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roscian - Raziel - 12-01-2020
well fed devils behave better
than famished saints
He hasn't left the desert in five years.
Five years of four walls and one silence.
But he's not rueful; he doesn't know how to be. His life, this pitted half-life, is as large as he's ever wanted it. It doesn't matter that his mother had wanted more for the House, that his father had needed more for himself: she was dead and he might as well be dead too. What matters is that Raziel had lived and his heart had grown smaller in the absence of a world that had not.
Perhaps as a boy he'd dreamt of castles under a kaleidoscope sky and promised wilderness all the while cocooned in the safety of his brother's shadow. But could dreams carry grief? Were they strong enough? Raziel could tell you, if you wanted to ask. He would say it depended on a number of things: who you were, what those dreams meant to you, how desperate was your loss? In his case he had been a bulb without filament, they had meant nothing and his loss had been everything.
Alone, the world transformed into a valley he could not navigate: it deepened and darkened and tunnelled into the very nucleus of his despair. Alone, it grew too large and too fast and he was faced with the realisation that he didn't want to see it: the cliffs of Praistigia, the mountains over Denocte, the warmth of a Deluminian sun, if it meant he had to see them alone.
And wasn't that just as bad? That he'd lost something of himself, too, even if it had been an illusion. The way his cowardice bled as yellow as the sun, to find his weakness a skin he could not shed. In vain he prayed Gahenna hadn't seen the way his fingers had fumbled over the knife he'd once pressed to his throat, hoped she would not see his fear; he could not bear it if she should leave him too.
So his world had swallowed itself over and over again until it became small enough to fit into the palm of his once-shaking-now-paralysed hand. It became docile. Here he had been okay; nothing more or less. Always-drunk and ever-callous but still, somehow, okay.
Years on and now-sober, the desert has since become his graveyard. He walks over its bones, a pilgrimage he cannot abandon, until he is deafened by the sound of the dead crunching under his feet. He wonders, with their skeletons broken into pieces, if they will follow him still.
He knows the answer will always be yes.
RE: roscian - Aeneas - 12-18-2020
S
olterra has nothing for him. His wings take him there, regardless, as if they possess a will of their own. When Aeneas flies to settle his dreams or clear his mind, his route spirals aimlessly from Terrastella’s dark spires. He dives from the cliffs and toward the sea; and rises up, up, up until the burn in his pectorals is a constant, searing heat that spreads into his shoulders, and then his back, and then his brain until he thinks of nothing at all.
And then—
Then Aeneas flies over the fields, and past the fields, over the swamp (so old and heavy it seems to possess a life of its own).
Aeneas normally stops there, at the ethereal border where the swamp gives way to the steppe and he can see Veneror Peak—shrouded in ghostly blues—to the north. He typically tilts his left wing and banks long, hard, curving back toward the swamp.
But not today.
Today he keeps going.
He flies until the steppe gives way to a river cut from the mountains. He flies until the trees and altitude drop sharply; the pines become junipers, scraggly, and then nothing at all. He is in the higher altitude desert to the west of the Elatus. He should go back, now.
He should not keep flying, fast, hard, into the land of the sun and sand.
Into his father’s land.
The more time that possess the less he remembers of Orestes. And the less he loves him. Children, it seems, are unforgiving; and Aeneas, beneath his mild demeanor, has the makings of a man of polarizing extremes. And so what was love becomes caustic. What was love becomes bitterness, and bitterness dances the line toward hate—
It is a blessing, then, when Aeneas spots the dark silhouette below. It is a blessing, then, that the young Prince does not pursue the same avenue of thought. Aeneas tucks his wings to perform a steep, sharp dive. At last, in a flash maneuver, he flares them out to land several feet from the stallion.
“Ah—do you know, how far to the city, from here?” Aeneas wants to know—and yet, in the asking, realizes:
He does not want to know.
He needs to go home.
Not chasing after the ghost of his father.
the boy who looks all soft and angel doesn't make it out alive
RE: roscian - Raziel - 12-22-2020
well fed devils behave better
than famished saints
than famished saints
It doesn't occur to him that he is bored until the beetle he has been watching disappears quite suddenly.
It had been a slow, fat thing. Easy for his long gaze to track as it scuttled from one direction to another with seemingly frivolous intent until it settled on tracing a circle in the sand with its tiny dark feet. Round and round and round.
Raziel felt akin to it, somehow. As though he, too, was an insipid little insect with nowhere to go, stuck in the rhythms the cosmos had bestowed upon him. He is walking that same circle in the sand, only with larger feet and a heart that beat black.
And yet, where was the beetle now?
He might even have tried to find it he not caught sight of Gahenna's hackles flaring in the corner of his eye. He knew what that meant.
They would soon be disturbed.
Do we know them? he growls inwardly, to which she replies with a short sharp shake of her enormous head. So they wait in a silence that is as comfortable as it is familiar. It is binding. An agreement. A vow.
And always true to her word, his hound is right: for soon the sky swells and blooms under the heavy dance of a young man's wing.
The stranger is a film of blonde hair and drawings intricate enough to rival the tapestries on Saudagar's walls. Raziel wonders if he were to take a knife and peel back his skin, would those prints glint beneath his blood like old, forgotten promises?
It takes him a moment to register the stranger's question for he is too busy thinking of skin and ink and cartilage, but his lips move reflexively as though he were wholly machine behind a guise of being. Perhaps it is not blood that runs aurous from the cracks in his hull, but oil.
"An hour," hollowed-violet eyes trace the boy's bones slowly, "for you? Perhaps two."
Raziel Nazaret has seen the desert swallow children whole before and here, beneath the untamed sun, he finds himself hoping he will be there to watch it happen again.