The point of no return had never been an enemy of his until now.
He felt it for days now. It constantly edged him forward, southbound and over the great peaks of the Arma Mountains. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was going, but he knew that this endless yearning to belong again would cease the moment he arrived. So he pushed on, recoiling from the uncertainty in his every step along the way. He would never doubt that tearing his roots from the ground of his homeland had been the right choice, but it seemed to be leading him nowhere. Of course, going back was not a option, but then standing still would be just a lethal.
Damn that soothsayer for pitting him against ambivalence and conviction. He shook his head as if to shake away the thoughts and pressed on. He started down a path that had become deeply entrenched from heavy traffic and relentless rainfall, his footsteps sinking in to drowned clay with every step. Well-worn paths usually lead to some point of interest. Not this one. His rugged trail eventually came to an edge and then curved to trace the mountainside. From there, it only grew more narrow until it connected with a freshly faltered mudslide that still trickled with rushing water. He frowned at it and dropped his ears back, visibly annoyed.
It was rather symbolic for his current state of being. Going nowhere. Standing at a dead end, forced in to aimless wandering which was a rather new concept to him. Blyse exhaled, and then stepping over to the edge, the stallion dived over the cliffside. He plummeted for a moment then unfurled his wings to catch some lift and then leveled out with a single pulse. Two or three more and he was surging upward and in to the low hanging clouds.
Now this was clarity.
South of the mountains he could see a vast lake, like an ethereal mirror of the lavender and orange-hued sky. Beyond it lie…a city? From this distance, it was hard to tell for certain but he would know soon enough. At last, a true heading. He did not know what he expected to find there. This wasn’t a battle, the outcome wasn’t black and white. This was chance. This was gamble. This was entirely out of his comfort zone. All he could do was what the white mare told him to: pray. Resolute, Blyse descended in a spiral, dropping in one wing and letting gravity tug him to the earth.
Chance and gamble was all Acton had known. That was his comfort zone, the murky gray that required no measure of soul-searching. The buckskin did not believe in black and white, only what could and could not be done with the right group, the right tools.
Which is why, stripped of that group when most of the Crows had vanished with their former king, Denote’s erstwhile magician found himself uncomfortably unmoored. He hadn’t grown to like it in the time since summer, when things had first begun to topple south, but at least he didn’t go on days-long benders anymore.
He missed Bexley, and he missed Raglan, and he missed Raum (though Denocte’s silver Ghost was still around somewhere, just even more of a haunt than normal). Most of all, maybe, he missed knowing what he was going to do with his day, his week, his black-soot, coin-bright life.
With no one left to give him direction, Acton wandered like a boy, like maybe his answers were around the next bend or buried beneath a copse of silver-barked trees.
Of course they weren’t.
At last, with the spring sun full and warm on his back, Acton set to what had always been his idle activity: practicing his illusions. The air was cooler, here, at the foothills of the Armas, and the lake was a smooth silver mirror a mile distant. Here with no audience, the buckskin spun his long-ignored trade. Rivers of colored scarves poured from the air and scattered into a flock of crows; a deck of shuffled cards always turned up the King of Hearts no matter which was flipped. As he warmed to his work so did his illusions: colored some, crackling but heatless flames, a spill of golden coins.
All of it hollow, hollow, hollow.
The knowledge of it - that none of it mattered, that not much did anymore - put that familiar heat licking back under his skin until his blood ran hotter than his false fire ever could. He might have just burned himself out, alone as a single struck match - but then a flicker of motion drew his eye, and his magic vanished as he turned to watch the pegasus land, hooves like striking flint as they set him down at a flat gallop.
Ordinarily Acton might not have done what he did (at least not with a stranger), but he narrowed his eyes at the closing distance between them and licked his lips, wondering. He had not tested the range of his magic in some time -
and with a thought, a little twist of wherever the magic lived (his gut? his heart? his chimney-dark soul?) he set up a line of bright fire a dozen or so yards before the figure. Any inspection would show it was heatless, scentless, nothing but a mirage -
but the stallion was moving too fast to study, and Acton watched with a thin and black curiosity as he maintained the barrier of false fire.
With each stride that pounded the earth like a hammer against burning steel, Blyse felt further from his destiny. How terrible the distance seemed now. Did the day decide to turn itself into a decade or were the seconds gripping at his skin as he ran to slow his progress? He didn’t know, except that he was acutely aware he did not want to be where he was any longer. Progress had always been King in his life. It commanded him to move forth and condemned him when he did not which is why he itched with restlessness. There was but one exception to this and that was this gift which he had heard but never felt to be his. The gift was magic which Caligo stole back from the imposter King to be his. Maybe that is what really itched at him and thrust him forward—knowing that he possessed something he hadn’t the slightest notion of how to touch. He had been given a weapon to elevate him in life and yet was drowning in the ignorance of how to wield it. It frustrated him. Inability was a cut as deep as failure and every step he took toward the city without getting there was the salt.
In a sudden shift of luck, a gold-red burst of fire tore a crossed the hills before him, as if a Molotov cocktail were shattered in to his path unprovoked. Blyse was prepared for many things, but strange as it were fiery anomalies was not one of them. A curse under his breath was all the time he could afford before correcting his steps. He shifted back his weight, dropping his rump to drive his ivory heels in to the clay. But he barely tore the grass before his wings unfurled from his ribs and pulsed against the direction of the fire to drive him backwards. He jerked his own hooves right off the ground with a second beat of his wings and put a safe distance between himself and the blaze with a third.
Strange thing, these flames—they did not react to the fan of his wings as he did this. They glowed, flickered and danced with arms outstretched but not a howl or a crackle to speak with. No sound. No scent? Blyse knew what the flesh of earth smelled like when set ablaze and it wasn’t crisp as the fresh rains of spring that he inhaled now. His backpedaling lessened so that he dropped down to the earth with a harrumph.
Few things were this perplexing, but he did know of one—Magic. And Magic had this interesting little habit of needing a live and benevolent host to live within. His nerves sprung more alive at the thought of a living assailant—no fires or quakes or floods could compare to the art of deadly instincts wielded by a sharp, mortal mind. He knew who the real predators of the world were and he’d come much too far to be silly prey.
So he called out to the rejected flames as he carried his gaze carefully along them. “Just what is your quarrel with me?” His voice poured out like acid, melting the silence between them. He realized just how little he cared about the contents of a response compared to the presence of one.
Whatever the quarrel might be, he would be walking in to that city by dusk.
@Acton // UM OK so I didn’t even realize that they have SIMILAR MAGIC and now I’m twice as excited about this.
The satisfaction he felt as he watched the stranger react to the barrier he’d made was thin and fleeting, patchy smoke compared to what he would have felt once. Acton was changing as much as Novus, and his growing pains seemed to him just as ugly.
Even so he wore a crooked kind of grin as the man’s wings beat back against the flames, a wind to which they did not (could not) bow. As the dark figure danced back, the buckskin ambled forward, until he stood just behind the row of leaping, heatless fire. It was a different kind of spark that leapt beneath his skin to hear the stranger’s voice, the tone of it reminding him of a hundred back-alley brawls. This was the kind of meeting Acton always sought out when he began to feel like a stranger in his skin.
“If I had one you wouldn’t have to ask,” he said, and released his hold on the magic.
Without even a flicker the flames were gone as though they’d never been, and the buckskin smiled like a knife at the man. Now that he was closer it was clear how big he was, wings spread like an eagle, and Acton was surely a fool to provoke him -
but Acton had always been a fool, and at least it felt familiar.
“Where were you headed in such a hurry?” His own voice was smooth and unruffled, a contrast to the (not unwarranted) acid of the other’s; the answer itself wasn’t important. If the man felt like getting somewhere quickly, he’d use his wings to do it, and no one but Caligo’s thunderbirds could stop him.
Information was only a secondary goal. All Acton wanted to do was provoke, to push and push until he felt less like a fuse and more like a firework, bright and hot and brief as a falling star but oh, so glorious as he burned.
@Blyse yes! it may have been part of what made me go this route :p
In all his days, there were only two things that had brought Blyse much joy: success and a sense of purpose, always going hand in hand. Despite where he came from and despite all the uneasy feelings he had about his noble ties, his former place within the military fed both of those hungers. In fact, it had been a feast. He succeeded on the battlefield, shoulder to shoulder with brethren whose cries for war could not drown out his own. He found purpose by the fires, drawing himself among the soldiers in the sand as he commanded them to play their next move. War was his purpose; war had been his success. And then suddenly…there was no war.
Feast became famine.
That was largely what plagued him so dearly then—finding those things that brought him joy through other means, unknown to him in that moment but surely waiting for him in the city. Of course, what drove him is of little import until you consider the obstacle standing his path. From its lips came a sarcastic retort, delicately laced in spite, echoing through the flames. And then, in pure theatre, his flames vanished and revealed the showman in a fine coat of buckskin and black and wearing a shit-eating grin across his masked face. Blyse did not return the smile, but he would be lying if he said he did not feel at least a sprout of contentment bloom in his chest from the sight of the conflict waiting to leap free from its dormancy.
There was nothing stopping Blyse from abandoning this boy for the sky, except that he was proud and a bit more likened to conflict than he would likely ever admit. Another notion he kept tucked away in deniability was the intrigue he had for this man’s trick. He once knew a brute who used similar illusions to prey on his people and it left a bitter taste in his mouth. He could hear the ghost of a short-lived acquaintance remind him of just who those illusions now belonged to, but he denied them their proof until they were tangible to him. Perhaps then he would re-evaluate his opinion on the matter. Today, he had only what he always had—wit and iron will, in both of which he was well-equipped.
The red-wine stallion stole a few steps toward the other, eyes focused and drinking the stranger in. He looked a bit younger, this brute. Not a child by any means, even with his penchant for tricks, but Blyse supposed that naiveté was a not a worth-while bet. “Somewhere I did not expect to be interrogated.” His reply had a duller edge than his first command, misleadingly innocuous. Tension coiled in his shoulders, ready to command his wings at a moment’s notice. “Do you fancy yourself a sentry?”If so, a rather poor choice.
Acton, too, took his meaning from success and a sense of purpose - though both of them had to be through less conventional means. He could never have made it as a military man; he had spent too long an orphan on crooked streets, and soot and knife-shine had made it too much into his blood. The buckskin would never willingly follow an order that was presented as such, and served no cause but coin and pleasure.
Or so he’d always pictured himself. There was a gnawing worry that his present self was falling short of his past one, and the rats’-feet scratching of the thought went round and round his mind.
Acton still didn’t know who he was if he wasn’t a Crow. And the Crows were months fled, now, gone to nothing but feathers, the finest vanishing act he’d ever seen.
But the grin he wore when the stranger stepped closer didn’t feel like an act. Nor did his gratification at the set of the stallion’s shoulders, the tight lines of his wings, the thin slash of his mouth. The buckskin did not take his own step forward, but the look in his amber eye was a dare nonetheless.
He did not miss the way there was less bite to the man’s next words, and rolled a burnished shoulder in a shrug. “Luckily for us both this is no interrogation.” When he tilted his head, there was something corvid-like in the black of his mask, the gleam of his eye. He laughed like a crow, too, brief and coarse, at the question that came next.
“Gods, no. That would suit nobody.” Almost he added that he was only bored; instead he cast a glance overhead, as if in idle assessment of something the clouds concealed. “We’ve had far more things to worry about lately than a solitary stranger. No offense.”
