A viscous mist dwelled silently over the high alpine pass, it's intangible density obscuring the wayfarer's view. The only sound to be heard for miles was the uniform click and clack of a man's footfall along the narrow trail, drifting through the darkening gloom as though nothing else existed in the world - just he and the ancient mountain. As a child he had peered up at a range most similar to the Arma, finding his thoughts rising as high as the snow-tipped peaks; awestruck, perturbed. From the low lying land of his hamlet that small, patchwork boy had traced the jagged silhouette, his mind a snowstorm of imagination and longing.The magic of such tall everlong kingdoms had always captured his curiosity, and even now Lothaire could not deny the ethereal beauty of this towering, stone-walled world. The keepers of Denocte were as stoic as ever. This was not the first time he had elected to cross back into the borders of this Night-ridden land, but never before had he allowed himself to be so brazenly visible. The shrouding mist ran her cool fingers along his rugged wings and oaken spine; pulling him forward, deeper. There would be whispers soon enough, small voices burning like oil in the dark - barely there, cloaked and cryptic but present, regardless. The Crows would recognise his old musky scent, and word of his return would travel like electricity back toward the castle - Reichenbach would be waiting. Lothaire's mind turned slowly at the thought; unaffected, cold-blooded, indurate as ever.
The path wound narrower and were it not for the winged serpent's learned knowledge of this perilous route he may well have met an untimely death by now; the 100 foot drop to his left sang quietly - the unfathomable call of the void. After hours of carefully traversing this treacherous terrain the flinty passage opened up onto a wider pass carved out from the mountainside, as though Caligo herself had gouged out the rock and earth with her somber hands. The tall spectral man paused, his muscles protesting and aching at his nightlong journey. Space-black eyes were cast north, then, watching silently as through the mist a pale tentative sunset stretched its rosy lilac kiss across Denocte, and he wondered - wondered if he brought the world to a standstill and existed in this beautiful untouched moment forever, he might feel happiness' embrace.
Alabaster hooves clicked a steady tempo on the slick, moss-covered path as she moved wraithlike through the fog, ivory hair blowing like spun silk in the wind. A pebble dislodged from where her hoof had been moments before, falling a hundred feet, a thousand feet, until it vanished into the oblivion below.
Messalina’s journey to the realm of Night had been slow going, and her wits were frayed down to its last thread. When her eyes fell upon the hulking mass of the Arma earlier that day, she had questioned if this little excursion of hers was worth all the trouble. But the girl was nothing if not iron-willed to a fault, and so she began the ascent with a weary but firm resolve to see the fabled night sky of Denocte even if it killed her.
And fate seemed willing to deliver on her resolution. The winding pass through the mountains had tried its hardest so far to usher her towards a quick demise, the path brutally narrowing until she had no choice but to press herself taut against the cliff face, suspended on what seemed like nothing more than a thread. Angling her fair crown towards the ground, she dared a glance down, down. The pallid face of Death stared back at her. A chill settled into her bones, and she bit down on her lip as she tore her gaze away from that hypnotizing blackness. Panic began its descent over her, slow and familiar—and Messalina knew once it settled, she would lose more than a mere battle of wits with the godforsaken mountain. All this would be in vain if I falter. I refuse to surrender to weakness. A puff of warm air streamed from her flared nostrils as a tactic of last resort took over. She wrenched her eyes shut, snowy lashes brushing the tops of her cheekbone as she searched the depths of her memory for something to grasp onto. And she found it.
A low hum escaped her lips, wavering and unsteady at first. But among the solemn rock and snow-tipped pines, there was not a soul left to hear—it would be alright, if only for the moment. Her voice strengthened, and Messalina’s frozen limbs began to thaw as she crooned out a ballad she knew by memory. It was from a waltz she was fond of, the dance especially intricate and beautiful. Her steps, previously as shaky as a foal’s first strides, became featherlight as she moved to the rhythm of her song, her weight shifting from hoof to hoof as she traversed the unsteady terrain with newfound certainty. How free she felt in that moment, dancing with Death itself as her partner! How profound it was to hear herself with such clarity, her song amplified by the bare rock and alpine air.
The last chords of the melody left her velveteen lips just as her hooves tasted steady footing at last. She’d traversed through the most treacherous pass of the Arma in something of a reverie, her lips parted as she drew in short bursts of breath and her normally pale cheeks rosy with the effort. The girl could feel her braids loosened and her cloak shifted, but she cared not for either as she finished the dance with an elegant twirl that took her dangerously close to the edge. A hair’s breadth from it, she came to a standstill, her lips tugged upwards in a laugh as she processed the ridiculousness of it all. So this was what laughter was!
In her revelation, she failed to notice the looming shape of a winged body a few paces away from where she had halted until the fading sun glinted off the man’s serpentine scales and reflected into her eyes. When she at last saw him, registered the fact that she was not alone, she could only gaze steadily into his coal black eyes as a dull throb of regret coursed through her entire being. She had no words, no meticulous plan to salvage the last of her pride from a situation she'd never conceived she'd be in. Silence stretched between them as the burnished gold of the sunset set the world below on fire. They were but two spectators in these lonely mountains, and their paths were fated to cross—in what way, only they could decide.
— ♕ —
@Lothaire notes: I had trouble framing this post, but in the end I decided to tortureMessa just a tad to see her reaction--and of course Lothaire's! ;u; (Messa:
O fuck)
The world below slowly burned, the corners and edges of Denocte curling inward - blackened by the redfire sunset and the promise of nightfall. He watched as a timeless ritualistic dance between day and night unfolded before his bleak gaze; there was no triumph for Solis here; only the absolute dominion of Calligo and her chaotic descent. The emissary, having visited Solterra once at the end of a long airless summer, recalled the heavy feeling of time weighing in his bones with every step taken across that old whispering sand. There was something infinite about the desert, something transcendental that had settled into the pithy hollow of his chest; weighing him down, and even still he could feel the dregs of whatever singed entity had made a home inbetween his ribs. People breathed rumour of the magic hidden within Caligo's palace, but they did not often speak of the Solterran illusion - but Lothaire knew - oh he knew the way the asphyxiating heat had conjured illustrations only a devil and an angel could have cast. Images he would never forget.
A cold wind buffeted his sinewy frame, faint patterned skin glinting in a wash of red as the light died slowly. Deciding to rest but a few more moments upon this isolated precipice before embarking on the final descent into the land of Night and revelry, Lothaire inhaled deeply. Already the flickering of newborn candlelight had begun to decorate the lowlit prairie, stirring only an angular tilt of his head in recognition. Nothing had changed in his absence; the revellers would dance on still, the thieves would steal and the wolves in the shadows would watch with the same perpetual hunger.
Then, from the blooming darkness, came a sound: it warbled on the thinly-stretched air, twisting and dancing toward his formless ears. At first he remained statuesque save for the slow bloody beat of his pulse throbbing beneath the membranes of his skin, closing his starless eyes to listen purely to the sound spiralling toward him. Memories and nightmares flashed violently in the secret, sealed tombs within his head - tombs barricaded shut to shield himself from horrors of his own design; but even from the outside of those chambers he could see the flares of white light spangling and radiating through the cracks around the doors. Dread seeped slowly into his nervous system, his blood thickening into crystallised poison; this strange song contaminating his body with a cancer he had long thought dead. A single image now: his second winter, snow gripping the window frame, Mother. Her kaleidoscope gaze dull and choleric; but from her lips had come the most beautiful sound he had ever heard - only the second time he would ever hear her sing.
Lothaire is drawn from the past by a foreboding hand. The singing had stopped without him even realising so deep had he sunk into his mind. Silence now; darkness. And something else, someone else. His vacant black eyes bore into the dim light, consuming the sight of a girl who had appeared like magic from the mountain, almost as though Caligo herself had placed her there. The man does not flinch, or start, at the discovery of this fairy - for that is the label to which he instantly assigns this pearl-skinned woman, with braids and roses in her ethereal hair and eyes as wide as the sky. Would her porcelain body shatter if he elected to beat the air with his colossal, taloned wings? He stared, only the sound of their rhythmic breathing layering the heavens beneath which they stood. The fairy looked perturbed, by what? - he could only imagine. Her scent flowered and flourished, lilting toward him as he filed it into a corner of his library - Delumine. She was a child of Dawn. Of course she was.
A long drawl melted into the cold air, as toneless and as vast as his gaze and being.
"You have travelled far, with only a song and a rose."
Messalina had known friendship but once in her life, and how she wished she had never tasted the sweetness of that forbidden apple. She recalled the memory with an aching sense of bitterness. It had been her second year in the castle. Despite the barbs she had thrown at him in her initial uncertainty, a boy with a pelt of deepest onyx had been unwavering in his determination to make this girl of hollow porcelain smile in earnest. He had sought her out where he could, tiptoeing into the library where she studied and slipping handmade puppets over her small hands. They hid under the great oak table, lost to a world of their creation as he indulged her with his fantastical tales. She called him Wren—he called her Messa.
Their friendship ended before the last patches of snow had melted from the frozen earth. When Mother found the worn puppet in Messalina’s wardrobe, she had regarded the stuttering girl with narrowed eyes as she set the puppet gently on top of her bed. What a cute little toy you have here. Be sure to store him away safely, sweetheart. The next day, she waited for Wren to come to their special spot, to delight her as he always did with his stories and his dolls. He did not come. She waited a week. He never came. Not knowing what else to do, she had whispered a silent wish to the North Star like the children in Wren’s tales. Perched precariously by the window ledge, alabaster hair leached of all color by the moon’s light, she had pleaded for an end to her loneliness, for the ache in her chest to cease. She remembered the saline taste of her tears as they fell silently across her cheeks and darkened the neckline of her nightgown. They came without her permission, and she wiped at them in distress as she willed for them to stop. Tears were for the weak, and Messalina hated weakness, could not succumb to it for she would certainly lose even Mother if she did. Mother had warned her about the deception of others, and she’d been right—she always was. As she realized the extent of her idiocy, she fled from the window to the depths of her cold, vast bed in shame.
Yet the star had heard her wishes. The pain ebbed away into nothingness as solitude became her most trusted companion. She studied faithfully and practiced diligently; she was delightfully pleasant to the ones whose titles dripped from Mother’s lips like honey, and coldly indifferent to all others. The whispers and stares that trailed her in every hall became nothing more than dull static, tedious to even address. That was how she had existed before she’d been forced to construct a new life out of ashes in the court of Dawn, the court of Beginnings.
Under the blood-red sky and biting wind, Messalina steadied her breath as her eyes flitted over the form of the stranger that had appeared so suddenly in front of her. She felt dwarfed by his looming stature, made larger still by the pair of massive, featherless wings that rested upon his shoulders. The serpent’s skin that patterned his flesh gleamed dully in the fading light, and her eyes rested for a fraction too long on his earless head, as smooth and reptilian as the rest of him. He could crush her fragile frame with a flick of his wings; yet she felt no hostility from him, no reason to treat him any differently than she would anyone else. You have traveled far, with only a song and a rose. His voice echoed towards her, devoid of any inflection of tone or mood. She tilted her head as she processed his words, her mind picking apart every syllable as she tried in vain to read him as she read the men she’d been forced to entertain. Without clear analysis, it was difficult for her to craft an ideal response, one that could sway the conversation towards her control.
His blank eyes gave nothing away, however. How frustrating. "Not far enough, I’m afraid. Denocte still eludes me no matter how long I tread towards her.” She inclined her head in a short bow, though she walked no closer towards him. The proximity would unnerve both of them, she suspected. "I am Messalina. I admit I was not expecting to meet another so high up in these hostile mountains.” Eyes of frosty blue peered deeper still into ones as black and endless as a void. Something about this man hinted at a fondness for solitude much like her own, though there was one gaping difference. Companionship had never corrupted his soul like it had to hers, leaving a gnawing hunger in her that she could not banish. Did he register the emptiness within himself, within them? If he did not, she would envy him his ignorance.
This porcelain fairy undulated before him in the dim light, both strangers observing each other in that familiar old dance we all undertake with every new rendezvous; each seeming as new as the last. Lothaire had encountered many a stranger in his lifetime - but that was the way they had all stayed: distant, unfamiliar, transitory. Never had he pulled them closer, never had he cared to dig too deep for fear of uncovering something in himself that he would not be able to compartmentalise.
The strange girl was right in her internal assumptions - as friendship remained an entirely abstract concept to the great serpent; it had never wrapped its lurid tendrils around his ankles and his knees, incarcerating him within a fever from which he might never wake. A solitary boy he had been, by both nature and misfortune, for there had been no other children in his hamlet and Lothaire had spent many a long cool afternoon in the pastures and the forest fabricating the voices of his imaginary companions. Such a habit died quickly - it was too melancholy, too anticipative. In any case, he was never alone with the stars.
The lady before him speaks now, and to Lothaire, her voice sound like poetry; the way it oscillated gently on the air, looping over him, and had his attention not been so languidly fixed on her he might have watched its ascent up into the heavens. Those pale, roseate syllables were carefully crafted like an art she had long practiced, accompanied with a bow that he traced with eyes of black pearl. Messalina's own azure gaze seemed to pry up at him, as though trying to open a book she had found on the highest shelf of a dark, dusty library. The book remained firmly closed.
"Ah, yes. Denocte is indeed an elusive beast. Only the patient and the persevering tend to happen upon her," he paused, running his chasmic stare over the panes of her face once more, "I am sure your journey will soon be at an end." Beneath that veneer of frosted glass Lothaire drank the sense of something more within this unknown siren, as though she were concealing a thousand secrets beneath those artistic vowels streaming from lips of salmon. Nobody made it this far across the Arma in such bitter weather without possessing fortitude and wit, he knew that much.
Mutedly, he considered the situation for a moment, before continuing on with that same thinly-stretched baritone - "I would be failing in my duties as emissary of the Night Court if I did not escort you on down into Denocte; I'm heading that way in any case." Lothaire couldn't remember the last time he had spoken so much in one sitting, and he clenched his jaw almost without thinking as though testing an unused muscle. With a final sweeping glance over an enormous patchwork shoulder he stepped forward, hooves searching for grip on the icy slope. Assuming Messalina had chosen to follow him, for it would be a foolish decision not to, he turned his curiosity into dialogue. "So, what is it you seek from Caligo's realm?"
@messalina boop silly old Lo forgot to introduce himself !! c:
Should she be concerned with the intensity of her stare upon the towering silhouette in front of her? Possibly, had she not detected the very same unabashed attention in his gaze towards her. As a result, she refused to shift her eyes away in feigned modesty—social conventions should be abandoned from time to time, she mused, and she reckoned he would not mind regardless. As his cavernous eyes swept over her, Messalina felt that he’d memorized every detail that converged to complete the porcelain ballerina she was, nestled prettily atop an ever-turning pedestal. She remained unbothered however—the sooner he realized there lay nothing below the surface, the sooner he’d lose interest and leave. It was a tired act she’d played along with far too many times.
His voice rumbled through the air, in a pitch so low she thought it almost soothing. Which was odd, as his presence wasn’t soothing at all—not that his physical looks unnerved her, but the fact that he’d witnessed the spectacle she’d made of herself earlier… even pondering upon that moment sent a unpleasant prickle through her skin. “I am glad to hear that, for I admit I was growing weary,” she responded, sincerity lacing her words as she glanced over to the horizon, the distance that still remained mocking her in its ember glory. As the man’s lips continued to move, his sonorous voice blanketing her like a swathe of velvet, Messalina’s attention at once snapped back to him as the word ‘emissary’ resonated casually from his jaws. Was fate taunting her in excess today? It was not enough for her to make a fool of herself in front of merely anybody—no, it had to be a ranked official, the first one she’d encountered in Novus. Lovely.
“I am honored for your company, sir. I… was not aware that I was in the presence of Denocte’s emissary. Please excuse my manners,” she managed to speak, her voice steady despite her inner agitation. The girl’s training was so ingrained that leaving out an obligatory title—now that she knew his position—was impossible, but she refrained from bowing again. It would be overkill at this point. After his declaration, the Emissary only gave her a moment to process his offer before pivoting his body and beginning the descent down into his court; he expected her to follow, and she complied tensely, lengthening her stride to walk alongside him at his shoulder. Midnight orbs glanced down towards her as they traversed the tricky terrain, breaking the silence with a light question. She considered it for a moment before responding.
"I have heard rumors of your court, about the talents of the populace and how night reigns over day. Its festivities never end, and its fires burn brighter than those in any other kingdom. I wished to see these sights with my own eyes, as those are all foreign concepts to me.” Her answer was carefully given, as her true reason remained unsaid. Perhaps she would touch upon it later, after the Emissary entrusted her with his name; she dared not ask for it so brazenly now.
The path narrowed then, forcing her to draw closer to the winged official. Her slim shoulder brushed against the ridges of his folded wing, and the girl flinched at the sudden contact, an ivory hoof slipping from its grip on the frozen rock face. In that split second, sandwiched between the cliff wall and the Emissary, Messalina knew that if she lost her balance she would knock the man dangerously close to the crumbling edge. He had wings, yes, but she couldn't trust them to open in time to save him. With a forceful push of her hind legs, she leapt forward; combined with the momentum of her fall, she landed many lengths ahead of where she’d been, lean muscles straining to keep herself balanced as her hooves slid across the ice-covered trail. Perilously close to the ledge, she finally gathered enough traction to push against the ground and spring backwards. As she fought to catch her breath, Messalina wordlessly thanked all those hours of dance that had honed her agility to be almost catlike. Cerulean eyes dilated with adrenaline met the gaze of her surprised companion. "I apologize. I lost my footing for a moment,” she murmured, and a faint smile colored her lips as she struggled to contain the shiver of panic coursing through her.
— ♕ —
@Lothaire notes: i threw some action in there to spice things up ;o;
![[Image: lothaire_pixel2_by_outofthefurnace-dbhn4ra.png]](https://orig00.deviantart.net/e7c1/f/2017/206/0/5/lothaire_pixel2_by_outofthefurnace-dbhn4ra.png){kind=tracking}
