YOU'VE LONG SEEN YOUR DOWNFALL SPELLED OUT IN ANOTHER'S BONES
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The sun crawls slowly here, Mantis notices.
No matter where you go, it always seems to burn bright above you, sweltering flares making your head throb and skin warm. So when it finally turns dark and the sun dips the dunes at the horizon in a beautiful orange, Mantis is relieved. Her muscles are stiff from the day she spent traveling and she's glad to catch her breath for a while, staring at the sunset. She stretches her neck. A bone pops and blood rushes to her poll. It thankfully doesn't start pounding.
She hadn't anticipated this long of a journey. When she left Aed, she was hoping for shelter at Maxir maybe, but working as Envoy had made her realize how easy the people of Aed were to manipulate. Other folks listened between the lines more, watched more closely, caught onto things quicker. It had made her a little uncomfortable, back then, not being able to sit straight and stare, but she's adaptable and makes herself fit in. Sometimes it makes her question if it was her own personality, the mind in her that controlled her doings.
She shakes her head. No time for such thoughts.
She turns to look at the building in front of her. It's built out of yellow stone, worn with age and wind, and Mantis is a little surprised it's still standing with how the walls are cracked in some places. Back home, if a palace started cracking, they'd just tear it down and build a new one. Mantis decides she shouldn't think about Aed that much. This place was different. Maybe a bad kind of different, but at least something new. She'd give it a try.
With evening falling upon the desert, she notices shadows starting to creep out of their holes, their bowed low silhouettes scurrying around the horizon. Mantis despises the scoundrels and thieves that come out at night. She should probably find shelter. She just doesn't know who this building belongs to and isn't to keen on finding out, either.
So she stands. Waits for opportunities to come. It usually never takes too long.
There is no season that can truly steal the sun from Solterra. Even in the dead of winter it glares from overhead, omniscient and stubbornly painful; today is no different, and Bexley is glazed in warm yellow light when she slinks out of her chambers and toward the center of the court, the sun strangely bright for how low it’s dipped past the horizon. Streaks of pink and violet bruise the deep-blue sky. In the heat, clouds wither and dissipate. Under the watchful eye of the sun Solterra simmers and flares and fades like an ember, until it is covered in the satin drape of darkness and bodies can move through the streets unnoticed, as easy as a fish slips through water.
Bexley is one of these fish, winding her way through the alleys with a practiced kind of poise. After so many months of wandering the Court, it is second nature now to turn corners without looking, to recognize streets simply by the pattern of their cobblestones, to not feel nervous even when tracked by the scoundrels of Solterra, knowing her status and the scar that splits her face is enough to make most of them back away. For the most part, her path is uninterrupted. No one bothers to even try impeding it.
Until she bumps into the girl in the middle of the street.
Turning a sharp corner, Bex has to slam to a stop to avoid falling into the stranger, braking so hard dust sprays up from the half-moon marks her hooves make in the dirt.Gods, she spits without even checking who it is, maybe don’t stand in the middle of the street like that - her lip is still curled with irritation when that blue gaze snaps upward and meets Mantis’, glowering under a carpet of dark lashes. Heat simmers in her irked expression. Almost she keeps moving, tempted to brush past the girl without another word - but then she realizes that this person is new, so new that even the Regent doesn’t recognize her, and pauses in place.
No one can say Bexley shirks her duties.
Anyway. Bex rolls her shoulders, tries to smooth out the displeasure in her expression in favor of a tight-lipped smile. You’re new, hm. Welcome to Solterra. Watchfully, she stands in place, gilded in the darkness, curious and cool.
She says nothing of the girls’ lures, the lupine glow of her yellow eyes. Novus is full of even stranger things.
YOU'VE LONG SEEN YOUR DOWNFALL SPELLED OUT IN ANOTHER'S BONES
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It didn't take long, just as Mantis assumed.
A girl turns the corner. Her coat is bright chestnut, nearly golden, but dipped orange in the sunset light. White reaches past her knees on every leg and sits upon her face as well and a scar reaches from her left eye to her mouth. Mantis takes a step back, bracing for impact, as the golden mare lurches into a full stop, nearly falling into Mantis. Only a hair's width left between their bodies, Mantis is quick to gain her personal space back and breathes in. She smells rose water.
Mantis doesn't have much time to think about it, though, as the girl launches into berating her for standing in the middle of the street, irritation simmering in her blue stare that snaps up to stare into Mantis' own golden one. Mantis raises her eyebrows. Did no one nowadays teach their children respect anymore? She had such high hopes for this one, thinking maybe she was raised well, going from her noble coat color and the golden necklace upon her neck - but then again, her build was short and stocky, so maybe she was just a commoner trying to fit in with royalty. She refrained from curling her lips up in distaste.
Apparently the girl noticed that Mantis' face was unknown for her, as she stops in her talk to examine her face. Mantis easily schools her expression into one of trained neutrality. She had hoped for her first encounter to be bearable at least, but she doesn't like this one already - no reason to show it, though.
Mantis nearly snorts at the way the girl covers up her annoyance, favoring a tight-lipped smile instead of her irked expression. Ah, at least a bit of common decency. 'You're new, hm. Welcome to Solterra.' Mantis sees no reason not to, so she nods, careful to make it steady. Strangers are usually not fine-tuned enough to catch onto Mantis' body language, so she keeps it simple and straightforward. Back at home, her muteness was never a problem. Her people were trained enough to read her facial expressions. In this new land, she couldn't be sure of it.
When she was younger, Mantis used to wish she could talk. Ask questions. Berate others. But over time, she learned how to conceal this uneasiness. How to communicate without words, but not make her body language too easy to read. There's a fine line between unconscious mannerisms and clear communication in body language - nowadays, Mantis knows how to control her gestures enough to not let anything slip. In return, it gets blurry for others sometimes. She can't find it in herself to care for it, though. Being mute is a great excuse for staring holes into the air.
Less than a second into her tirade, Bexley realizes her miscalculation.
The girl looks back at her with eyes that simmer molten gold, not unlike her own when she could tap into her magic, and as Bex watches her - the sloping shoulders, the ivory eyelashes, the bright-yellow lures - she thinks she recognizes something in the stranger, the same since-forgotten nobility that runs inside her own blood. She has to pause abruptly, curb her tongue. Almost a feeling of embarrassment comes over her. Maybe she’s spent too long in the desert - maybe it’s sanded down her fine edges and royal manners and left her as common and rough as the next native Solterran, wearing bone piercings and face-paint made from ash.
But that’s only a maybe. Maybe, she thinks, it’s still this girl’s fault for standing in the middle of the street.
The Regent leans back onto a cocked hoof, unselfconsciously winds a stray curl back behind her ear. Those blue eyes linger on Mantis watchfully. She’s surprised to see the stranger’s only reaction is a nod: almost every newcomer can be caught in a state of obnoxious arrogance or complete panic, depending on how well they know the desert, how willing they are to fight, and how little they believe in their own mortality. Almost every newcomer is wild-eyed and unhinged, but this one rests on the axis of casualness and complete, bone-freezing chill. Bexley wonders how much of it is a facade, a serious attempt to gain the upper hand in a land that expects her to lay down, roll over, and take it - and if it is a facade, how far she’ll go to keep it up.
Solterra breeds its own kind of desperation. Under the hot white eye of the sun, there’s room for very little else.
I’m Bexley, she continues, raises a dark-gold brow against the dimming light. It's a strange thing, to have to introduce herself, when she's been in Novus so long, settled in so deeply, that half her new conversations don't require an exchange of names - when most strangers have already passed around whispers speculating what blade cleaved her face in two, why she wasn't smited for raging at her own gods. Nice to meet you. And you are-?
