All Welcome Discount Divination

Willfur

He's far too cautious an animal to approach the island while the cacophony of light and sound and vibration is still ongoing, but once the sky stops falling and the noise dies down, as light begins to creep over the horizon and illuminate the newly crystalized atoll, the mule's curiosity finally wins out over good sense and he determines to see what there is to see.

It's a short swim, but still, the novelty of events finds him squinting with each powerful stroke, struggling to make sense of the scene ahead before he's even close enough to touch hoof to soil, and when he does - finally - touch bottom, it's not soil beneath him at all, but a hard, multicolored glass that rings and reverberates against the weight of his step.

Everything is glass, or appears to be. The ground is a jumble of broken chips and shards that crunch and crinkle underfoot. Great four and five sided pillars spear upward, some rising far above the clay-colored stallion's head, others only barely tall enough to distinguish from the rest of the rubble, their surfaces impossibly smooth, reflecting recursive images back at him like a carnival fun-house. The effect is dizzying, disorienting, and sometimes blinding, as dawn swiftly transitions to day and the sun lifts free of any earthly obstacle, shining down without restraint.

Claustrophobia rises suddenly in the stallion's gut, as if the images within images have actually surrounded him, captured him, though he knows it's impossible, but so many things he's seen lately have been 'impossible,' and if he cannot trust in the laws of the universe then he must trust in himself, his instincts and intuitions, however illogical they might seem right now.

Fretting, shuffling on the spot, a small sound of anxiety rises in his throat, forced into a strangled, "Hello?" As his skin begins to twitch with nervous energy.

RE: Discount Divination - Thana - 08-17-2020

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;

There is thunder in the glass island, in her steps, in her blade, in the thumping of predator paws as they run. It breaks in her ears like a capsized storm, all belly up with thunder before the lightning striking out in rays of sunlight off the graveyard of stars. Darkness has no home here. Even her shadow is bright as blood and her blade as shining as a new-forged god has not yet learned how to drink deep.

Thana runs in that endless thunder with the dead stars laying down a mapped out road only she can see. Eligos follows close behind and leaves golden paw prints in his wake from a glass shard that had cut him earlier (but not slowed him). Together they twist and weave through the innards of the planets, and the cold bellies of stars full of only ash, and dusted lines of constellation that whisper around her in stories without sound or shape. The artistic devastation of the old world soothes something in her black heart where her black magic lays curled like a snake bloated with hares.

She looks neither left nor right to see the unicorns and monsters running with her (as her, in her). Nor does she look to see the way the glass turns worn and stained in all the places touched by her image.

All she cares about in the endless roar of the thunder, the way her bones stretch, and how her muscles hum below her skin. Freedom and wildness ferment on her tongue-- sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet. Thana licks it from the backs of her teeth like a wolf at the throat of a desiccated lamb. She bellows with the thunder just to see if her lungs have learned to make the sound.

They have. Oh, they have.

They are still singing thunder-roar when she finds Wilfur caught between four version of himself. Thana flares her nostrils, exhales, and looks unerringly at the version of him that is made of flesh, and blood, and all the things she knows how to unmake. “Hello Willfur.” She answers his call with a smile still heavy with the taste of fermented wild.

And in the sound of her voice there remains the thunder as her hooves dance on the dead world like a ghost at a gate.

"Speaking."@Willfur

♢

RE: Discount Divination - Willfur - 09-13-2020

Willfur

Sound seems to distort among the multi-colored pillars as much as imagery. The vibrations are bent, redirected, and made to travel through - mineral? glass? - in unexpected ways. There's a rattling that twists and turns the mules oversized ears, a thrumming of untraceable, unseen energy that, nonetheless, can be felt like an unwanted physical touch. It tingles in the air, flutters across the tips of his fur, brushes against his skin, invasive and impolite, sending the stallion shuffling backward until his hindquarters hit something solid, pressing heavily against an enormous outcropping of crystal.

Everything on this island is so unsettling. Willfur isn't typically a high-strung animal - on the contrary, he relishes the new and the unknown - but here he can't look and he can't listen and he can't let himself be aware of the sensations around him or else he's quickly overwhelmed, the double beat of his heart jumping and racing to fill his veins with adrenaline against some unknown threat. What is it that his instincts so fear? Is he overreacting? Having an off day?

Sweat begins to dampen his coat, seeping through the soft peach hair to make uneven patches of auburn, almost brown in the crease of his chest and behind his elbows. He closes his eyes, squeezing the lids tightly together, lays his ears flat, closes out every unwanted sense that he can. "This is silly... He mutters under his breath, a sour note in his voice, a rare harshness to his words. "What am I doing?"

He hasn't quite figured that out yet, or whether to feel sorry or angry with himself, his eyes still clamped shut and his nostrils pinched into a pained expression, when the mare extends her olive branch of familiarity and the stallion leaps to accept it.

"Thana!" He lurches forward, not bothering to hide his desperation and only thinking to stop himself from barging right into her, from tucking himself into the perceived safety of her side, when he catches a flash of her companions warning eyes. He looks as feral and forbidding as ever, but the mare, she is vibrant, even through the lens of his stress and confusion, she seems more alive now, brighter than she'd been that day in the forest where they'd met. There's something different about her now and he's as much at a loss for words to describe that as he is to explain the wrongness of this island.

"Thana?" He questions, stepping back, glancing down at the darkening crystal shards beneath her hooves. "What is this place?"

@Thana

RE: Discount Divination - Thana - 09-20-2020

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;

Had he been anyone else, anything else, careening towards her between the star-bones Thana would have cleaved a path between his skin and heart. The instinct is there still. It’s in the whine of her tail as she drags it across the mirrors to hang above her hip. It’s in the violent violet flash of wrath in her gaze that flickers out as quickly as the thunder of her steps when she stills.

And it’s in the way she strains towards him instead of away when she drinks his fear straight from his lungs.

Had he been anyone else there would have been a feast.

But she only smiles at Wilfur in the wake of her flashing wrath (and there are too many teeth in the look as there always is). Her ribcage curls around the outline of him as he stops, as a wolf coddles a cub when the first bear comes to call. Beneath her own skin her heart stumbles and stutters to match the melody of his own (drum beats, and fear, and the aftermath of war). Her reflection joins his own between the ribbons of dust and mold racing over the mirrors. The blade on her tail settles with a pale echo of thunder as she rests her horn across his brow in a dangerously gentle touch.

“Walk with me.” She says. The thunder is still riding hard in her bones still itching with instinct. And when she passes him, shoulder to shoulder as lions, her heart stumbles and stutters again into a fresh echo of a battlefield. There is no fear in the sound of it, only clash and clamor and ruin. Mold and rot follow her like footprints across the star-bones.

Eligos follows, nose tucked to her hip, as any faithful monster might. He wails against the tether of his unicorn as his hungry, molten gaze follows the spines of them as they walk. Thana does not need to remind him of the cost of hunger, not when she drags her nose across a mirror and sets it to a flashing chaos of memory.

Flash. A winged thing falling.
Flash. Harpies soaring towards them over a sea black as ink.
Flash. Death. Flash. Blackness. Flash. Nothing.

“This is what happens after a galaxy of stars dies still full of wishes.” Her tail whines across the pathway rising up in glimmering agony around them. An eon lives in her gaze, a world full of magic too broken to follow what laws it was made to obey. There is a knowing too, as gods know, when she turns to follow the line of his flank that still rises and falls quicker than her own.

Thana’s smile does not waiver. “Is it only your reflection that you see?” Above that unwavering smile, her eyes turn feral with the instinct she has not yet forgotten.

Eligos steps closer and rests his nose against the apex of her ribcage.

"Speaking."@Willfur

♢

RE: Discount Divination - Willfur - 10-15-2020

Willfur

He stills under the press of Thana's horn against his brow, surprised by the touch itself, but even more so by the utter gentleness of it. There's no pain, no sudden death or destruction or whatever else he might have imagined that touch to bring, only an outstretched hand, softly beckoning. Here, it calls, and the mule's eyes roll in their sockets to follow the twisted shaft down to its base, away from the dizzying, nauseating not-quite-reflections.

He wants to crumple against her, close his eyes and let whatever ominous power still clings to this place do battle with whatever it is that lies coiled beneath the chestnut coat and amethyst eyes beside him, let them devour him if they like, so long as he doesn't have to see it, but the mare moves and he follows, loathe to be alone, to chance being caught in the mirrors again.

He swallows, shakes himself, awkwardly trying to blink away the moisture building behind his eyes and speaking haltingly into his knees. "They're not reflections, they're..." The skin along his spine draws painfully tight, the muscles beneath visibly rigid. "They're... wrong. They're... choices, I guess. Bad choices. Things I would never do, but I can see them. I can see the harm I know I'm capable of, but I would never..." He hesitates, head rushing upward to seek confirmation in her expression, as if agreement would make it more true.

"I wouldn't do any of those things. I wouldn't hurt anyone in any way. Not unless they were going to kill me, or do something awful to someone. I'm not... I don't want to be a..." Every word he can think of feels childish, so he lets the silence stretch, sure that he must sound like the most melodramatic idiot in the world, like an easily frightened brother fretting over monsters and bad dreams to an elder sibling who's actually seen them, fought with them, might be one of them.

"I can see myself doing terrible things in them. I know I'd never act that way, but it's so... real. It's frightening... because I know I'm physically capable of doing those things, so technically they are possible but... Even the thought is sickening. I know I wouldn't, but it still hurts to see those things and think about them. To think about what kind of effects they would have on everyone around me. It makes my chest ache. It makes me want to crawl into a hole and just... stop existing."

Explanation does nothing to dull the ache in his chest, but it does release some of the tension in his shoulders and back, loosens the knot in the back of his throat so that he can breathe again and his heart begins to slow. "I'm sorry. I'm just stressed out. I didn't mean to throw all that at you. You're..." More, he thinks, more than a simple pack animal with too many feelings. "But, what do you see?"

@Thana

RE: Discount Divination - Thana - 10-17-2020

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;

Thana, a unicorn down to each cell in her body named monstrous, knows every way in which a choice might be terrible. She knows it in the same way that she knows how to be both terror, and innocent, and wild thing with eyes bright as gemstones in the gloaming thicket. And she traces the lines of knowing in the panic of his gaze and the tightness of his spine as he pulls his skin in like a shield against all the reflections begging in, in, in.

Her tail taps a denial against the dead-stars as they walk onward through the death-yard. Each note of her blade, each clamour of her form in the silence, bellows instead of whispers. And it whispers mine, this is mine. Every time his words tangle on against the reflections, and his eyes dip in worry, her tail taps another reminder to the things, the choices, the monsters in the glass.

“It is not so terrible to be a monster.” She says with her mouth full of teeth that have drank of blood, and suffering, and death, and still asked for more, more, more. That same begging look sparks in her eyes like lighting spidering across a black cloud. Her look counts the lines of his ribcage peeking through too tight flesh with the same sort of hunger a fox might count hens with. The begging smile does not waiver when she pauses her walk with one hoof hung in the air like a wolf caught on a sliver of moonlight.

The point of her horn finds his brow again and lays there once more like a kiss. “Should I destroy you in fear of the choice you might make?” Thana leans her weight into the kiss of horn and mortal flesh until her touch is more promise than threat, more warning than devouring. Magic roils in her belly like a hurricane sea though a dunegrass forest. It begs her to feast until this graveyard belongs not to the stars but to her. “Or should I show mercy for the things you might choose not to do?” She learns closer so that the air in his lungs might expel directly into her own.

Eligos learns closer too and the dead-star-dust vibrates into the shape of jaws and eyes at his bloody paws.

And she does not relent (they do not relent) until the silence between the questions she asked and the question she does not answer grows bloated with the harsh echo of their heart-beats and their lung-beats.

"Speaking."@Willfur

♢

RE: Discount Divination - Willfur - 11-27-2020

Willfur

She doesn't answer his question, but maybe it's better that way, with the glimmer of unknown, untold things in her eyes, things that challenge and laugh and press too eagerly forward at the signs of distress in his. Daunted - as he probably should have been long ago - he looks away, pressing his lips firmly together to stop the flow of uncontrolled thought and emotion, but the sudden silence only serves to highlight just how much he's already spoken.

Embarrassment rises like embers catching to flame beneath the mules skin, evaporating all other emotions with its heat. He might have tried to excuse himself then, to escape the island and the crystals and the sense of being overwhelmed by it all, but again the unexpected touch of twisted bone, sheathed in magic and keratin, against his brow pins him in place, forcing his eyes up to meet the mares amethyst ones and his ears to listen.

She's making a point more than simply waxing philosophical, he thinks, as he's sure now, beyond any doubt, that the unicorn and her companion are both much more than they appear, capable of great and terrible things. He's struck again by how much like a child he must seem in comparison, agonizing over petty hypotheticals here, at the feet of fallen galaxies and in the company of powers incomprehensible, but since she's chosen thus far not to destroy him - even in spite of the temptation he can smell building among their mingled breath - he suspects that this confrontation is meant to ground him, to make him remind himself of what he holds true and right in this world, because who can convince us of any idea more resolutely than ourselves?

"Mercy." He breathes, not quite entirely sure whether he's answering one question or asking another, the pressure of Thana's horn no longer a bracing, supporting touch, but a force that threatens to topple the mule if left unrestrained, to pierce and to tear. He swallows, collecting his rattled thoughts. "Maybe I should be glad that those images affect me the way they do. Maybe it shows that I'm not that Willfur, that I won't ever be that Willfur, no matter how many opportunities present themselves." It's a comforting interpretation, at least.

Sighing, he leans away from the mare, one long ear folding flat to his neck as he tries, delicately, to extricate himself from her hold, the other turned warily toward her companion, whom he trusts much less, though equally as irrationally for how little he truly knows them. "I don't think I'd make a very good monster, anyway. I'm too squeamish, too sensitive, too self-conscious. I'd waste all day asking myself questions that no monster has ever spent time considering. Doesn't leave much time for monstering." A thin smile attempts to brighten his features, but it's not yet sure of itself and isn't able to reach all the way up to his eyes, which look tired now, and deeply set.

"talk talk talk"
@Thana

RE: Discount Divination - Thana - 11-29-2020

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;

Willfur reminds her, in a way that nothing else has, of how ‘other’ she has been made to be. She can see the antithesis of her in every look he gives her, in every feeling pouring out his eyes like wrath and want pour from her own. Looking at him makes Thana want to remember how she was filled with aching for softness, how she lamented over each rotten root instead of rejoicing at it. But when he speaks, and his language wanders into a gray that she’ll never understand, she realizes that she has nothing of true softness left.

Even her love, her adoration, is as sharp as the twisted spire of her horn.

And so she does not try to shift, and settle, into the thing his eyes are asking her to be. Thana is still hard, still sharp, still cruel even when she raises her horn from his brow. Her tongue runs along the inside of her teeth, straining even as she steps away, for all the things she could have had with a step closer instead of away. Eligos snarls at her and turns away, furious but tame in the face of Thana’s silent command.

“It is a wise thing to ask a unicorn for mercy.” She says as he pulls away (and as she allows it). Eligos is already dissolved into the mirrors and Thana can hear the roar of his need echoing in her chest like thunder. The storm is still echoing in her chest when she lays her tail against a mirror again and says, “although it it wiser still to demand it and be certain that you cannot be denied.”

The tap, tap, tap of her tail echoes again as he talks of monsters, and monstering. It is the strangest thing, the most mortal thing, a horse has ever said to her. Thana, who has learned how not to devour each citizen coming to her for help (but to devour the thing worrying them), cannot help but smile at the softness she can see but never understand. On her the look is not done in half-measures of amusement but half-measures of cruelty. “You will never be a monster Willfur.” Her smile withers as she speaks, unaccustomed to remaining for very long.

When she nods her head at him there is nothing in the gesture but a farewell between blade and scabbard. “But when you want to learn how to defeat them I will teach you.” And Thana does not linger much longer when Eligos’s hunger turns from thunder to hurricane. She only lingers long enough to say, “And then you can demand your mercy of a unicorn instead of asking for it.” Her walk turns to a trot and then to a canter as all the hesitation of the hunt she had felt at the sight of him returns.

The island, the mirrors, the glass at her hooves, does not make a sound as the darkness swallows Thana back into the belly of it.

"Speaking."@Willfur

♢

RE: Discount Divination - Willfur - 12-02-2020

Willfur

It's been with downcast eyes and attention turned inward that Willfur's shambled along at Thana's side. His legs seemed to move of their own accord, hardly even noticing the effort, and with no awareness of direction. He simply moved when she moved, stopped when she stopped, met her gaze as and when she commanded him to do so. He did not risk looking anywhere else, being caught in the mirrors projections again.

It comes as a genuine surprise then, when she finally pulls away and leaves him standing alone on the shore of the island, the scattered fragments of crystal beneath his hooves giving way to ordinary sand. He turns to watch her go, some banal word of thanks or parting on his lips, but too late. Her and her companion have disappeared without the slightest sound of their passing but those that they chose to make, another sign of their true natures, he thinks, their prowess in the predatory and covert.

He straightens, staring out across the canal, then glancing down at the wavering reflection of himself in the waters surface, this one unobtrusive, quiet and familiar. He looks haggard, the fur around the base of his ears darkened with sweat and his brow creased in an uneven line where the spiral edge of Thana's horn had parted and crushed the soft facial hairs, but - maybe because of these things - he sees himself there, the version of him that he recognizes.

Studying that self, finding comfort in it, he's drawn again to the broken crease above his eyes. He wonders exactly what manner of lessons the unicorn might teach him about monsters and conquering, what impetus could ever drive him to ask for them. He believes the offer was made in earnest, but it feels ominous nonetheless, threatening in a way that echoes the call of the void in the mirrors, a seemingly forgettable detail, but one that the omniscient vision of hindsight might look back on and say, this is where it started, this was the first seal.

Shaking himself, he sets his eyes on the far bank and steps forward into the water. Every movement is a choice and every choice a crystal mirror to a new reality, a new him, but today, he chooses to be soft. Today, he chooses to be Willfur.

"talk talk talk"
@Thana
OOC: Totally unnecessary, but I had thoughts, so extra closer. <3