[P] the subtle shifts of rhythm - Printable Version +- [ CLOSED♥ ] NOVUS rpg (https://novus-rpg.net) +-- Forum: Realms (https://novus-rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=5) +--- Forum: Ruris (https://novus-rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=6) +---- Forum: Archives (https://novus-rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=96) +---- Thread: [P] the subtle shifts of rhythm (/showthread.php?tid=5840) |
the subtle shifts of rhythm - Danaë - 11-23-2020 a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas. In the middle of the night, when the moon was high enough that her window could not hold it, she had awoken with the taste of brine in her teeth. The roar of the sea had rung in her ears louder than it had when she pressed her ear to a shell on the library’s mantle. Her thoughts, as she blinks and blinks and blinks to shake them loose, are full of white dolphin curling sea-froth and gulls screaming along the horizon. When she thinks of it, as she untangles herself from her sister, she begins to feel like a thing as brutal and wanting as a hurricane tide. She does not linger and wait for the feeling to settle, she starts to run. And runs, and runs, and runs. All the way to the sea she runs. The dawn is a pale speck of light on the horizon, a smear of rose-gold and lilac purple, by the time she walks. Down in the belly of the cliff and shore the tide has rolled out far enough that there are miles of sand begging her closer. A gull screams loud enough that her lungs sutter at the wanting in the sound of it. The gull dives towards the sea and so does Danaë. Rocks tumble down the cliffs as she races to the shoreline. Each of her steps is as reckless as only an immortal can be, as deer-agile as a unicorn, a full of sonnet as a rose unfurling for the first time. Here, as the sand tugs at her weight, she feels like a wild thing in a way that has nothing at all do with the forest. She cannot see a single tower of an oak to blot out the rising of the sun. And she wonders, for the first time, why her city watches the run rise through the forest and over their gardens instead of by the sea. Across the horizon the rose-gold turns to just-gold, the lilac to royal, and the gull is joined by his flock. The sun edges up, a fat and round crown, and Danaë only shits her gaze over it quickly as a hummingbird as the gulls start to pick from the dying, forgotten creatures left behind by the shore. She watches them feast and that wild feeling, that hurricane tide of brutality, rises. And just like she had run it rises, and rises, and rises. “And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched " « r » | @Aster RE: the subtle shifts of rhythm - Aster - 11-29-2020
@Danae | <3 RE: the subtle shifts of rhythm - Danaë - 11-30-2020 a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas. A gull is devouring the belly of a crab. His sister is trying to pluck out the stomach of a clam and only getting a heavy pearl in her mouth instead. The gull, the one with the pearl, is too hungry to pause before swallowing the treasure down her throat. Danaë watches it slide down her throat, so heavy that it ripples below her feathers like a snake moving into a dean. Her own tongue presses against her teeth, against the back of her throat, as if by willpower alone she might save the gull from her greedy death. But when the gull starts to scream as the pearl lodges between throat and stomach, and as those scream turns to shrill knells of death, Danaë discovers how frail and useless a thing like hope can be. She’s moving towards the gull, towards the arcane display of wing sprawled haphazardly across the sand where the gull choked, when the pegasus joins her. For a moment she looks past the girl instead of at her, for the brother gull is curling over his sister’s body as if he’s considering how like a crab she might taste. Her attention waivers there, as if she is the gull looking downward with both sorrow and hunger. And how easy it is to feel both those things at once! The gull, the brother gull, turns away and the pearl that had been in the belly of a clam weighs down the throat of a gull. Danaë turns her attention away too and shifts it (still fat with sorrow and hunger) to the girl as she bows. A smile catches on the backs of her teeth, like a pearl, and she cannot make her face do anything but shift as impassive and as bright as they dawn haloing them. “I was dreaming.” She does not bow, or dip her horn, and she has no feathers to flutter teasingly. There is only a lift of her head, as regal as it is warning, to show that she’s accepted the company as all. Because just as the gull has paused, she had too as she decided if the mare was to be food or sorrow. Danaë settles on sorrow. “I had thought I was late.” Late, late, late. Late as greed and early as death. “And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched " « r » | @Aster RE: the subtle shifts of rhythm - Aster - 12-12-2020
@Danae | <3 RE: the subtle shifts of rhythm - Danaë - 12-15-2020 a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas. D anaë finds herself caught between pegasus and sea so tightly that for a moment, an inhale and exhale of the forests in her lungs, she cannot tell where the shoreline and featherline divide. She cannot tell the gilded gold of a tine from the gilded gold of a frothing wave dusted in the sunrise. In her dreaming she had not felt like the thing divining difference but like a thing that is divine-- divine and nothing else. The distance between them turns to bird-wing and she cocks her head like the brother gull as she counts the spaces between the girl’s ribs. Perhaps, she thinks, she had been too eager to be sorrow instead of hunger. Perhaps she had been as hasty as a gull with a pearl in her throat. “Oh.” She says with a trace of the forest in her voice, a shiver of a wind through a tall pine just starting to lean. “I had been dreaming of the sea.” And it’s to the sea that she moves, opening up a bird-wing to a dragon-wing. Against her hooves the sea feels cold as tears and just as cold as the war in her mother’s steps when she walks through the gardens. She can feel the seaweeds trying to plant themselves into her marrow like she is more shoreline than unicorn. And she wonders, when she looks at the girl over her shoulder, if the salt in the waves is to heal the wound in the dark deep of it or to make it ache, and sting, and fester. It feels like a silly thing, a mortal thing, to smile and so she only keeps that dead-look softness on her lips. Wind whistles through the curls of her horn, a sonnet of some horizon’s rage below the whispering pine of her voice. “I think I was the sea. But my crown was not the sunrise and my tide was not low enough to give back all the ship skeletons and whale skulls.” She blinks, slow as a risen when it learns that it must walk before running and that its rosebud lips know no language but bumblebees. “What do you think it meant?” She asks. But she does not need to, not when her tongue feels sweet as a rosebud against her teeth. Danaë already knows what the dream-sea was trying to tell her. Just as she already knows she will try not to listen again. And again. And again. And again. “And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched " « r » | @Aster RE: the subtle shifts of rhythm - Aster - 12-23-2020
@Danae | <3 RE: the subtle shifts of rhythm - Danaë - 12-27-2020 a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas. T here is a hill fat with heather, and vervain, and sycamores spit out from the forest, hidden in the outskirts of her city. Beneath that hill there are slumbering stones through which she can feel a heart-beat each time she lays her cheek down in the heather sheets whispering in the wind. And she had wondered, as she does now when leans into the gilded girl so her ear meets a throat, if anything in the world could sound like that hidden, slumbering hill (before she had known it was not the earth breathing but the things buried in it). She can hear another thing slumbering now, louder even than the sea roaring a lullaby to dead night. Almost, almost, does she listen to the instinct in her telling her to step away and crack open her jaw so that the girl can hear her own song. Almost does she sing into the whipping wind as her horn does. But, just like the earth and death, she is a greedy unicorn. And she had been dreaming that she was the sea. “Then I shall be like the sea instead of a dream of it.” Her smile goes as quickly as it comes, a flash of teeth that is nothing more than another curl of frothing waves in the sun (blinding and then black). “I will not apologize when I keep all that I find.” Like the sound below the pegasus’s pulse. Like the sleeping stone. Like the hill fat with heather, vervain, and sycamores spit out like the night’s stars. Like the weeds of the sea curling around her ankles when she starts to walk across the waves. Like the oyster shells cracking open around pearls underneath her weight. She has no reason not to keep them all now, not when the cracked shells start to bloom fresh-water lily pads that break up the crashing waves. She thinks it looks like the sea is breathing just like that hill in her city when it breathes. “I think maybe,” The looks in her eyes begs the pegasus to follow, to follow as the sleeping stones follow the beat of her magic, and as the foxes run upside down through the dirt to follow her shadow as it trails through the forest. “I dreamed of the sea to find you.” Because what doe, what predator, what thing of gold and air, does not long for the wildness of flowers that no city, no wall, can give? “And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched " « r » | @Aster |