The Courtyard is blessedly quiet when the Crow stepped out into it for the evening. Behind him in the faint murmur of equines in various states of celebration and revelry, muffled laughter and the sound of hooves slammed against oak tables. The Spring had chased much of the chill away, but in the evenings the cold lingered. Frigid tendrils of Winter's breath, wary of the braziers which illuminated the old stone, but not enough to leave completely. Dovev floated like a ghost, a smokey wraith weaving across the stones with no true destination in mind.
There's no sense of urgency in these familiar halls, not like the way he slinked in the gilded halls of Zolin's dominion. A momentary thought is spared toward such wanderings and then quickly dismissed. He is far too much an amiable mood to sour it with a fleeting, unintentional trot down memory lane. Crystalline eyes instead pass over the small flashes of color that have began to line the Courtyard gardens, occupying him and provided him with a momentary burst of relief. Bright splotches of blue, white and purple revealing themselves after a long slumber, in Summer it would be magnificent. Midnight roses glittering at night with their speckled visages, moon lilies and their luminescent dust.
Of course, Denoctian citizens would wreath themselves in them, twine them around their locks and incorporate them into their outfits. Dashing stallions and beguiling maids. Ah, Dovev can see it now.
Somewhere in the distance, a dragon uttered it's song, ethereal and ever so cutting on the wind. It sank into the marrow of his bones and reverberated in his soul. His gaze moved to scan the skies, and when they found nothing, returned their attention back into the courtyard he occupied — specifically to the obsidian and diamond flecked sculpture of Calligo at it's center. His attention does not stay there for long, an ear flicked back with practiced grace as his head tilted minutely to the left.
Raum watches as Dovev moves like smoke across the stone; a wraith to meet Denocte’s Ghost. Raum walks with him, their every step matching, but the elder Crow is so very hidden.
Oh, Raum is always unseen, revealed only at his moment of choosing. It is how so many victims met their death in silence and anguish. His shadows pour over his skin like ink, praising his return as they pull him deeper and deeper into black.
The boy had learned to walk beneath the Solterran sun, leaving his trails in its infinite grains of sand. But it is Denocte that forged this assassin from the shadows and where they now welcome him home.
Raum is the Crow who flew too close to the sun and oh how his skin burned for its every stolen touch. That soul, corrupt and savage, is now a canvas of burns: so beautiful, so terrible. The sun took a part of him and it remains held within Solterra’s fiery grasp when he flew for home.
The moon high above him whispers along his skin. It whispers its song of death – for how much it yearns to die again so that the sun might live with her fire and her wild heart.
The darkness takes Raum’s silver skin a gift of Calligo’s moon and jealously painting it black, black, black. Its prodigal son has returned; for Calligo’s shadows have always been his parents.
With silent limbs, Denocte’s Ghost pours across the stone of the courtyard, electric blue eyes - the only part of him that glints in the dark (the only part of him he affords Dovev to see) – watch his fellow Crow. Ah yes, they are so startlingly similar, silver skin, bright eyes of myriad blues; they were both pulled from the side of the moon.
The shadows cling and cling and cling to his body as he finally steps out from their grasp and into the moonlight. They fall away like silk, a cloak he has finally discarded. Raum gleams silver beneath the moonlight, every part of him liquid mercury. Those electric eyes still glowing, still seeking to drown their foes in their live waters, take in the whole of Dovev: One assassin to another.
He does not wear a smile, for when has Raum ever? Ah, maybe his sun, oh yes, maybe her. The scent of the sun still clings to his skin, the sands still abrading the stone of his soul. “Brother.” The prodigal Ghost greets, voice chafing like silk over rough stone.
Denocte’s multitude have sung his name for days, for The Ghost is to return to the stage this night. He will dazzle and enchant as he always has. This evening he will smile and seduce the crowd before slipping away, ever the silent Crow, with his scarf – his silent weapon about his throat and the deadly song of his blade upon his limb. And that blade is the only part of him that makes a noise.
The other Crow of the Sun graced him with his presence. Despite the vast distance between Denocte and Solterra, the scent of the Sun radiates like rays of gold. Heady are the smells of sand, sweat and perfume, they stirred bittersweet memories to the front of his mind. Invited him to swim backwards in the river of time and stay awhile, how easily he could of slipped into those sheets just then, but no. He forced it away with a soft sigh, and replaced his nonchalant visage to one of a wicked grin.
"Raum. It's awfully bad manners to watch someone and not say hello until you're found, you know." He said with no expectation for a remark back, at least on that little quip. Instead, easily he turned to regard the ghost, the wraith's long hair wrapped around his hocks like luxurious bindings of silk and liquid moonstone. Raum had gone willingly to Solterra, the free crow in the Court of the Sun, a stark difference to the role he had played in the Sun Kingdom. He always found that tidbit amusing.
"Was Solterra everything you hoped it would be?" Dovev asked silkily enough, a balm against Raum's roughened voice. Ah, he'd always been much more softer around the edges, it made hiding the knife easier. Both the one he carried tucked against his pale fur and the one between his teeth. His question is not asked maliciously, rather curiosity flowed over the words as water did across the shore. "I haven't stepped foot in that endless sandbox since Zolin died, is it much the same?" He elaborated after a moment, not that he needed to, it was common knowledge among the Crows that Dovev had rather pointedly chosen to avoid going back to Solterra, at least until he decided otherwise. Of course, he had kept an eye on the reports, but they hardly accounted for the living conditions, or the way the culture now weaved in the grip of the new monarchs. Merely the politics, the tumultuous threads of fate that guided them all. "Are you really going back?" Was a much better question, all things considered.
It happens so subtly, he doesn’t notice until it is too late. Between one night-chilled breath and the next, the writhing magic that lurks always within the Illusionist’s avian bones has simply… faded, like a dissipating exhale upon the frosty air.
Which is troubling, because without his spells, Caine is as good as blind. Already, his wavering grasp on Aether’s presence slips, and it won’t be long before he loses his hold on the dragon for good. How so like Agenor to neglect informing his silver-eyed student that the farther he strays from Vectaeryn, the more his magic will slide from his clutches like water.
A stream of white mist curls from his lips as he sighs, and the boy watches in silence as it drifts up, up into the looming heavens above. A place he will never see, he suspects, and a dark smile flickers lightly across fine-hewn features. As a sudden gale whips strands of onyx hair across Caine’s pale eyes, he makes no move to sweep them away. Instead, after one more attempt at resurrecting his now surely lost magic, two sets of raven wings blacker than midnight flare out like flashing silk. A mighty stroke, and he ascends in a gust of wind.
Within seconds, he is gone.
—
Like a shadow-clad Raziel, he descends upon silent hooves along the edges of a moonlit castle courtyard. It is the last place Caine’s disintegrating magic had sensed Aether’s lingering aura, as frigid as ice and almost as black as his own.
But the surprising beauty of his surroundings shifts his attention away from his jeopardized mission for a long moment, as the boy’s pale gaze flits from dew-soaked flowers to crystalline-carved statues in subdued wonder. The gilded palaces of Sunsyia had been rumored to be as glorious as the sun, as opulent as a dragon’s ruby-encrusted horde. He has never seen it for himself to confirm.
Caine knows Vectaeryn only from the bits he has stolen from books and memories and dreams. The rest, he had quietly observed from the skies with the apathy of a hawk before he had turned his back upon its mist-shrouded shores for good.
He is tempted to stay cloaked in shadows for the rest of the night, piecing together what remains of his meticulously crafted plans that have toppled like dominos. But that is before he sees them. Two figures, as quicksilver sleek as the moon-bathed cobblestones they stand upon, converse quietly beneath a statue of onyx marble that glimmers like a constellation has been inlaid across its surface. It is carved in the shape of a mare, and her frozen stare reminds him of an avenging goddess entombed for eternity in stone. Ironically, Caine finds it unsettling.
So weary is he from his travels, that the boy no longer wishes to hide himself like a slinking hound in every corner. And Agenor is no longer here to snarl at him, otherwise. Amused by the notion, Caine’s mind is made, and he tucks both sets of sleek raven’s wings along his sides as he steps out of the dark and into the gleaming light of the moon.
“I hope I am not interrupting,” he says, angling a pleasant tip of the head towards the two of them as his mesmerizing silver eyes slip from one to the other in an elegant dance. Appraising, judging, memorizing.
"There is someone I seek, and if my... sources are correct, you are sure to know of him."
Raum’s gaze slips like a blade over the soft of Dovev’s wicked smile. His sliver lashes blink slowly, slowly over his electric blue eyes. Static crackles between the hairs of his eyelashes and sings along his nerves. The silver Crow regards his brother as Dovev slips like silk across the cobbled walkway before him.
The sand still abrading his skin, is not enough to rid it of its gleam beneath the moon’s hoary touch. It turned everything to silver, falling like stars and transforming everything to liquid mercury, seeping out across the ground. There is no surprise, no regret that might flash dangerously in Raum’s gaze, when Dovev begins convivially. The other Crow knew he was there, of course he did. This is what they had grown up with, they were the same age after all, both artists of the dark, able to sink into Calligo’s black embrace and disappear into nothingness.
“You didn’t find me.” Is all Raum says in a voice rich as heated whiskey and soft like the whispering clenching of a noose. Slowly his gaze slips to Dovev’s from where it had been watching the approach of another. For now only shifting shadows, rippling like ink, betray the stranger’s approach. Yet none could expect to surprise the Ghost of Denocte upon his on territory. The shadows have whispers for him, and he listens. Oh how he listens. “When you actually do find me, I may say hello sooner.” And only then do those silver lips tip into a smile. As fast as light flashing along a dagger’s blade, it is gone again.
Raum’s lips are not set for long, for at his brother’s next question his smile grows and grows and grows. That expression is dark like Calligo’s magic, it is filled with a dangerous mirth that licks at the edges of their humour. It is a devil’s smile, a curl of lips made out of steel, soft enough to mold, dangerous enough to scold.
“Everything.” The Crow purrs like a jaguar, his gaze as rigid and unwavering as a stalking cat’s. It is a gaze to clench about the throat of his victims as he presses his mouth close and asks them what final wish they might have upon their gasping lips.
Raum’s answer is both truth and lie. It is a Crow’s delight and a lover’s remorse. “Sand and sun and personalities bleached like bone.” He says softly. “I got my fun though, with Acton’s help.” He wonders of Bexley, of her fierce eyes and sharp tongue. He was sure she bit like a snake. She was a rapier-girl with a temper that flared faster than light. The Ghost wonders if her bones are bleaching in the ruins of the cave’s entrance… He would have to find Acton and ask his brother what he had heard for Solterra’s gates were closed to Raum now, but he wanted for nothing there. His love was back, their child a quick study under the tutelage of the Crows. There was little he could yearn for, beside Rhoswen’s contentment... Her discord was an arrow in his chest. She was the only creature that could slay him with a look. So much of the fire-hewn girl was a blade to his hoarfrost skin.
The Ghost ignores the slither of serpents in his stomach and lets the terrible smile upon his lips remain. It is a beautiful thing, that smile... He is a beautiful thing, if only he let himself be seen – away from his shows. “Nothing has changed, brother. It is just a little more affluent but otherwise simply sand and sun, forever.”
Raum’s eyes swallow the moon, as Rhoswen’s words haunt the shadows of him. He can feel the moon dying for love. His teeth clack, for he knows the moon watches him like they are kin, lost in love. “I am not going back. This is my home. My deed to Reichenbach is done. Besides, they will be looking for an attacker now.” And his smile is gone, there is no trace of it left along those satin lips. They are shadow softened and his gaze returns at last to the stranger that slinks in, just as quiet, just as dangerous.
I hope I am not interrupting?
“Too late if you are.” Raum says, rich as whisky, soft as silk. He does not offer the raven winged man an inch. He moves, pouring like silver wine tipped from a glass. Over the cobbled stones he glides as he regards this stranger with a crow’s wings. “Depends. Our contacts are vast.”
The blade feels cool and ready upon his leg as he drowns the man in sea-blue eyes. With that look the Crow vows to pull him down, down into the depths where only darkness and the song of a blade await Caine.
Solterra had sharpened this Crow.
@Dovev @Caine eeee so sorry it took so long my loves <3
You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
04-06-2018, 02:43 PM - This post was last modified: 04-06-2018, 02:46 PM by Raum
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