emerges-- one minute Ipomoea is looking into the water, the next he’s looking into Anandi’s calm green eyes. She stares at him a moment too long, catlike and unyielding, before lifting her muzzle above the water to say “It isn’t very nice to litter.”
The kelpie rolls onto her side, looking up at him through the sunlit mist of sea spray as the waves rock her to and fro. He looks sad. She found it interesting that the sea brought great joy to children– they rushed to it with delight, skipping stones and frolicking in the waves– but for adults it often had the opposite effect. She had seen countless men and women standing at the top of the cliffs with that same haunted look in their face.
To the sea each stranger showed their true face, expressions not clipped or buried or emphasized with the knowledge that someone else was watching. And Anandi had learned, from much time spent watching from beneath the waves, that when you took away the audience most people were sad.
Sorrow was a disease, and she was determined to never let herself succumb to it. She didn’t particularly like being around sad people (they were often quite boring) and any effort made to cheer others up was often made for selfish reasons. She smiles prettily at the pied stallion, voice charcoal and red wine. Her tail flicks briefly at the surface and is gone again just as quickly as she purrs, “I wonder, sovereign Ipomoea, what punishment would you inflict on someone caught littering in your lands?” Her tone is laughing, teasing. She was hardly about to fine a foreign king for dramatically discarding a letter into the sea. Especially knowing what joy it might give some little girl living deep, deep below.
A N A N D I
"Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like.
I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else."
For a long time, paper scraps like that were a lifeline to her. They would sink ever so slowly into the sea, undulating back and forth with the breath of the tides. And when they reached the depths where the Minns resided, Anandi and her sisters would carefully draw close in the dim light to decipher whatever text was still legible. Sometimes the words had already faded, the surface of the paper dissolved into the sea, but sometimes they hadn’t. They mostly got business ledgers from sunken trade ships, but sometimes they would get letters, lost or discarded, or even books and maps. Each poured over like scripture, and hotly discussed for weeks to come.
Anandi doesn’t attempt to piece together the writing on the letter that drifts down now. People, she had quickly learned, were far much more interesting than their trash. Instead she gracefully rises to take its place on the surface. Blink and you’ll miss the exact moment she emerges-- one minute Ipomoea is looking into the water, the next he’s looking into Anandi’s calm green eyes. She stares at him a moment too long, catlike and unyielding, before lifting her muzzle above the water to say “It isn’t very nice to litter.”
The kelpie rolls onto her side, looking up at him through the sunlit mist of sea spray as the waves rock her to and fro. He looks sad. She found it interesting that the sea brought great joy to children– they rushed to it with delight, skipping stones and frolicking in the waves– but for adults it often had the opposite effect. She had seen countless men and women standing at the top of the cliffs with that same haunted look in their face.
To the sea each stranger showed their true face, expressions not clipped or buried or emphasized with the knowledge that someone else was watching. And Anandi had learned, from much time spent watching from beneath the waves, that when you took away the audience most people were sad.
Sorrow was a disease, and she was determined to never let herself succumb to it. She didn’t particularly like being around sad people (they were often quite boring) and any effort made to cheer others up was often made for selfish reasons. She smiles prettily at the pied stallion, voice charcoal and red wine. Her tail flicks briefly at the surface and is gone again just as quickly as she purrs, “I wonder, sovereign Ipomoea, what punishment would you inflict on someone caught littering in your lands?” Her tone is laughing, teasing. She was hardly about to fine a foreign king for dramatically discarding a letter into the sea. Especially knowing what joy it might give some little girl living deep, deep below.
"Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like.
I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else."
@Ipomoea <33
RE: all the lives i have dreamed - Ipomoea - 06-10-2020
Ipomoea
I hope you are blessed
with a heart like a wildflower.
Strong enough to rise again
after being trampled upon,
tough enough to weather
the worst of summer storms,
and to be able to grow and flourish
even in the most broken places.
with a heart like a wildflower.
Strong enough to rise again
after being trampled upon,
tough enough to weather
the worst of summer storms,
and to be able to grow and flourish
even in the most broken places.
Despite all the time he has spent searching the shadows for monsters and beasts, he has never thought to look beneath the waves.
Ipomoea stares down at the water and, at first, does not see the Emissary hiding below it. He sees only the bits of escaped paper spinning, sinking, drowning; the remainder flutters in the air before him, barely caught in his telekinesis. There they tremble (much like his wings), as if they’d like nothing more than to follow the rest of the letter down into the dark water. He almost lets them, but then —
But then the waves are pulling back, and two bright eyes are smiling up at him.
He blinks and there she is, teeth as bright as the foam cresting each wave, sharp as the rocks they collapse against. Her smile feels like a knife, cutting straight through to his melancholic heart and twisting. He wonders if her plan is to cut the sadness away like a disease; but he already knows, if Anandi were to sink her teeth into his skin it would not be for whatever heartbreak she found there.
Ipomoea has heard rumors that the Dusk Court Emissary was a kelpie; a part of him has even prepared for meeting her. And yet now, coming face to face with her, he realizes there is nothing he could have done to prepare himself for this. Still he smiles back down at her, despite the way his wings trembled to look at her.
“I would say setting a memory to rest is sometimes worth a scrap of paper.”
He thinks of all the paper lanterns set loose into the sky from these very cliffs, can see them fading away into the night still when he closes his eyes. And he wonders how far the wind might have carried them — was it far enough for the wishes tied to their blanks to come true? For the hurts woven into their canvases to be eased?
It had not been far enough for his; perhaps his had sank in the ocean, had drowned and multiplied in the sea. But he hopes it was far enough for others.
“Do you have any memories that need laying to rest Anandi, Emissary of Dusk?”
He is not so sure he would believe her if she said no.
@
“speech”
RE: all the lives i have dreamed - Anandi - 07-03-2020
Anandi’s tongue presses against the back of her teeth, where it tastes of salt and blood. The scent of Ipomoea is distinct in the air, so warm, thick, fleshy against the one-note backdrop of brine. She breathes in deeply, swirls the scent around in her mouth like a precious delicacy.
Kings and queens; flesh and blood and bone. All of them, all of it, all at once temporary and permanent as the wind.
And where, you might ask, does that leave her?
Above it all, of course. Pretty little monster, filled with shame and self righteousness. Wanting-- yearning for-- forgiveness but not enough to ask for it; when pride swells as it has in her, it leaves no room for apologies and no flexibility to turn the head and look back. Forget burning bridges, it isn’t worth the effort. You just need to go fast enough, far enough, long enough, and the past will never catch up to you.
“I would say setting a memory to rest is sometimes worth a scrap of paper.”
The sound of his voice is richer than she expected. It hints at deep roots. He is brave, and she admires him for the way he smiles even as his little wings flutter uselessly-- the barest of motions, but it does not escape her keen gaze.
(All predators know, without needing to be taught, what fear looks like. What weakness looks like. Not that she would ever touch him, at least not in that way. It wouldn’t be very diplomatic to indulge in king.)
He is strong, despite all appearances of softness, and she admires him for that too. But Anandi was always finding reasons to hold others in high esteem, even as she looked down on them. “You are as wise and kind as the stories make you out to be.” And she was gracious and flattering.
“Do you have any memories that need laying to rest Anandi, Emissary of Dusk?”
Her eyes laugh. “Don’t we all?” The question is evaded with a sweet smile. Sovereign or not, he could not expect her to confide in a near stranger, especially if they were not standing (or, even better, swimming) face to face as equals. He would have to try a little harder, if familiarity was what he sought.
The emissary changes the subject blithely- “Why are you so sad, king?” The sharp green of her eyes seems to soften to olive grey. I can help you, those beguiling eyes say. Let me help you.
A N A N D I
"Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like.
I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else."
Kings and queens; flesh and blood and bone. All of them, all of it, all at once temporary and permanent as the wind.
And where, you might ask, does that leave her?
Above it all, of course. Pretty little monster, filled with shame and self righteousness. Wanting-- yearning for-- forgiveness but not enough to ask for it; when pride swells as it has in her, it leaves no room for apologies and no flexibility to turn the head and look back. Forget burning bridges, it isn’t worth the effort. You just need to go fast enough, far enough, long enough, and the past will never catch up to you.
“I would say setting a memory to rest is sometimes worth a scrap of paper.”
The sound of his voice is richer than she expected. It hints at deep roots. He is brave, and she admires him for the way he smiles even as his little wings flutter uselessly-- the barest of motions, but it does not escape her keen gaze.
(All predators know, without needing to be taught, what fear looks like. What weakness looks like. Not that she would ever touch him, at least not in that way. It wouldn’t be very diplomatic to indulge in king.)
He is strong, despite all appearances of softness, and she admires him for that too. But Anandi was always finding reasons to hold others in high esteem, even as she looked down on them. “You are as wise and kind as the stories make you out to be.” And she was gracious and flattering.
“Do you have any memories that need laying to rest Anandi, Emissary of Dusk?”
Her eyes laugh. “Don’t we all?” The question is evaded with a sweet smile. Sovereign or not, he could not expect her to confide in a near stranger, especially if they were not standing (or, even better, swimming) face to face as equals. He would have to try a little harder, if familiarity was what he sought.
The emissary changes the subject blithely- “Why are you so sad, king?” The sharp green of her eyes seems to soften to olive grey. I can help you, those beguiling eyes say. Let me help you.
"Please,” she said, “you’re so beautiful. You may eat me if you like.
I’d sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else."
@Ipomoea <3
RE: all the lives i have dreamed - Ipomoea - 08-17-2020
Ipomoea
I hope you are blessed
with a heart like a wildflower.
Strong enough to rise again
after being trampled upon,
tough enough to weather
the worst of summer storms,
and to be able to grow and flourish
even in the most broken places.
with a heart like a wildflower.
Strong enough to rise again
after being trampled upon,
tough enough to weather
the worst of summer storms,
and to be able to grow and flourish
even in the most broken places.
If it had not been for the sea weeping below him, throwing salt and foam in his face like accusations, he might not have hated her. If it had been any day but today, if it had been any letter but one tying a weight around his throat by which to drown him beneath her. Maybe if it was not for the monster that the desert had awakened in him, gnawing at all the pieces of his heart that still felt soft.
Oh, he has never been good at this game.
But Anandi is there in the water and looking so much like a shark waiting to devour him, and Ipomoea has half a mind to throw himself to the waves and whisper I dare you in the Emissary’s ear. His magic is growing thorns in his lungs again, froths as white as the sea around her body, burns as the salt when it catches in an open wound. Anandi is there — and Ipomoea is only a vessel for his magic, and in the absence of a war to fight and a king to behead, it is Anandi that his monster snarls at now.
He does not smile when she humors him — he is not listening. Ipomoea has never had a use for flattery, particularly when the same teeth that forms them flash so sharply in the light. Every word he feeds to his magic, to his monster, and it only grows all the more hungry because of it. And like the sea carving away a cliffside, it strips away his sadness bit by bit until the anger brimming below is all that remains. And he wonders —
has there ever been a difference to the two? Being sad has always felt a bit like being angry.
When he smiles at last, it feels every bit as sharp as her teeth. “Will you trade me a secret for a secret? Or are mine the only ones to be cast into the waves?”
He steps closer to her, closer to the sea — the ground crumbles, pebbles sliding away into the water. “Won't you come up here with me?”
If the sea was whispering to her now, surely it was carrying the dare he speaks with his eyes.
@
“speech”
RE: all the lives i have dreamed - Anandi - 10-13-2020
Anandi
please, please, please
I
n her tenure as emissary, Anandi had admittedly not spent much as much time and attention as she should have on Delumine. For the most part she had taken the many stereotypes to be true, and dismissed the scholarly court as benign and uninteresting, introverted and innocuous. From her understanding of Novus history, they lacked the fire of Solterra (a court she always considered a threat, even with mild Orestes at the helm) and the mystery of Denocte. The physical courts of novus, in architecture and style, she was not particularly interested in-- it was the citizens and the culture. For the latter the library was deeply intriguing to her, and perhaps the one interesting facet of what she privately referred to as “Doldrum Delumine”. Yet she had never visited to see the revered structure and its contents for herself. It lay entombed in the thick, lush Viride- a harrowing journey, one she always found some reason to avoid. It was not the darkness of the ancient forest that intimidated her, for she was born and bred in shadows, and she had no fear of adventure- elsewise she would have never even arrived in Novus. The simple truth is that she did not like to be so far from the sea. It was impractical, perhaps irrational, and certainly not a measure of safety, for she was as well-equipped and dangerous as any other predator that might lurk in the jungle. But whenever Anandi did not have sight or sound or scent of the ocean in range, a sense of doom began to press in on all sides.
She saw it as a stroke of good fortune that the dawn court sovereign had come to her shores. Their meeting was long overdue, to the point that she felt a flush of shame that their first meeting would be a chance encounter. But Anandi, ever the optimist (so long as optimism was in her favor) focuses on the bright side, the silver lining, and discards her shame and failings as easily as a scrap of paper thrown into the sea.
He’s not at all the bland, simpering puppy she imagined. Is it due to whatever sorrows brought him here to her sea?
Or is it perhaps because of her, the contradictions in her that called to those in him? (sharp-soft, sweet-sour, as blood could be velvet beautiful yet smell of rot)
“Witch,” she had been called once as she rose from the sea. It was supposed to wound, but she only tipped her head back and laughed. Fools often thought the spell was in her song, but really it was in her being.
Does he ever get called warlock? She figures he doesn’t, men having a way of being defined by more than their power or mystery. Which was funny, as she had no discernible magic and he-- he was brimming with it. She had heard great tales of the havoc he’d caused in Solterra, the armies of beasts and walls of prickly cacti. In the songs he brought a hundred shades of color to the monochrome of the desert, each of them twisted and turned to his will. Nobody mentioned how many of the beasts died, and if they did so with fear or joy in their eyes.
This is all on the back of her mind as he talks about secrets, and then summons her to land. She wonders briefly if his words are laced with magic. Is it will or compulsion with which she moves next? She rises to the dare in his gaze, wordless, setting hooves into the dark sand and stepping forth from the shallows to the slim beach. The brief smile she shares with him says it all: “Yes, king.”
But only because I want to.
The cliffside, although steep and rocky and prone to crumbling, is scaled quickly and skillfully. (Anandi has spent much time going up and down those cliffs- she climbs with more grace than she walks.) And then they stand before each other, emissary and sovereign, each with their own headpiece of sorts. Like delegates for land and sea. “I like your flowers,” she says, even though she had seen how flattery washed off him like rain. Saying nice things when they came to mind had gotten her surprisingly far in life. Perhaps it is because these little compliments carried sincerity in ways her scheming and flattery did not, and from these glimpses of integrity one could discern that Anandi is still so very young, still softened and delighted by pretty things. Still drawn to all the beauty in all the great big world, and eager to share it.
Anandi turns and steps around so they stand shoulder, facing the sea. The two are of equal height, and from this distance she can sense the warmth that leeches from his skin. It hangs in the air around him like a shroud, until the breeze picks up and sweeps it away. Her heart quickens, although her voice stays low and steady. “What kind of secret would you like?” Her grin is less sweet now, more mischievous. It only makes her look more like a girl.
“I have many.”
RE: all the lives i have dreamed - Ipomoea - 10-28-2020
Ipomoea
I hope you are blessed
with a heart like a wildflower.
with a heart like a wildflower.
He used to dream of the sea. They all did, all those slack-ribbed orphans haunting the alleyways ot a city that did not love them. They dreamed of worlds beyond this one, worlds where they were the kings and queens and there was water enough to forget what it was ever like to live in a place where they were allowed a single fountain to both bathe and drink from.
Their dreams were all they had. So together they made up stories about adventures and love, anything to make them forget, if only for a while that they had neither. They turned their dusty, red stone streets into gardens and rivers in their minds, and promised each other that one day, one day, they would never need to remember the lash of whips at their backs or the sound of teryrs crying out their hunger at night.
He used to dream of the sea. But that was before he learned the sea had just as much hunger, and just as many monsters, as did the desert.
Now when he dreams it's dark and he is a blade of grass in that darkness — reaching, and reaching, and reaching for a light that does not exist. His bones ache from stretching and growing and each time he wakes it is because of a branch knocking on his window, like the night is begging to be let in.
Or maybe it is only commanding him to let the monsters out. And each night he moves closer and closer to that window, and the latch, and the promise that it is not too late to go home.
And now as the Dusk Court Emissary rises elegant and feral from the waves, he finds himself taking one step closer. He does not smile back at her. Ipomoea has spent all his smiles — all the softness — on people starving in the desert. He wonders if she has ever stopped to wonder there was ever a hunger more important than her’s.
His magic begs him to find out but he swallows it down like all the seawater he dreamed of as a boy. It mixes there in his belly with the ash of burned trees and blood-soaked sand, running like war in his veins.
There is a moment that he wants to ask her if she knows why he chose poppies and dahlias today, why every day the roses grow darker and darker (and how he’s afraid that one day he might wake up and find them black.) He wonders if she would understand the warning in them, the way each petal whispers a promise to the wind that tries to pull them free. Part of him wants to tell her he could give her these flowers, that he could sow a field for her that is as honest and vengeful as the weeping sea.
Would she like them then?
"An honest one, Emissary. But," and here he turns to her, his voice quiet against the roar of the ocean, "I do not think you could tell one from the other." What he does not say is that she looks too much like the ocean, waves shifting in her eyes and sun glinting off of her skin, for him to trust anything she has to say. Not here, so close to the deeps — not today.
Ipomoea inhales and it tastes like saltwater and perfume, death incarnate and all its drowned prizes. "One day, come and tell me the story of the ocean and I’ll tell you that of the trees." At their feet as he turns away another garden is growing, weeds and grass reaching through the crags of the cliff to lay themselves down like sinners bowing before their god. They gleam a thousand colors in the sunlight, brighter than reflections of the sea glittering like a sapphire jewel before them. And when he steps out of their embrace and turns his back to the sea, they shiver and press all the closer to the Dusk Emissary.
And he wonders as he leaves her standing there in his ring of flowers, if she sees the thorns lining every stalk like teeth, waiting to consume.
@
“speech”